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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#11

Post by cb321 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #9

For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V support. While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that the meta-distribution model is the…

While I was always a sourced-base/personalized distribution personality type, this is also a big part of why I moved to Gentoo in early 2004 (for amd64, not Risc-V / other embedded per your example). While Pentium-IV's very deep pipelines and compiler flag sensitivities (and the name itself for the fastest Penguin) drove the for-speed perception of the compile-just-for-my-system style, it really plays well to all customization/configuation hacker mindsets.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#14

Post by Fiveplus »

cb321 wrote: post #11
Fiveplus wrote: post #9

For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V support. While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that the meta-distribution model is the…

While I was always a sourced-base/personalized distribution personality type, this is also a big part of why I moved to Gentoo in early 2004 (for amd64, not Risc-V / other embedded per your example). While Pentium-IV's very deep pipelines and compiler flag sensitivities (and the name itself for the fastest Penguin) drove the for-speed perception of the compile-just-for-my-system style, it really plays well to all cus…

That is a fantastic historical parallel. The early amd64 days were arguably Gentoo's killer app moment. While the binary distributions were wrestling with the logistical nightmare of splitting repositories and figuring out the /lib64 vs /lib standard, Gentoo users just changed their CHOST, bootstrapped and were running 64-bit native. You nailed the psychology of it, too. The speed marketing was always a bit of a red herring. The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool. It respects the user's intelligence rather than abstracting it away.

Since you've been on the ride since '04, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. How do you feel the maintenance burden compares today versus the GCC 3.x era? With the modern binhost fallback and the improvements in portage, I feel like we now spend less time fighting rebuild loops than back then? But I wonder if long time users feel the same.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#15

Post by GrowingSideways »

Etheryte wrote: post #5
Y_Y wrote: post #3

> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations. It's crazy how projects this large and influential can get by on so little cash. Of course a lot of people are dona…

This is, in a way, why it's nice that we have companies like Red Hat, SUSE and so on. Even if you might not like their specific distros for one reason or another, they've found a way to make money in a way where they contribute back for everything they've received. Most companies don't do that.

Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. It's nice we get good software out of it, but this is not a funding model to glorify. And of course american businesses not producing open source is the single most malignant force on the planet.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#17

Post by tosti »

Etheryte wrote: post #5
Y_Y wrote: post #3

> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations. It's crazy how projects this large and influential can get by on so little cash. Of course a lot of people are dona…

This is, in a way, why it's nice that we have companies like Red Hat, SUSE and so on. Even if you might not like their specific distros for one reason or another, they've found a way to make money in a way where they contribute back for everything they've received. Most companies don't do that.

Yes, that would be nice but when I look at their Grub src.rpm for instance, some of those patches would look original but came from Debian.

Back in the day when the boxes were on display in brick-and-mortar stores, SuSE was a great way to get up and running with Linux.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#18

Post by jonfw »

flipped wrote: post #12

How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?

In my experience (this was about 5 years ago mind you) it was no more complex than an arch installation, but with a smaller community and less documentation.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#20

Post by entropie »

2025 I switched to nixos and will probably stay. I used gentoo for like 20 years. Its the distro of my heart.

With some notebooks, some of which were getting on in years, it was simply too resource-intensive to update. Only GHC, for example, often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks.

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