Hardware optimizations would be enough. How many people out there actually would use USE flags if they knew and understood them? Imagine a situation where a friend comes with a new camera to share the photos. What would you with super-optimized kernel that has only drivers you need? I believe the USE flags are becoming obsolete. Nowadays we use machines which are strong enough to deal with "bloated" code. Also, the more functions are enabled in the program, the more it is prepared for unexpected situations, like the camera example above. Concluding, the software should have compiled-in all the stable functions.
I had dreamed about the multi-optimized distributions for years already, since my first contact with Gentoo. However, I am not skilled yet to try something on my own. After thinking about it for a long time I decided what kind of system would be most efficient. A tool would need to be created, which determines the suitable optimizations. Even better, if optimizations would be selected for each package (as in package manager) separately. Distribution would be installed from a precompiled installation media and then it would recompile itself with the aforementioned tool. All new packages would be compiled during installation with tool too. This way, the cost of package maintenance would actually lessen while the users got a faster system.



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