True. I have never gone down the Gentoo rabbit hole. Might be fun to try sometime, but I'd seriously doubt that the time spent compiling would be won back from

True. I have never gone down the Gentoo rabbit hole. Might be fun to try sometime, but I'd seriously doubt that the time spent compiling would be won back from better performance. Clear Linux is probably a more practical alternative. I used it a couple years ago, and found that they had a lot of avx2 and avx512 versions of random libraries built, with the appropriate ones presumably being loaded based on the hardware. Random glibc math function calls, for example, were much faster on Clear Linux than Arch or Fedora. But development of Clear seems to have stopped, libraries like llvm aren't being updated anymore so the toolchains are outdated. I'd wanted to avoid the blood and sweat of managing my own toolchains, and ironically being on bleeding edge distros (Arch,Fedora,etc) was the way to keep that to a minimum. Next time I reinstall an OS, I'll look at Clear again. Or maybe Guix or Nix. Or maybe use spack for package management on top of some other distro.