[ Thanks to Mike
Petersen for this link. ]
“Imagine an Operating System that only includes the
features that you actually want and use. An Operating System that
is finely tuned to your computer hardware. One that doesn’t include
any resource hogging applications that you don’t need such as
“Desktop Search” or huge bloated software such as modern music
players. A System that doesn’t need to be re-installed or upgraded
every 6-9 months like most Operating Systems. Well, if you are
partial to Linux, Gentoo Linux is such an Operating System.“Gentoo Linux is what is referred to as a “Source Based
Distribution”. What this means is that you build all of the
software that you will use directly from the “Source Code” – Source
Code is what developers create and modify, mostly comprised of text
files, however, computers don’t understand Source Code. In order
for a program to be usable on a computer, the source code needs to
be compiled into Binaries (the “language” computers
understand).“Since Gentoo Linux is built from source code, it is a highly
configurable distribution. For instance, instead of building the
source code to a generic 32 or 64 bit processor, you can tell the
compiler to build the code specifically to your exact processor.
This alone can give you a noticeable performance increase. As well
as optimizing the binaries for your computer (cpu architecture),
you can also optimize the software for the features that you want
your software to have (and ignore the features you don’t want to
have).”