Any real advantages to building your entire system from ports? reddit / freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- theclumsytech · 2023-03-20 03:17 I’ve always been a fan of Gentoo and the “use flags” idea. Is it worth the time to do this in FreeBSD with a custom make.conf using knobs, setting options, and optimizing for your cpu? Is there any real optimization or performance benefit? Or is it strictly for customization only? Is there a marked difference between CLang and GCC and how it optimizes code? It is nice to have support for something compiled into every piece of software that supports it. So it would still be worth it to me for some systems. If you have the time to build an entire system this way, should you? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- the_humeister · 2023-03-20 04:06 What's your time worth? I used to run Linux from Scratch when I was younger, had more time, and not as many responsibilities. I don't have those luxuries anymore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jloc0 · 2023-03-20 05:03 Depends on your use case. It seems to me the ports tree gets updated more often (and much faster) than the packages do. I’d suggest learning “poudriere” so you can configure your system exactly how you’d like, build it, and send the packages to the machines you’d like to use it. If just a single device, Poudriere is still useful to maintain sanity with things, but building directly from the ports tree works as well. I’ve compromised with a ports/packages setup currently, attempting to get it all into a sane Poudriere setup for myself. But is it any better, that I can’t say. If anything, it’s more time consuming but the end result would be similar. I just like building from source, packages are great, but building locally is more *fun*. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thindil · 2023-03-20 09:33 If you build your whole system (kernel and userland) with proper flags, then you should have a nice boost to speed. But to be honest, you will lose the same amount of time on compiling everything which you could gain by doing it. :) Especially for desktop usage. I think it could make a sense to build everything from ports if you will do it for a hundred or thousands of machines, the same build. But for personal usage: in my opinion it is better to stay with default options, unless you need some fancy features, or you want to disable ones. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Xerxero · 2023-03-20 16:17 Not everything but sometimes you need different settings for a port. For example the default db for Nextcloud is MySQL but postgresql is an option you can set in the config for that port.