I'm sure the Gentoo crowd will refute this in a day or two when they're finished compiling and can read it.
Edit: bro, a 2001 era Thinkpad is going to take like a month to finish building everything. You can probably cross build that system faster on your phone.
Yes it would be faster but it's my first go at Gentoo for the base install I want to stick to the handbook. As soon as the base install is done I will see how to make my good Debian machine compile the packages for the IBM. Besides, I have time.
Back in the day, around 2005 or 2006 I did that and I had browse the internet in a text based browser for 2 days because KDE on that old machine took two days to compile.
It depends on the site, back then there were a lot of table-layouts which were quite fucked up in the text-only browser. Nowadays there are non of them which is good, but nowadays there are JavaScript only websites which don't really work well. You can install a text only browser and try it out yourself.
I recently discovered emerge --jobs 8 --load-average 8 instead of just make -j8. Not gonna help much on a 900MHz pentium, but it has really sped up my build times.
Serious question, how long will it take to compile the whole thing if you had a ryzen 9 maxed out or an Intel i9 or whatevet those crazy CPUs are with all top specs PC?
Is there a particular reason why you prefer Gentoo over other distros? Can't you run a conventional distro that doesn't need to compile? Just curious, no judgement. I know that Marcan, the dude who reverse engineered the apple M1, runs Gentoo. Always been curious as to why some folks prefer it