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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#51

Post by mogwire »

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)

Pushing their decisions? This is comical.

I guess Debian, SUSE, Canonical, etc get that email from Red Hat just go along with it. We better make the switch, we don’t want our ::checks notes:: competitor made at us.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#52

Post by Cyph0n »

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 even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#53

Post by InfamousRece »

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…

To be fair it was not that difficult to set create a pure 64 bit binary distro and there were a few of them. The real issue was to figure out how to do mixed 32/64 bit and this is where the fight about /lib directories originated. In a pure 64 bit distro the only way to run 32 bit binaries was to create a chroot with a full 32 bit installation. It took a while before better solutions were agreed to. This was an era of Flash and Acrobat Reader - all proprietary and all 32 bit only so people really cared about 32 bit.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#54

Post by stabbles »

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…

It would be interesting to have a more accurate estimate of the effective cost of maintaining Gentoo. Say 100 core developers spend 10h/week, and 380 external contributors 2h/week; that's well over 40 FTE, and at $150K per FTE that's $6 million a year.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#56

Post by zppln »

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…

I've been on Gentoo for my gaming desktop for like 2-3 years now and I don't think I've ever had an update break anything.

I will say though that my valgrind is broken due to march native. :)

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#57

Post by malwrar »

Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardware + rsync to update. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever built, at this point I’m effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it’s all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how little they operate on I’m definitely setting up a recurring donation.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#58

Post by elcapitan »

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…

OTOH, not having money also comes with upsides, like not having overpaid CEOs, managers, marketing people, or distracting side projects.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#59

Post by c-hendricks »

Philpax wrote: post #45
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.

Also curious of Gentoo's influence in 2026.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#60

Post by speed_spread »

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…

What Gentoo really needs is an official immutability mechanism like ostree used by Fedora Silverblue or ZFS/btrfs snapshots of the root/boot volumes. This way the ever-experimental nature of the distro would be compensated by having an easy mechanism to rollback to previous known-good builds.
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