There was already a Gentoo community on Lemmy, however it hasn’t had any activity in 2 years and since Lemmy’s popularity has exploded in recent days, I figured it might be time for a new one with active moderation.

Anyone reading this likely already knows what Gentoo is, but on the off-chance that someone completely unfamiliar with Gentoo clicks on this thread, here’s a quick primer. Gentoo Linux is essentially a meta-distribution. You’re given a package manager (Portage) that builds your packages from source, and some useful command line utilities. Other than that, you get your choice of everything - systemd or OpenRC? X11 or Wayland? Gnome, KDE or some other desktop manager? Or none at all? All up to you. Now of course, Arch provides you the same freedom of choice, but Gentoo’s party trick is the local compilation - you can have the compiler optimize everything for your particular CPU’s instruction set, or just leave out features you don’t need in some programs.