Anti-opinionated

Reading the room

Every Linux distribution is an answer to the same question: who decides what your system is? Most answers reduce to "the maintainers, wisely." Your distro picks systemd or OpenRC, glibc or musl, ext4 or btrfs, and you inherit that stack as the price of using it.

That's genuinely fine for a lot of people. It's how you get a system that mostly works with default effort. But it means the shape of your machine is decided by someone else's tastes, release cadence, and risk appetite.

The anti-opinionated answer

Keru answers differently: the distribution holds no position. Not a middle position — no position. It doesn't ship a "best" init or a "recommended" filesystem, because that recommendation is the very thing Keru exists to remove.

Every foundational component is presented as a flat, open choice in the installer. Runit or systemd? They're options, side by side, weightless. glibc or musl? Your call. btrfs or reiserfs or swap? All offered. Keru doesn't rank them, because ranking is an opinion, and opinions are exactly what it delegates to you.

What it grants

• No inherited stack. You never fight a default you never agreed to. What's on the disk is what you chose, full stop.
• Every system is the same system. "Your" configuration isn't a deviation from Keru's ideal — it is Keru. There's no blessed path and no lesser path.
• The distro never defends a mistake. An opinionated distro inherits the burden of defending its picks forever. Keru inherits nothing to defend.
• Legibility. Because there's no position to paper over, every choice is visible in make.conf — readable, editable, rebuildable.

What it costs

• No hand-holding. There's no "the way you install Keru is the way you install Keru" comfort. You carry the decisions.
• You must form an opinion. The installer's only requirement is that you have one. For people who specifically want that, it's freedom; it's not for everyone.
• More surface to keep stable. Supporting many inits, libcs, and filesystems means more combinations to honor — which is why the stability promise is scoped honestly.

Not GNU/Hurd, not a meta-OS

To head off a common reading: anti-opinionated doesn't mean Keru is a "meta operating system" that runs arbitrary kernels. Keru is a Linux distribution. Its freedom lives in userspace and configuration — init, libc, filesystem, kernel (within Linux), tooling. It's the meta-distribution stance: choice and composition over a fixed opinionated stack.

In one line

An opinionated distro tells you what to use. Keru tells you that you have to choose — and then builds exactly what you pick.

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