The biggest pro’s with Gentoo are that you can setup what are called USE flags. Basically they’re like meta-flags which tell the compiled packages what to build into your system. For example, if I add “mysql” to my USE variable, all packages that have mysql support will be built with mysql enabled. Likewise, there are flags for everything from kde, gnome, and X to the basics like alsa, and ssl. This produces an amazingly targeted and fat-free system that only has what you want it to have. In theory this sounds great, in practice it’s absolutely mind-blowing. You want all your packages to suddenly support postgres, just add it to your USE flag, and run ’emerge –newuse world’ and any packages that can provide postgres support will be re-built. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
Link: LXer
