[ Thanks to Joe Barr
for this link. ]
“A relatively new distribution called Gentoo Linux is gaining a
rapidly increasing, rabidly loyal group of users. The increasing
popularity of Gentoo is almost difficult to explain, given that
it’s clearly a distribution by geeks, for geeks and for nobody but
geeks. Obviously a geek can set up a Gentoo system for a non-geek,
so you may find novices using Gentoo. You just won’t find many
novices installing it.“To be more precise, Gentoo Linux is not really a distribution
but a meta-distribution. You don’t usually install pre-compiled
binaries when you add software to a Gentoo system. You most often
compile and build the binaries yourself, according to your own
personal optimization and configuration settings. Gentoo gives you
the ability to treat almost the entire system this way, but it also
lets the less-patient users start with a basic pre-compiled system.
After that, you can build your own higher-level packages on top of
that core installation…”