About

• Source based Linux distribution with up-front configuration.
• Decentralised development done properly.
• For distribution developers, not end users.
• Derived in a few parts from Gentoo, but not a fork.
• Uses the Paludis package manager with a custom built EAPI.

Why

• Doing anything interesting or fun with Gentoo is too difficult.
• We need the freedom to break everything whenever necessary.

Goals

• All design goals must be phrased in such a way that it is hard to use them as slogans to justify stupidity.
• The target user knows what they are doing.
• No interactivity requirement. Controllable, repeatable behaviour with up-front configuration.
• Flexibility where it makes sense to provide flexibility.
• No over-centralisation. Only widely used packages are to be in main repositories, and make the tools good enough to deal with lots of small third party repositories for random other apps.
• Be able to deliver features that other distributions consider too ambitious.

Why Exherbo is Not For You

• We don’t provide packages for some things you might consider to be critical.
• There’s no guarantees that the packages we provide work properly.
• There’s several large features that we still want to redesign and some of them will cause large breakages.
• We don’t really provide support. We don’t (always) bite but user support isn’t a priority just yet and is a bit uneven.
• We don’t provide install media but there’s lots of good live CD’s available from other projects.
• Init system? Our init system is far from ready but you can use other systems like Upstart, Baselayout or a simple bash script instead.