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Gentoo developer Bryan Østergaard yesterday revealed what he has been working on over the past few months: Exherbo. The only thing is, Østergaard doesn’t want you to use Exherbo, and even if you did it probably wouldn’t work.
Gentoo has long been the Linux distribution of choice for users that believe they are more hardcore than other Johnny-come-lately Linux users. Userfriendliness and easy of use are not qualities high on the Gentoo user’s list. Customisability and the ability to optimise each and every application on their machine is.
Over time, however, even Gentoo became more mainstream and so a handful of developers, led by Østergaard set out to create a new distribution, one unfettered by management and community and able to do its own thing. A Linux distribution that only a hacker could love.
Exherbo is not a fork of Gentoo, says Østergaard, although there are some similarities. It is also very “experimental”. In fact, Exherbo is so experimental that it probably wont work on your computer, or anyone elses, he says.
Østergaard says Exherbo was created so that the developers could “focus on technical goals and the needs of real users”, as opposed to worrying about developer politics.
“Exherbo is not, at the moment, a user-targeted distribution,” he says. “It supports packages that the people involved find interesting or useful; it probably does not support your favourite desktop environment or applications. That kind of thing will come later — there are plenty of other options for users who want a distribution that does everything badly rather than a few things well. In other words, go and use Gentoo or Ubuntu please.”
Some of the plans for Exherbo, according to Østergaard, include a new packaging system that will be “similar in idea to Gentoo’s ebuilds but … completely incompatible due to the many technical differences”. Improved options handling is also on the table.
Østergaard says the Exherbo team are also “writing a completely new initsystem free of all the weird, useless legacy stuff and based on user needs in the 21st century”.
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