Mastodawn

Jesus Michał von Gentoo 🏔 (he)May 11

Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?

If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:

1. Gentoo is independent.

There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.

2. Gentoo aims to be secure.

We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.

3. Gentoo is made by humans.

We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.

4. Gentoo supports sustainability.

This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.

Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.

And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.

What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)

@mgorny It's by far one of the most flexible general-purpose OSes out there. That and its support for Python is second to none.

Emil Thorsøe May 11

@stuartl @mgorny I think Gentoo is such a meme that most people do not stop to consider, how they would seriously view it.

When I switched away from it, my maintenance workflow had become too laborious and I had become more proficient in maintaining similar system on Debian.

@ethorsoe @stuartl @mgorny Gentoo has a seriously poisoned public image, that I'm not sure if it'd be possible to reconcile at this point. On the one hand it's easy publicity and it keeps the distro permanently in the public's view, on the other hand it brings in the kind of people who do it for the street cred.

Then again, the well of OS discussion has long been poisoned, I never see reasonable takes on the differences between distributions, and people still reglarly recommend popos to newbs..

Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)May 11

@mid_kid @ethorsoe @mgorny I've moved most of my servers away from it merely because I found the customisation options to be less of a big advantage, whereas keeping systems patched is the bigger criteria.

Here binary packages win. You get a reproduce-able environment very easily that way. There's one server though that will remain Gentoo, and that's a TS-7670 which runs an ARMv5 CPU: Debian are dropping support for this platform in release 14, and AlpineLinux never supported ARMv5. So Gentoo it is.

My laptop still runs Gentoo though… probably been running Gentoo on workstations for about 20 years now. I *could* switch to Arch, but why change something that isn't broken?

@mid_kid @ethorsoe @stuartl @mgorny I'd like to think that I've attempted to be reasonable.

Am curious to know what you think about https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-recommendation-framework-and-my-picks-for-2024/

A Linux distro recommendation framework and my picks - unsungNovelty

@unsungnovelty Good overview though there's a few things I disagree with: independent distros don't last longer than derivatives, they require much more work and more people, while a derivative can last incredibly long with few maintainers. I also disagree with your take on rolling release, even if your arch "hasn't broken" in 5 years, it is a constant churn of programs changing behaviours and breaking existing configs. 6 months is a great release cadence and I wish linux mint wasn't on LTS now.

@unsungnovelty I really like that you explain your decision process rather than trying to categorize groups of users into distros, so people can make their informed decision.

@mid_kid Thank you. This is what I would've liked to have when I started using Linux. I had to go through a ton of distro hopping before finding a productive distro to do serious work.

Which is also why this is a framework and recommendation - not a review. Cos different people uses Linux for different usecases. My recommendations try to cover most of the usecases. Not all. :)

@mid_kid Thanks for reading! :)

One clarification. I didn't mean that Independent distros will last longer from the project's POV. But user's installation POV. Independent distros wont get effected from external decisions like point releases. If Ubuntu pushes something, Linux Mint will not have voice all the time.

As for rolling releases, there r no other mainstream OS where using latest stable software is considered bad. MacOS, iOS, Android or Windows. It creates insecure, buggy experience.

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@mid_kid @ethorsoe @stuartl @mgorny Heh I think I'll now keep not capitalizing popos, looks much funnier that way.

Ben Torkington May 15

@mid_kid @mgorny YES. I just stumbled on a forum thread boasting "25% performance improvement" that was just talking about shaving a couple of seconds off a boot time by hand-rolling a kernel. I tried a push back on it because I think it's this kind of thing that makes it hard to argue with people who think G users are crazy, but they ain't having it

Ben Torkington May 15

@mid_kid @mgorny that, and the fact we tend to attract a lot of the "so… this is the systemd haters club, right?" types which have strong opinions on init systems with no idea why

Eli Schwartz May 15

@bentorkington @mid_kid @mgorny

It's because anyone who even offers the option of using a systemd alternative is assumed to hate it. Either you're for or against it, there is no middle ground.

And when most people hear "distro that supports not-systemd" they are only aware of Gentoo, Alpine, and maybe Devuan with the caveat that many systemd haters (or many people in general) would rather die than associate with the Devuan community. Gentoo is "a big name" in not-systemd.

Ben Torkington May 15

@eschwartz @mid_kid @mgorny haha 🙃
strict 50/50 split of systemd/openrc in my farm to keep me on my toes. One day I'll set one up that alternates between systemd and openrc each boot, as soon as I figure out how to tame the dep conflicts