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 threadJosh May 11

@mgorny @diazona my favorite thing about Gentoo is that it lets me decide how things should work, and try new things. It’s like LEGO compared to a model kit.

Do I particularly care which NTP daemon my system uses? No, but I do care that I could change it if I some day decided I wanted to.

I do care that it’s not some weird or obscure choice to install a headless system with no graphics packages at all, or to build my graphical stack exactly the way I want it, and the difference is just simple configuration files that I control and can change at any time, not an entirely different install process.

And I do, of course, love that I can turn up the optimizations to wring every last processor cycle out of my hardware. In the (distant) past, using Gentoo and being able to compile my own custom kernel and graphics stack was the difference between being able to run 1080p video smoothly on ancient hardware when Ubuntu could barely play a video file at all, saving me hundreds of dollars on hardware.

Show threadSerge from BabkaMay 11

@josh0

Why Gentoo vs Nix?

Show threadJosh 
@serge mostly because I’ve been using Gentoo since c. 2001, and Nix went through an entire cycle of everyone’s using it oh now we all hate it and shouldn’t use it before it even really got on my radar.
May 11 at 1:50pmWeb
Show threadEli SchwartzMay 11
@josh0 @serge nix is only incidentally configurable because it treats the build recipe as a hashed input to the installation directory prefix of a package "for reproducibility", and therefore all changes of any sort whatsoever, also including the changes you care about, trigger recompilation of the entire software stack.
Show threadSerge from BabkaMay 11

@eschwartz

That's no different than Gentoo.

@josh0

Show threadEli SchwartzMay 11
@serge @josh0 Certainly not. Gentoo requires explicit USE flags to signify configuration points, and you only depend on exactly what you need. This is fundamental to the design, because the design is built around configurability, which is exactly the opposite of being built around something entirely unrelated that only incidentally has anything to do with configurability.
Show threadEli SchwartzMay 11
@josh0 @serge For this purported benefit, you get in exchange a dreadful packaging language and an entire operating system cobbled together out of bash scripts that set environment variables before invoking the real program, because nix fights the software to a sufficient degree that none of the integration points work anymore and one has to reimplement a C library loader in bash. And I'm not even exaggerating all that much.
Show threadSerge from BabkaMay 11

@eschwartz

Feel free to use Guix instead. Then you get Scheme.

@josh0

Show threadNudelstaplerMay 11

@serge @eschwartz @josh0

Both guix and nix are horrible in handling in the same way in different symptoms.
Gentoo is just as horrible in the same way but different.

Huge parts of the why are inherited by the Desktop Distro Software Stack being a badly integrated rube goldberg horror machine.

Show threadEli SchwartzMay 12

@lasagne I am not certain what point you're trying to make. I guess the implication is that there is no such thing as a good operating system (or perhaps there's no such thing as good software)?

Seriously, you parachute into a conversation about specific flaws in nixos by saying "well ackshually Gentoo is bad too because Gentoo is based on Linux and linux is an example of an operating system and operating systems aren't integrated well because muh desktop platform"???

Show threadNudelstaplerMay 12

@eschwartz

I was sleepy af bc. of meds I didn't expect to do that and lost parts of the context mid writing.
Can see how that comes across.
Sorry.

Show threadEli SchwartzMay 12
@lasagne alright, understandable I guess. :) Still curious what you meant though. ;)
Show threadEli SchwartzMay 11

@josh0 @serge Anyways, point is there's lots of good reasons to not like nix very much, and popularity need not enter into it.

Certainly the reasons for liking nix are very different from the reasons for liking Gentoo.