I have been building mate desktop and it's taken over 12 hours!!
My measly home server, a Core i5, builds a complete Gnome3 desktop in about 4 hours (That's without ccache and doing a full, clean build).if you're building a complete desktop environment the compile time is going to be huge no matter what you do.
Well, I really thank the people who went to the trouble to pre-build, however what did I learn ?? and in a lot of cases I have used the packages in the past. I don't have a lot of money so I cobbled together a couple of machines and I wanted to see if the actual build on that hardware would make a difference. I did finally get mate to build entirely and I think it does! I've also built Firefox,xfburn, etc. They do run, on these machines, faster and more smoothly. Maybe it's just me, but I'm happy.Why don't you use the packages?
synth upgrade-system
I would say synth downloads 70% to 90% of the ports using the prebuilt packages, and the rest is compiled. I have had some opinions where I didn't agree with some things, but when you zoom out and think about it, its a pretty good compromise in the big scheme of things and I am quite content with it.