Exherbo - a new round in the development of source-based distributions

    Once upon a time, I was a fan of Gentoo Linux and installed it wherever I could: at home, at work, on servers, but I was soon forced to switch to Debian GNU / Linux and FreeBSD due to the fact that each update began to generate more and more new problems - some of the necessary packages were not collected at all, some were expired, some had to be patched manually, for some, the settings were also corrected in package files. Now it’s hard to say exactly when it started, many say that this is due to the fact that many developers left the project because of diverging views on the future fate of Gentoo. And, despite the fact that the situation has somehow stabilized, a group of "people" from Gentoo decided to create their own distributor, which would correspond to the old concept of Gentoo, the one with which he came into the world, and with whom he was loved at the very beginning of the journey. So, meet - Exherbo!

    Exherbo is a distribution designed for those who know why and why they chose Linux. Much of his concept was gleaned from existing source-based distributions, in particular, this is the possibility of flexible installation with preliminary configuration (the user indicates that he needs / does not need specifically, flags and options for compiling packages).

    Exherbo is also not an offshoot of any project, despite the fact that the distribution code is used in others, despite the fact that many concepts are similar, and despite the fact that many team members are also involved in the development of other distributions, a large part of the Exherbo code is written from scratch.

    Exherbo is not yet a distributor, ready for use by a wide range of end users, such as Ubuntu. Most of his packages are precisely those that were prepared by people interested in the project (in fact, the development team), only those packages that they found interesting and useful in everyday work, it is even possible that Exherbo does not currently include your favorite shell of the table or music player. But the situation with the number of packages will improve over time, although even now there are many ways to independently build the necessary software, in the end it is a source-based distributor, which means that the user chooses here, not the developer, who believes that this package is for all users needed / not needed.

    The appearance of Exherbo did not come at all from the idea that all modern distributors are disgusting, but that you can create something that would more suit the needs of each specific user, or, even, your own, was flexible and customizable. There was already an attempt to create one based on one well-known source-based distribution (Gentoo), but he was not destined to become a viable long-term project. (let's discuss Exherbo better than the opinions of Exherbo developers regarding Gentoo)

    Official site of the project
    Official project IRC channel on the Freenode network

    This habratopik is partly a translation of the text from exherbo.org , the official site of the project .

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