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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Share specific examples of software built from source works better for you than packages or pre-built binaries (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I looked up specifically examples of this and didn't find answers, they're buried in general discussions about why compiling may be better than pre-built. The reasons I found were control of flags and features, and optimizations for specific chips (like Intel AVX or ARM Neon), but to what degree do those apply today?

The only software I can tell benefits greatly from building from source, is ffmpeg since there are many non-free encoders decoders and upscalers that can be bundled, and performance varies a lot between devices due to which of them is supported by the CPU or GPU. For instance, Nvidia hardware encoders typically produce higher quality video for similar file sizes than ones from Intel AMD or Apple. Software encoders like x265 has optimizations for AVX and NEON (SIMD extensions for CPUs).

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[–] msage 3 points 4 days ago

Gentoo has these USE flags, that drop stuff from local builds.

You don't use bluetooth on your desktop? No bluetooth code in your app! Don't need X? There are even flags for telemetry, codecs, what have you.

You also guarantee that you won't be using any binary blobs, only stuff you can build (unless you make exceptions, like for Steam).

Anecdotally Firefox built on Ubuntu felt much faster than repo build, could be many things, but at that point I just went into Gentoo.

It's the best system for me, can't imagine going elsewhere.

Gentoo4life