[batman-farts]

These days my 5950X can get through some of the big scary packages quite rapidly. Firefox is done in about 8 minutes, a new point release of Rust seems to take about 15.

I still haven’t decided whether or not I should be embarrassed that I mainly bought a 16-core CPU to run Gentoo.

[chemicalnovae]

Don't be embarrassed, its what computers are for! I've done the same thing recently too. It honestly feels like a better use of a high-core desktop CPU than have it sit idle 99% of the time.

[lmz]

I wonder which is more wasteful - compiling these packages for the nth time vs mining cryptocurrency...

[chlorion]

These aren't even close to comparable, and I am very tired of hearing people complain about this!

My current Gentoo system seems to have existed since 03/29/21, so roughly two years now. In the time period, the time spent compiling packages has accumulated to 5 days, and my CPU takes ~140W at max load (Ryzen 3900x).

If I did my math correctly, this comes out to roughly 16KWH accumulated energy across two years.

We can compare this to a gamer, who spends 1 hour per day gaming, for 2 years, on a system that takes 300w while running a game, and this comes out to 230KWH in total. That about 15x as much energy spent by a fairly lightweight gamer on a very average system.

It's also worth noting that the majority of packages build in under 1 minute on my system, the vast majority of compile time is spent on things like Firefox, Rust, GCC and a few more.

This is just a very silly thing to be concerned over, and if we are going to be offended at people for being wasteful there are much larger targets than someone building packages from source.

[anthk]

Do you use ccache?