For anyone wondering, when you install Gentoo, you untar a stage3.tar.gz into a / that you chrooted into. That tar file contains a precompiled environment and t

For anyone wondering, when you install Gentoo, you untar a stage3.tar.gz into a / that you chrooted into. That tar file contains a precompiled environment and toolchain. From there most things get compiled. For example "emerge x11-base/xorg-x11" would install X and related utilities, but you wouldn't do that. X is a dependency, what you really want is whatever desktop environment you like. So "emerge qtile" and the rest is handled. The compilation time thing isn't a big issue on any reasonable solid state hardware, and there are precompiled packages available for large popular projects (like office suites). Install instructions: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64# https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64#