When comparing Funtoo vs OpenRC, the Slant community recommends Funtoo for most people. In the question“What are the best rolling release Linux distributions?” Funtoo is ranked 18th while OpenRC is ranked 36th. The most important reason people chose Funtoo is:
The profile system improves portage's usability without losing the soul of Gentoo.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Like Gentoo but more streamlined
The profile system improves portage's usability without losing the soul of Gentoo.
Pro Use flags that are suitable for a task or environment are grouped into Profiles
It allows selecting, for example, gnome or desktop profile with most of the sane use flags enabled inside the profile.
Pro Portage tree split into kits
This allows more fine-grained control over package updates, and packages can be now tied together inside the kit to minimize dependency breakage while upgrading.
Pro `boot-update` to take care of bootloader configuration
A tool to update your grub config.
Pro Funtoo Linux offers a variety of stage3 builds
Customized to a variety of CPU microarchitecture variants from AMD, ARM, and Intel.
Pro Stage3 sources are built using the Funtoo Linux tool 'metro'
It's a sophisticated replacement for Gentoo's build tool 'catalyst'.
Pro Uses GIt instead of Rsync
THis makes updates so much faster!
Pro Stage3 archive coming with pre-compiled kernel based on Debian's kernel
Pro Simpler template-based network configuration
Pro No feature creep
OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.
Pro Extremely simple
All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.
Pro Fast
OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.
Pro UNIX-Like
Does one thing and does it well.
Pro Less dependency creep
Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.
Pro A very balanced compromise
Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.
Pro Very efficient on system resources
Uses multi-core and ram very efficiently.
Pro Portable
It can be ported to other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.
Pro Flexible and extensible
I can add a new startup script for most cases in under five minutes. The ability to quickly insert new applications into the system is a big help.
Pro Not bloated
Pro Deterministic
It always initializes a system the same way; if OpenRC booted and ran a system properly today, it will boot and run properly tomorrow, and the next day.
Cons
Con No socket activation
OpenRC does not have socket activation yet. It will be added in the future though.
Con Not widely offered across distrubutions
From Distrowatch, only ten distributions (of which 8 Linux, 1 BSD) officially support OpenRC, and offer it through their standard repos.