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 threadAnton

@mgorny

1. To me, Gentoo is a litmus test for software being actually free. Some (usually large, usually corporate-maintained) programs come with a free license, but have no practical way to be locally compiled, let alone modified by the end-user. Things packaged for Gentoo, by its nature, are actually, in fact, compilable locally, with a minimum level of adaptability to a particular setup. The exception are *-bin packages, which are clearly marked and are kept to a minimum.

2. Gentoo provides a shallow learning curve from very little (being able to follow instructions in the Handbook) to the very depths of computing. From installing the system, to making your first ebuild, to droping a minor fix into /etc/portage/patches to contributing an ebuild into one of the semi-official overlays (you are getting feedback now!) to submitting bugs upstream -- every step is small, and every step is a learning opportunity. And at every step there is a community willing to help.

May 11 at 12:09pmWeb
Show threadsamMay 11
@anton @mgorny I love your articulation of point 1! It's something I say to people that it's the ultimate expression & practice of free software, being able to actually customise at-will.