Exherbo aims to be a stable and flexible distribution for developers, tinkerers and people who need their distribution to help them be productive. Exherbo actually makes it fun for developers to develop, be it on their own code or the distribution itself. A good set of tools, clear, up-front configuration and excellent support for decentralized development make the system work for instead of against the developer.

Source based Linux distribution with up-front configuration. Common tasks like package installation and updates follow a flexible yet deterministic and comprehensible path.

Decentralised development done properly. Mixing in packages from unofficial sources or even packages that you wrote yourself is easy.

For developers - we expect users to take part in the development. The first year alone we counted contributions from over 70 different people, who worked on packages (both pre-existing and new), documentation, etc. Since then, we have not only been able to attract more and more active users, but also to entrust them with more and more responsiblity.

Native multiple architecture support (multiarch). Our multiarch concept allows for cross-compiling to different architectures while still being able to use the features and dependency resolution of the package manager more easily than any other available distro.

Uses a couple of bits of code, and some ideas, from other open source projects, but the majority of code is original, not forked. Exherbo takes some ideas from other open source projects but it’s our own ideas that really sets us apart and defines Exherbo.

Uses the Paludis package manager with a custom built EAPI. Paludis is a fast and flexible package manager that allows us to quickly add new features targeted specifically at Exherbo. Many of the defining features of Exherbo are based on Paludis and the tight co-operation between the Exherbo and Paludis developers.

Simple and safe account management The system manage users and groups so you don’t have to worry about them.

Tracking unwritten packages With the unwritten repository, packages that haven’t been made can be tracked by the distribution itself, speeding up workflow.