I vividly remember compiling KDE (12-24 hours) and Firefox (3+ hours) back in like 2006. The hype and complains about Gentoo’s compilation times were legendary back then.
I used Gentoo as a daily driver back in early college (2002-4)-ish.
Was a lot of fun, but a huge amount of time compiling
Every time I decided to try a new window manager and update USE flags to do something like add GTK support for Gnome, or QT for KDE, and obviously remove whatever I had to start with for optimization it would recompile everything. I remember in particular doing something like a fresh Gnome install, starting to use it and realizing I'd missed a USE flag for audio and having to re-compile all the Gnome apps to have them be able to use sound.
