45
Building from source - disadvantages? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Are there any risks or disadvantages to building software from source, compared to installing a package? Can it mess with my system in any way?

I usually avoid it because I've found it to be a faff and often doesn't work anyway but in a couple of cases it has been necessary.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The irony is that big things like Firefox can get the most advantages from building for your specific CPU variant, especially if you use them frequently.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but only when you build with lto+pgo which will take even longer

    https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Mozilla/Firefox_Benchmarks_2025_Q1

    spend an hour building to save 1ms per page load

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I thought the optimizations didn't actually do they much.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    They don't in general, but things that do heavily detailed graphics work (like your compositor or browser) or lots of cryptography work on the CPU can get a bit more out of those newer instructions than many other programs.

    Very approximately, things that Gentoo offers prebuilt versions of because compiling them is so resource intensive are often the things that can get the best benefit out of your architecture variant. (Not singling out Gentoo here as an example of "doing it badly" - they do the sensible thing by providing these prebuilt binaries, but in some ways it defeats the purpose of optimised source distributions.)

    It's a Hard Problem™ to solve.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent