“Gentoo is a Linux distribution that succeeds in striking a
balance between fine-grained configurability and ongoing
manageability.“In contrast to popular Linux distributions such as Red Hat’s
Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Debian GNU/Linux that are delivered as
collections of precompiled binaries, Gentoo Linux users build the
software that makes up their Gentoo systems from source. In this
way, Gentoo preserves for administrators a broader range of
software configuration options, since many choices must be made at
compile time…”