You know, one of the things that has maybe gotten lost sight of in the past few years in Gentoo is: what exactly is Gentoo, anyway? Is it a distro? Is it a meta-distro? What the hell is a meta-distro anyway?
So, I’ve been playing with Django a lot lately. And that obviously makes people think of Ruby on Rails for some reason. But here’s the point: django and ruby are frameworks that allow me to build what I want to build. And that’s the real power of Gentoo, isn’t it? Gentoo is a framework for your own distro.
Its power is in being a platform. A platform upon which to build exactly the sort of system that scratches your itches. You know, you get your ricers and then you get the regular desktop user, and the server users and the hardened users and the embedded users (and I haven’t mentioned all the different architectures let alone the BSD people — well there, I just mentioned them), and most of these people probably installed the basic system in the same way and then went on to customise.
There’s a sense of empowerment there, and it awes me.