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Someone Just Made an Immutable Gentoo-Based Distro Tailored for Gaming (itsfoss.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/linux@programming.dev

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Sabayon Linux was a Gentoo-based distribution that existed from the mid-2000s until 2019. It aimed to make Gentoo accessible to regular users without the usual compilation headaches.

Created by Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon offered pre-built binaries through its Entropy package manager. This let users skip the hours of compiling while still getting the Gentoo experience.

Now Fabio has shared that he's working on a new immutable, atomic Linux distro called matrixOS. Like Sabayon, it's also based on Gentoo.

🚧 The developer warns that this is a hobby project specifically created for homelab setups, not for production machines.

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 23 points 2 days ago (2 children)

In Gentoo, emerge compiles packages from source on practically every machine you set up. matrixOS remedies this by building once and distributing binaries, so you skip the compilation wait entirely.

Okay, soooooo...basically disregarding the entire point and benefit of Gentoo? The entire reason you'd want to build from source on a specific machine or architecture is for the compiler optimizations done on that hardware. Just shipping binaries around is normal, so I'm not getting what the point is here.

[–] Supercrunchy@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

IMHO the power of gentoo is the customization, not the optimizations you can do when compiling. You can change the dependencies and config of software to get exactly what you want instead of a config somebody else has chosen for you.

I used Sabayon back in the days for a few years and you are expected to accept the defaults for most packages and use it as a mostly binary distro, but you also have the option to use emerge(gentoo's package manager) to customize only some packages via USE flags. It was working quite well as far as I remember.

[–] ZomieChicken@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago

This. USE flags are the real strength of Gentoo. There can be benefits with various C(XX)FLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. However, most of the time^1^ those changes are at best moderate, and sometimes outright dangerous.

With Gentoo, if $PKG has a choice to require $LIBKITCHENSINK, you can choose not to. This, sometimes, can mean saving a TON of compile time. Also, the kernel is arguable more secure^2^.

One time I recompiled either Opera, or some lib it depended on with some magic LDFLAGS and got a notable speedup on startup. However, this is fairly rare.
IIRC, a certain part of the kernel can rerandomize the kernel stack in memory, meaning that, unlike a Debian kernel or Fedora kernel, no one can be entirely sure what a certain data structure would be in memory.