Linux Administration Cookbook

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Things like the kernel can be compiled too, but will take much longer given the sheer number of parts and subsystems that have to be accounted for. Long compile-times are the main reason people and projects have defaulted to using pre-compiled binary blobs these days (because few people want to wait around for their code to compile, unless they're deliberately trying to avoid work.)

Even Gentoo, which is famous for allowing customizability (at the expense of installation time), has precompiled binaries that you can install for the larger programs, if you don't want to sit around for a week waiting for your code to compile.

There's also cross-compiling, which is the act of compiling software for different architectures. For ...