Hi all. I've been building a small Gentoo-based live system with its own installer. It's still early, but it installs and runs, and I'd like feedback from people who know Gentoo better than I do.
What it is: Gentoo underneath (Portage, OpenRC, your own USE flags and overlays still work), but without the first day of the handbook:
Installer in two flavours (TUI and GTK), written in Rust. It handles partitioning, locale/timezone, user, desktop and GPU driver, and a failed install can be resumed.
Prebuilt kernels: the installer detects CPU generation, GPU vendor and laptop/desktop, and copies a matching kernel from a store. I build those with a fragment-based config matrix (kernel-matrix).
Binary install: packages come from Gentoo's binhost plus my own for what it doesn't build (niri, Noctalia, ghostty). A full install with desktop merged 263 packages in a VM with zero compiling (about 15 minutes).
Desktop: niri by default and (Sway , MangoWc , Hypr , dwl in option here) + Noctalia with colours following with the wallpaper, plus ustan (.deb/AppImage/Flatpak/.exe installer) and a Portage GUI/CLI store.
Every installer decision is committed to git in /etc/portage, so "undo" is just git revert.
ISOs are signed, Secure Boot capable (enrol my cert or disable SB), and boot via Ventoy.
What it is not: not a binary distro with its own repo of everything, no LUKS in the installer yet and no planning , no Microsoft-signed Secure Boot, and Secure Boot isn't set up on the installed system.
Honest status: tested in QEMU/KVM (BIOS/UEFI) and on my own hardware a few servers , laptos and desktop. Other machines are untested, so reports of what the verbose boot entry prints on a failing machine would help most. Also, some READMEs (especially gentoo-installer) are outdated. I'm rewriting them this week, so trust simple-linux's README over the others for now.
Repo: https://github.com/tarilka0gg/simple-linux
Installer source: https://github.com/tarilka0gg/gentoo-installer
Would love to hear what you'd change, especially on the binhost/kernel-store approach.