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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#121

Post by NERD_ALERT »

cardanome wrote: post #119
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.

Red Hat pushing for the disaster that is Wayland has set the Linux Desktop back decades. It is the Microsoft of the Linux world.

Why is Wayland a disaster? Most of the Linux community is strongly in favor of it.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#122

Post by notme43 »

Been using Gentoo since 2004 on all my machines. They won me over after I started playing around with their Unreal Tournament demo ISO.

The game changer for me was using my NAS as a build host for all my machines. It has enough memory and cores to compile on 32 threads. But a full install from a stage3 on my ageing Thinkpad X13 or SBCs would fry the poor things and just isn't feasible to maintain.

I have systemd-nspawn containers for the different microarchitectures and mount their /var/cache/binpkgs and /etc/portage dirs over NFS on the target machines. The Thinkpad can now do an empty tree emerge in like an hour and leaving out the bdeps cuts down on about 150 packages.

Despite being focused on OpenRC, I have had the most pleasant experience with systemd on Gentoo over all the other distros I've tried.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#123

Post by malern »

Thaxll wrote: post #104
CursedSilicon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gentoo's Portage build system is (or at least was?) part of Google's ChromeOS Gentoo also runs the backend infra of Sony's Playstation Cloud gaming service Anecdotal evidence claims it used to also run the NASDAq

Highly unlikely that PSN runs Gentoo. They're using AWS.

I've no idea if Sony uses Gentoo or not, but you can definitely run Gentoo on AWS

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#124

Post by strangedude »

notme43 wrote: post #122

Been using Gentoo since 2004 on all my machines. They won me over after I started playing around with their Unreal Tournament demo ISO. The game changer for me was using my NAS as a build host for all my machines. It has enough memory and cores to compile on 32 threads. But a full install from a stage3 on my ageing Thinkpad X13 or SBCs would fry the poor things and just isn't feasible to maintain. I have systemd-nspa…

I'm so interested to learn more about this. Do you still run all your emerge commands on the thinkpad? What's the benefit of mounting /etc/portage over nfs?

I have this dream of moving all my ubuntu servers to gentoo but I don't have a clear enough picture of how to centralize management of a fleet of gentoo machines

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#125

Post by nextos »

sekh60 wrote: post #81
Philpax wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

ChromeOS is based in Gentoo.

Yes, Gentoo is like NixOS, sort of a meta-distribution.

Being the base of ChromeOS makes it highly influential.

ChromeOS market share is >5% in many countries, sometimes around double digits.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#126

Post by sohrob »

stakhanov wrote: post #40
tosti wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I've found openSUSE MicroOS to be a great homelab server OS.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#127

Post by yakk0 »

I haven't used it in years, but when I was first using Linux I used Gentoo for a long time. Building Gentoo from scratch really helped me learn a lot and probably more quickly than dual-booting a system like I had been. I'll always have a soft spot for Gentoo.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#128

Post by bashkiddie »

shevy-java wrote: post #35

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.

I have heard rumors that at one point in time gentoo lost its forum - basically a catastrophic strike such as deleting Arch Linux wiki

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#129

Post by eikenberry »

cyberpunk wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.

Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop? Over the years i’m pretty sure redhat contributed a great deal to various desktop projects, can’t think of anyone who contributed more.

Off the top of my head System76 jumps to mind with their hardware and Pop!_OS.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#130

Post by mmh0000 »

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.

As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing for the overall Linux community. They give back far more than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and open source version.

For example:

  - Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA  (i.e. Active Directory for Linux)
  - Red Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello
  - Ansible ... Ansible.
  - Red Hat OpenShift -> OKD
  - And more I'm not going to list.
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