Never Heard of Exherbo? Never Will, Either.
We don't begrudge developers their fun, but Exherbo made us pause. It shares a lot of concepts from Gentoo, but Exherbo's developers claim that it is not a true Gentoo fork. From the site, "Exherbo is a distribution designed for people who know what they're doing with Linux." In this case, that's just Exherbo's developers, apparently, since the site is very adamant the Exherbo is not intended as a user-distribution and a wide developer base is not desired. From the site: "A developer base polarised between those who make thousands of changes every month and those who make perhaps a dozen each year does not make it easy to push forwards the sort of improvements we want." Huh?
So in other words, Hi! We are playing in the open source sandbox with open source toys, but we play with only our friends. Nyah nyah.
It seems a little counterintuitive to say that users are "a detriment to the distribution's technical needs" since some of the best software features often are user-requested. It’s okay -- we get it. As developers, we've created perfect applications that pesky users kept ruining because they couldn't appreciate the simplicity and elegance of our creation. All the whining for useability, error-checking, and formatting! And jealous rival developers clearly don’t understand how to work with the perfect architecture.
Still, it’s a little arrogant of the developers to write, “It's just that we have nothing to offer you, and you have nothing to offer us.” It’s the age-old tree in the forest question. If I can’t get to look at the app, can’t tinker with it, or even see what it does, who cares? And when (if?) Exherbo is ready for users, will anyone come?