Are there any risks or disadvantages to building software from source, compared to installing a package? Can it mess with my system in any way?
I usually avoid it because I’ve found it to be a faff and often doesn’t work anyway but in a couple of cases it has been necessary.


Yeah, but only when you build with lto+pgo which will take even longer
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Mozilla/Firefox_Benchmarks_2025_Q1
Look I don’t have heat in the winter so I compile Firefox for various processors to keep my bedroom warm okay?