matrixOS brings OSTree atomic upgrades to Gentoo with a simple motto: "emerge once, deploy everywhere."

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.

  • ZombieChicken@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    24 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 time1 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 secure2.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.