Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they've a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it's a cross section.)

That tells me NixOS should be hosting their own infrastructure for holding binaries instead of stuffing them into version control (Or maybe cull old versions of packages more aggressively since anyone who needs them can just build them again, isn't Nix all 100% reproducible anyway?)

Not that I'm sad that they're burning 0.001% of Microsoft's money though.

Are we still talking about Gentoo? Big and important, huh? Bimp-or-tant.

Many, many years ago (20-ish?) I spent a full weekend trying to get Gentoo working on an even older PC. I wasn't completely new to Linux (having installed and used a bit of Mandrake and Fedora Core), but I was certainly no expert.

I spent the entire weekend trying and failing to get a usable system, reinstalling numerous times with different options, installing countless packages, and following innumerable guides on troubleshooting. I never had a system even close to as usable as Fedora was out of the box.

Still, I consider that weekend a complete success. I learned more about Linux in that one weekend than at any point since. Everything after that has been little tidbits needed for the task at hand, without much of the base foundational understanding. Failing with Gentoo taught me so much.

Gentoo USE flags are addictive.

Good question. For a similar reason people keep using corporate-owned social media, I suppose?