Josh Saddler

Gentoo is not about choice.

It's not. Despite the fact that you'll see this repeated ad infinitum by users and some developers alike. Take another look through all of our documentation and the About Gentoo and Philosophy pages on the website. Nothing in there about "choice" at all, is there?

Let's take a look at what we do see. Words like adaptability. Tools. Not choice. So, what is the strength, the purpose of Gentoo?

Flexibility.

This is readily apparent in several ways. You have a good number of choices -- in packages, in initscripts, in where to place config files. It shows in the configuration tools like emerge --config and rc-update, and other tools that serve the user. You can adapt Gentoo into anything you like. It's flexible enough that you can even strip out Portage, the heart of Gentoo, and install a tiny operating system on your embedded device. Or you can scale Gentoo up and run it on networks of thousands of servers. You can tuck it away in your living room as a combination HTPC and game station. You're a programmer? You're in luck; half our tree consists of development tools.

It's this kind of flexibility that makes Gentoo strong. It's not limited to traditional roles as a 'server" or "desktop" or "firewall" distribution. Instead, it's something else, something that can't be defined as easily as Ubuntu or Red Hat. It can be any of those things, all of them at once, or something else altogether. How easy is it to build a customized distribution designed for some sort of specialized application out-of-the-box if you're using Ubuntu? Not very easy, if you're trying to set up an exotic webserver. But it's easily done in Gentoo.

"Yes, yes, I know all about about how flexible Gentoo is," you might say. "But what about when the developers take choices out of our hands by removing XMMS from the tree and making vanilla-sources and stage 1/2 installs unsupported?"

That's a common enough whine. But you've forgotten that the same flexibility is still there. Dig into our publically available CVS to find that XMMS ebuild you want. Drop it into your overlay, and two commands later and you now have your favorite old-school media player installed once again. Same thing for vanilla-sources -- they're still around. Stage 1/2? We still have installation instructions in our documents (something nearly every user forgets), and release engineering still provides tarballs; go browse one of the mirrors.

It's all still there; it's never really gone. To me, that's pretty incredible. If some RPM-based distro like Fedora or Mandriva removes a package from their repositories, it's pretty much gone. You'd have to scour the internet to find it again in some unofficial third-party repo. That isn't the case with Gentoo. Whatever you're looking to do, you can still do it.

That's some kind of adaptability and flexibility. You can choose whether or not to only use packages from Portage, you can choose what you're going to turn your system into, you can choose many things. But choice itself isn't the be-all and end-all of Gentoo Linux. All these choices come from our goal of flexibility.

It doesn't get much more basic than that.