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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#41

Post by IshKebab »

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.

Red Hat contributes a huge amount to the open source ecosystem. They're one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel (maybe the biggest).

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#42

Post by distances »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #22
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 was exactly what I was going to comment on. Why are they not spending more money?? I don't even know what they should spend it on, but like.. it's Gentoo! I would have thought they'd pay the core devs something?

What money? Doesn't sound like they have anything extra?

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#43

Post by IshKebab »

WD-42 wrote: post #38
shevy-java wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I expect people will stop yelling about Wayland when it works as reliably as X, which is probably a decade away. I await your "works for me!" response.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#44

Post by ryandrake »

Fiveplus wrote: post #14
cb321 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool.

I tried Gentoo around the time that OP started using it, and I also really liked that aspect of it. Most package managers really struggle with this, and when there is configuration, the default is usually "all features enabled". So, when you want to install, say, ffmpeg on Debian, it pulls in a tree of over 250 (!!) dependency packages. Even if you just wanted to use it once to convert a .mp4 container into .mkv.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#45

Post by Philpax »

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…

...is Gentoo large and influential these days? As far as I'm aware, its current cultural status is that of a punchline, but I'm open to being corrected.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#46

Post by tgtweak »

I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags correctly it produced heavily tailored and optimized binaries. I feel like a staged/graduated (downloading/running precompiled initially while a flag-optimized compile runs in the background) would be a good way to get around some of the downsides here (namely that it takes 45 minutes to install firefox with emerge/pacman and that builds fail more often than packages fail to install).

Very cool to see that it's still going strong - I remember managing many machines at scale was a bit of a challenge, especially keeping ahead of vulnerabilities.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#47

Post by anthk »

yndoendo wrote: post #31
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…

Tecnically with just a kernel optimized for your CPU, realtime patches, NTSync and a custom MESA build (with -O2 and -march set to your CPU) would give a good boost instead of trying to recompile verything.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#48

Post by Cyph0n »

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.

Red Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages, drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1].

One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind the “democratization” of virtualization in general, allowing users and small companies to access performant virt without selling a kidney to VMware.

Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack (one of which is virtio!).

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#49

Post by anthk »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #27
GrowingSideways wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g. - systemd - pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC) - Wayland - Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)

Pipewire rocks. Wayland it's half baked and a disaster on legacy systems. SystemD... openrc it's good enough, and it never fails at shutdown.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#50

Post by mogwire »

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.

You don’t know they are a positive force?

This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.

And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.

And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?

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