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?

Show threadmid_kidMay 11

@mgorny For me, it's the flexibility and extensibility. So many things I do on gentoo would require hard-forking another distribution, but here I just plop the modification into a file and can carry it with me across upgrades.

Besides that, I think paradoxically, gentoo is the simplest of the "advanced" distributions. Although not perfect, the majority of packages have very reasonable defaults, and the onboarding documentation is top of the line. Even if you customize nothing, it's worth it.

Show threadnjsg

@mid_kid @mgorny IMHO speed/performance isn't the correct take from the source-based nature of gentoo, flexibility is (although it *is* possible to get performance improvements out of target-specific compilation).

What in some other distributions might be a hard-coded choice that you must compile externally to change, in Gentoo might be just a USE flag, or even just a different package satisfying an alternative pseudo-package.

But yeah, support for user-provided patches makes some hacking and testing even easier.

May 11 at 11:29amWeb
Show threadmid_kidMay 11
@njsg @mgorny USE flags are merely the supported set of alterations ;)
What nobody had told me before digging deeper is how much further than that it went.