[HN Gopher] Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
___________________________________________________________________
Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
Author : akhuettel
Score : 275 points
Date : 2026-01-11 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gentoo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gentoo.org)
| danielscrubs wrote:
| Really hope I can return to Gentoo soon. It was just the most
| stable and most hacker friendly distro Ive ever used. Hats off to
| all the contributors!
| gylterud wrote:
| I used Gentoo for ten years (2005-2015), and I was very happy
| with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating
| frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was
| so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing
| everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I
| have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering
| time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have the same setup
| on every machine I use.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Hah, same! NixOS is perfect for me; I love the declarative
| aspect. But Portage is far-and-away the best traditional
| package manager I've ever used. It's truly phenomenal.
| zppln wrote:
| I've been on Gentoo for my gaming desktop for like 2-3 years
| now and I don't think I've ever had an update break anything.
|
| I will say though that my valgrind is broken due to march
| native. :)
| speed_spread wrote:
| What Gentoo really needs is an official immutability
| mechanism like ostree used by Fedora Silverblue or ZFS/btrfs
| snapshots of the root/boot volumes. This way the ever-
| experimental nature of the distro would be compensated by
| having an easy mechanism to rollback to previous known-good
| builds.
| arendtio wrote:
| I think Gentoo is very stable, but you have to make use of
| revdep-rebuild and know what you are doing (meaning: it is
| easy to shoot yourself in the foot).
| Y_Y wrote:
| > 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 donating their very
| valuable labour to the project, but the ROI from Gentoo is
| incredible compared to what it costs to do anything in commercial
| software.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| GrowingSideways wrote:
| 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.
| positron26 wrote:
| It's difficult to infer what kind of nuts is going on here.
| GrowingSideways wrote:
| If we're going to socialize production, let's do it
| properly.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > 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)
| anthk wrote:
| Pipewire rocks. Wayland it's half baked and a disaster on
| legacy systems. SystemD... openrc it's good enough, and
| it never fails at shutdown.
| mogwire wrote:
| Pushing their decisions? This is comical.
|
| I guess Debian, SUSE, Canonical, etc get that email from
| Red Hat just go along with it. We better make the switch,
| we don't want our ::checks notes:: competitor made at us.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| systemd and friends go around absorbing other projects by
| (poorly) implementing a replacement and then convincing
| the official project to give up.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Eh, pulseaudio got a lot better, and pipewire "just
| works" at this point (at least for me). Even Bluetooth
| audio works OOTB most of the time.
| tosti wrote:
| Yes, that would be nice but when I look at their Grub src.rpm
| for instance, some of those patches would look original but
| came from Debian.
|
| Back in the day when the boxes were on display in brick-and-
| mortar stores, SuSE was a great way to get up and running
| with Linux.
| stakhanov wrote:
| SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other
| distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy
| as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs
| snapshots were pretty cool.
|
| It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise
| support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious
| contender.
|
| The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e.
| they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling
| release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself,
| point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are
| available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap
| Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a
| broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal
| environments with an impressively small footprint without
| making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all
| of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy
| ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job
| supporting it all.
|
| As far as graphical tools for system administration go,
| YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently
| investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year
| history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their
| new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with
| the direction they're taking.
|
| ...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your
| "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to
| a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it
| was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've
| lost mindshare because other options became numerous and
| turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety
| doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still
| beloved by those who care to pay attention.
| tosapple wrote:
| SuSE slowroll is news to me, thanks.
| ghaff wrote:
| SUSE has a lot of ex-Red Hatters at high levels these
| days. Their CEO ran Asia-Pacific for a long time and
| North America commercial sales for a shorter period.
|
| SUSE has always been pretty big in Europe but never was
| that prominent in North America except for IBM
| mainframes, which Red Hat chipped away at over time. (For
| a period, SUSE supported some mainframe features that Red
| Hat didn't--probably in part because some Red Hat
| engineering leadership was at least privately dismissive
| of the whole idea of running Linux on mainframes.)
| sohrob wrote:
| I've found openSUSE MicroOS to be a great homelab server
| OS.
| kombine wrote:
| The OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation on my desktop PC is
| nearing 2 years now and still rolling. It is a great and
| somewhat underrated distribution.
