I took up gentoo on a macbook pro. My coworker recommended it and seeing little reason not to try something new and different I took him up on his offer. Moments later I find myself waiting almost 20 minutes for virtualbox to compile via emerge.

sudo emerge -av =virtualbox-5.1.18

I’m used to ubuntu, so the length of time to compile caught me off guard. For those who haven’t heard of gentoo, it is a flavor of linux that focuses on performance, which means its package manager portage specifically compiles source code of packages rather than installing binaries. This is neat, but very different than what I am used to.

So what do I do with ~20 minutes? I decide to start compiling vagrant in another terminal window, which ultimately depends on virtualbox installation…

sudo emerge -av =vagrant-1.9.2
Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No] Yes

>>> Verifying ebuild manifests

>>> Emerging (1 of 2) app-emulation/virtualbox::gentoo

And to my surprise, portage waits patiently for my installation with virtualbox to complete. Immediately after vitualbox finishes, the vagrant installation starts.

Neat.