this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I use it. Mostly just love of the game. Occasionally I've played with custom kernel patches and custom patches to software packages, and Gentoo makes that super easy. Building software that doesn't have a package is also pretty comparatively easy.
There's a lot more configurability than even arch; if you're careful it's not too hard to get your base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range). It doesn't force you to use any particular init system, if that matters to you. Even some individual applications can be smaller/a bit more efficient if you compile without features you don't need. You can also keep things super up to date, run the latest kernel etc. Supposedly the Google Chromebook os is originally based on Gentoo because of the degree of configurability.
Most of those things don't really matter, and aren't truely unique to Gentoo, but if you were really only concerned about practicality you'd just run Fedora or Debian.
There are also a few use cases like cross building to weird hardware that other distros don't have builds for where Gentoo can be a bit easier than LFS. Doing weird stuff like using musl instead of glibc is also possible. I haven't heard of that on another distro (although I haven't looked in a while).
It's not that much harder than Arch was back in the day, which was never really that hard if you were willing to actually read the manual.
A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn't use much more than this, or at least it didn't in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.
Yeah, for sure. It's not really unique to Gentoo, you theoretically can do it in any distro, some are easier, some are harder. Gentoo is one of the easier distros to keep minimal in my opinion.