Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he's begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS.

Like Sabayon Linux, matrixOS is also based on Gentoo Linux but this "gaming ready" distribution is an immutable, atomic distribution.

matrixOS describes itself as:

matrixOS is a Gentoo-based Linux distribution that blends the power and customizability of Gentoo with the reliability of OSTree atomic upgrades (yes bootc will come). It comes with Flatpak, Snap and Docker ready to go out of the box.

Our two main goals are:

- Reliability: Providing a stable, immutable base system through OSTree, which allows for atomic upgrades and rollbacks.

- Gaming-Friendly: Shipping with the Steam loader, Lutris and optimizations to get you gaming on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs with minimal fuss.

The matrixOS distribuion aims to always ship with the latest Mesa and NVIDIA drivers, is already shipping the "NTFS Plus" modern NTFS driver, Steam is ready to go, Google Antigravity is included as part of their AI push, the Btrfs file-system is being used by default with Zstd compression, and there is support for x86-64-v3 compiler flags.

Those wanting to learn more about matrixOS can download it and find out all the details over on GitHub .

I'll be running some matrixOS benchmarks soon to see how this Gentoo-based Linux distribution is competing with the likes of Arch Linux based CachyOS and others.