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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#31

Post by yndoendo »

flipped wrote: post #12

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

I have not directly used Gentoo in years. It was chosen so I could learn, maximize system performance, and have proper AMD64 support before the other distros supported the new CPU specs. Gentoo also had the best documentation in those years.

Id Software provided a Doom 3 Linux client when the game was first released. I found Doom 3 ran better on a custom built Gentoo Linux system compared to Windows XP.

Are you look at Gentoo to maximize performance with compiling everything with custom build parameters and kernel configuration versus pre-built binaries and a generic kernel loaded with modules?

Custom Gentoo just adds more time with having to wait to install software upgrades. It is like having all your Arch packages only being provided by AUR. There is also a chance the build will fail and the parameters might need to be changed. Majority of the time everything compiles without issue once the build parameters are figured out. It was rare when something did not.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#32

Post by MarsIronPI »

gylterud wrote: post #6
danielscrubs wrote: post #2

Really hope I can return to Gentoo soon. It was just the most stable and most hacker friendly distro Ive ever used. Hats off to all the contributors!

I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have…

Hah, same! NixOS is perfect for me; I love the declarative aspect. But Portage is far-and-away the best traditional package manager I've ever used. It's truly phenomenal.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#33

Post by joecool1029 »

rwmj wrote: post #26

Any more information on the Github move (away)? While the AI features of github are annoying, I've so far been able to completely ignore them.

I still send PR’s for ::gentoo to their github mirror, I would be surprised if they shut this off.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#34

Post by plagiarist »

dTal wrote: post #25
Etheryte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#35

Post by shevy-java »

Gentoo has many smart people. Having said that, I can't help but feel that ever since the rise of Arch, Gentoo lost a lot of grounds. This may not be primarily due to Arch, but it kind of felt that way to me. I feel that the Gentoo devs should really look at its main competitors such as Void or Arch, IMO. These seem to be more like a modern Gentoo, even if they are different and have a different focus too.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#36

Post by shevy-java »

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.

Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#37

Post by shevy-java »

plagiarist wrote: post #34
dTal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control; the situation is not the same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold, GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg, just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the ecosystem too.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#38

Post by WD-42 »

shevy-java wrote: post #37
plagiarist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control…

The usual semi conspiratorial nonsense. GNOME is only unusable to clickers that are uncomfortable with any UI other than what was perfected by windows 95. And Wayland? Really? Still yelling at that cloud?

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#39

Post by ihaveajob »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
Etheryte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.

Presumably, contribute to the entire ecosystem in terms of package maintenance and other non-monetary forms.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#40

Post by stakhanov »

tosti wrote: post #17
Etheryte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool.

It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.

The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.

As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.

...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.

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