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I've used Gentoo for a long time, chasing the idea that compiling the source code enables you to optimize the binaries for you specific machine. I think this hold only when you have some fancy hardware or when gcc supports the specific architecture you're working with. For example, a compiler might align your data so that they will create less cache miss given your processor's cache size.

In practice, the speed-up is often barely noticeable, so using binaries is most of the time no different from compiling the source code.

Unless one wants to do things the real geeky way :)