In fairness, I'm sure Gentoo doesn't always win; assuming Ubuntu compiles with something like `-O2` and some lowest-common-denominator march/mtune, plenty of programs won't meaningfully use newer CPU features nor benefit from O3, or will barely benefit (below the noise floor of the benchmark). I mean, at the end of the day you're taking the same-ish programs and building them with the same-ish compilers; if the only difference is that one distro compiles for a newer exact CPU target, it'll win sometimes but not always. I was just surprised at the notion that it could ever lose, since anything Ubuntu could ask gcc to do, Gentoo could do just as well; unless it's something like Gentoo happening to lag a gcc version at the exact time of the comparison, it shouldn't be able to be worse than Ubuntu. (Unless you count the overhead of doing the compile, in which case it can be quite easy to beat:])