this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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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.
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.
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.
I've invented a new type of Vegetarianism: instead of eating veggies for every meal, occasionally you'll add meat to your diet as well. It's really the best of both worlds.
Picture someone who says they could never become vegetarian because they love bacon too much.
It would be a lot better if they went vegetarian + bacon, than if they kept eating meat for every meal, thinking they can't be vegetarian anyway.
I agree. But you see how that's beside the point, right?
Nowadays gentoo already offers binary packages natively, if the user wants them ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart ). Default is sill to compile locally. But for large packages like libreoffice or browsers the binary packages are nice.
But i can see the benefit for new users in getting sth pre configured. For this to be long term usefull though,the documentation is crucial. Maybe just offering the guide to this specific install or how it differs from the standard install manual, like sakakis install guide (sadly defunct).
I'm curious to see how they will handle immutability and what will it set apart from other distros like fedora atomic.
Most immutable distros have limitations on installing CLI tools because they are designed to have flatpak as the main package manager. It'd be cool if they had some tricks for installing software in the user/data partition like you can do with homebrew in bazzite, but better integrated into the system package manager (I'm imagining a gentoo prefix integrated into a unified package manager)
That's good since I just learned Bazzite drains my laptop battery and It is a pain to change anything
Noice, I'll try that. Also, the Gentoo is my favourite species of penguin ๐ง๐ง๐ง๐ง