this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Someone Just Made an Immutable Gentoo-Based Distro Tailored for Gaming (itsfoss.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/linux@programming.dev
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Sabayon Linux was a Gentoo-based distribution that existed from the mid-2000s until 2019. It aimed to make Gentoo accessible to regular users without the usual compilation headaches.

Created by Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon offered pre-built binaries through its Entropy package manager. This let users skip the hours of compiling while still getting the Gentoo experience.

Now Fabio has shared that he's working on a new immutable, atomic Linux distro called matrixOS. Like Sabayon, it's also based on Gentoo.

๐Ÿšง The developer warns that this is a hobby project specifically created for homelab setups, not for production machines.

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[โ€“] ZomieChicken@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

This. USE flags are the real strength of Gentoo. There can be benefits with various C(XX)FLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. However, most of the time^1^ those changes are at best moderate, and sometimes outright dangerous.

With Gentoo, if $PKG has a choice to require $LIBKITCHENSINK, you can choose not to. This, sometimes, can mean saving a TON of compile time. Also, the kernel is arguable more secure^2^.

  1. One time I recompiled either Opera, or some lib it depended on with some magic LDFLAGS and got a notable speedup on startup. However, this is fairly rare.
  2. IIRC, a certain part of the kernel can rerandomize the kernel stack in memory, meaning that, unlike a Debian kernel or Fedora kernel, no one can be entirely sure what a certain data structure would be in memory.