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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#61

Post by TingPing »

elcapitan wrote: post #58
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.

That’s a 20 million dollar problem, but plenty of projects would be better with a few hundred thousand to pay staff and infra.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#62

Post by TingPing »

IshKebab wrote: post #43
WD-42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s very fair you can say “X works for me” but everyone saying otherwise is in the wrong.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#64

Post by raphinou »

malwrar wrote: post #57

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 hardw…

Did you document this somewhere? I'm interested to know more

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#65

Post by givemeethekeys »

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.

Arch is the reason I didn't choose Gentoo for my latest build. It's convenient and "good enough" for all my use-cases. Gentoo gives you the feeling of being fully connected to the computer like no other OS - the kind that leaves you nostalgic - but it also requires a time commitment.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#66

Post by malwrar »

raphinou wrote: post #64
malwrar wrote: post #57

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 hardw…

Did you document this somewhere? I'm interested to know more

Nah, first time I’ve mentioned it anywhere. Happy to answer questions, if there’s interest maybe this could be my reason for a first blog post.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#67

Post by speed_spread »

flipped wrote: post #12

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

General administration is similar to Arch or any other regular distro. Package updates necessarily take longer because of recompiling but that's just CPU time. There are precompiled versions of big popular binaries (open office, Firefox, etc) that allow you to save a lot of time if you want.

Where you lose time is in trying to optimize your system and packages using the multiple switches that Gentoo provides. If you're the OCD twiddler type, Gentoo can be both extremely satisfying and major time sink.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#68

Post by Y_Y »

IshKebab wrote: post #41
shevy-java wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

It looks like they're second to Intel, at least by LF's metric. That said driver code tends to be take up a lot of space compared to other areas. Just look at the mass of AMD template garbage here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#69

Post by ghaff »

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 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.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#70

Post by f1shy »

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)

I don’t know where they come from, but I try to avoid all in that list. To be fair, audio is a train wreck anyway.
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