Comment by amne

I remember 15yrs ago or so Gentoo was pretty much our only choice modern enough that we could run on our mixed farm of Solaris(SPARC) and HP G5/G6 (x86). We used those because they were cheap to buy used back then.

The overlay system was also a pretty big bonus. So easy to set up custom overlay and just pull freeradius from git, apply our custom patches and deploy it in the overlay. By deploy I mean archive the source code + some metadata files. Then boot up a machine and configure portage to know about our overlay and then just install the entire suite of apps we needed.

Things have evolved a lot I have to admit. These days you just have artifactory or ECR and just push and pull your custom container images from there and boom .. custom software up and running.