this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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I thought arch was all about reducing bloat. Is gentoo better than arch?
Gentoo recompiles everything, so it can do optimisations based on your particular setup Arch can't.
Obviously arch can be rebuilt pretty easily, gentoo does almost nothing that arch can't, and rebuilding itself osn't one of those things. Look up ABS.
You can also just recompile the kernel and any utils yourself on Arch, if you want
Yeah, but I'm using Arch cause I have better things to do. You guys have fun compiling your own stuff without me.
The only times I've compiled the arch kernel was for benchmarking
You can recompile the kernel in any distro. In Gentoo, you have to compile the kernel (because you compile everything).
This is not true any more. Gentoo provides sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin as an option.
gentoo arch?
Arch basically happens at a granularity of individual packages. You decide from the ground up which packages you actually need, which is how you end up with a comparatively minimal setup.
But yeah, if the package itself is big, then Arch doesn't usually deal with that. The Linux kernel comes with drivers for most hardware out of the box, which you can remove, if you know you won't need that hardware.
And while this can also be done on Arch, it is Gentoo's thing to do precisely that.
To add to this, the big thing you get when using Gentoo is to setup your compiler to use all of the optimizations for your exact CPU/other hardware.
The binaries for arch are built for generic x86-64, while your Gentoo system could bet setup to include AMD-specific optimizations or to remove code paths that you would never used based on your hardware.
The result will be that the binaries will typically be smaller and optimized specifically for your hardware.
The downside is that a system update will take you half a day of churning your CPU on compiling.
Arch is about telling other people what you use. If you use gentoo, you can take way more pride in you installation.
Arch is pourover coffee; Gentoo is those ridiculous Rube Goldberg setups that take 45 minutes to make a single cup. Both are for hipsters.
Ubuntu is that shitty Keurig machine with big plastic pods, but they call them "snaps".
I'd argue that there's literally no difference in difficulty of installing Arch vs Gentoo vs LFS. The only difference lies in the convenience of package management. Arch is very convenient, everything is precompiled. Gentoo is more time consuming. No difference in setting stuff up tho. LFS makes you be the package manager. Which isn't really difficult, all programs clearly state which dependencies they have, but it's just much more time consuming.
After restarting the installation for the 5th time, and wasting 5 hours compiling the kernel each time, you should be proud you finally can type on the TTY.
My 13 years old AMD FX-6300 can compile kernel in about half an hour. Sounds like a skill issue.
How long does it take to open the Wikipedia page on hyperbole?