иксы с сопутствующими библиотеками, графич. оболочка - в сумме компилятся порядка часа. собственно все. два часа

но на кой это надо?

First of all, welcome to Gentoo. You are about to enter the world of choices and performance. Gentoo is all about choices. When installing Gentoo, this is made clear to you several times -- you can choose how much you want to compile yourself, how to install Gentoo, what system logger you want, etc.
Gentoo is a fast, modern metadistribution with a clean and flexible design. Gentoo is built around free software and doesn't hide from its users what is beneath the hood. Portage, the package maintenance system which Gentoo uses, is written in Python, meaning you can easily view and modify the source code. Gentoo's packaging system uses source code (although support for precompiled packages is included too) and configuring Gentoo happens through regular textfiles. In other words, openness everywhere.
It is very important that you understand that choices are what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force you onto anything you don't like. If you feel like we do, please bugreport it.