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services
| but enraging in how much it has taken over every other
| thing in an IMO subpar way.
| shevy-java wrote:
| It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the
| whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now
| basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point
| this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind
| of take more and more control over the ecosystem and
| singularize it for their own control. This is also why I
| see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to
| leverage away even more control; the situation is not the
| same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance
| work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is
| primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold,
| GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg,
| just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the
| ecosystem too.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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?
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| TingPing wrote:
| It's very fair you can say "X works for me" but everyone
| saying otherwise is in the wrong.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't get your point. People regularly complain that
| Wayland has lots of remaining issues and there are always
| tedious "you're wrong because it works perfectly for me!"
| replies, as if the fact that it works perfectly for
| _some_ people means that it works perfectly for everyone.
| drnick1 wrote:
| These days Wayland is MUCH smoother than X11 even with an
| Nvidia graphics cards. With X11, I occasionally had
| tearing issues or other weird behavior. Wayland fixed all
| of that on my gaming PC.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| It's even more pleasant when you use a distro that
| natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on
| top. One such example is NixOS.
| allreduce wrote:
| NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as
| a NixOS user).
|
| Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part
| because of systemd and all the other crap you have to
| wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux
| desktop. Better to have a fat programming language,
| runtime and collection of packages which exposes one
| declarative interface.
|
| Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-
| bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design,
| which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be
| really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing
| the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar
| with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet
| below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix.
| systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = {
| serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot"; path = [
| pkgs.rclone ]; script = '' rclone \
| --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \
| --bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \ sync
| /mnt/photos/originals/ photos: '';
| unitConfig = { RequiresMountsFor =
| "/mnt/photos"; }; };
| systemd.timers.rclone-photos-sync = {
| timerConfig = { # Every 2 hours.
| OnCalendar = "00/2:00:00"; # 5 minute jitter.
| RandomizedDelaySec = "5m"; # Last run is
| persisted across reboots. Persistent = true;
| Unit = "rclone-photos-sync.service"; };
| partOf = [ "rclone-photos-sync.service" ];
| wantedBy = [ "timers.target" ]; };
|
| In my view, using Nix to define your systemd services
| beats copying and symlinking files all over the place :)
| mogwire wrote:
| You don't know they are a positive force?
|
| This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise
| Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent
| by Red Hat.
|
| And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you
| claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money,
| especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your
| name on other people's hard work.
|
| And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it
| that they're doing to the Linux desktop that make it so
| that people can't fix their own problems? Isn't the whole
| selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that
| it's so easy you don't need red hat to support it?
| shrubble wrote:
| Just a note: Rocky and Alma came out of CentOS
| hug wrote:
| Of course -- but CentOS' upstream was RHEL, no?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Can you name a company which does care about the linux
| desktop? Over the years i'm pretty sure redhat
| contributed a great deal to various desktop projects,
| can't think of anyone who contributed more.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well Red Hat did make a go at a supported enterprise
| desktop distro for a time and, as I wrote, Fedora--which
| Red Hat supports in a variety of ways for various
| purposes--is pretty much my default Linux distro.
|
| So I'm not being critical. Yes, Red Hat employees do
| contribute to projects that are most relevant to the
| desktop even if doing so is not generally really the
| focus of their day jobs. And, no, other companies almost
| certainly haven't done more.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > Can you name a company which does care about the linux
| desktop?
|
| To some extent Valve. They have to, since the Steam
| Deck's desktop experience depends on the "Linux desktop"
| being a good experience.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Off the top of my head System76 jumps to mind with their
| hardware and Pop!_OS.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Fedora is probably the best out-of-the-box desktop
| experience. Red Hat does great things, even if the IBM
| acquisition has screwed things up.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we
| look at the meagre numbers here.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Presumably, contribute to the entire ecosystem in terms of
| package maintenance and other non-monetary forms.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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).
| Y_Y wrote:
| https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contrib
| uto...
|
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| Intel has long been a big contributor--mostly driver
| stuff as I understand it. (Intel does a lot more software
| work than most people realize.) Samsung was pretty high
| on the list at one point as well. My grad school roommate
| (now mostly retired though he keeps his hand in) was in
| the top 10 individual list at one point--mostly for
| networking-related stuff.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Red Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages,
| drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1].
|
| One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is
| maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind
| the "democratization" of virtualization in general,
| allowing users and small companies to access performant
| virt without selling a kidney to VMware.
|
| Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the
| components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack (one of
| which is virtio!).
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
| jm4 wrote:
| Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A
| distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly
| contributes to another distro if it's not a derivative or
| something?
|
| Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and
| various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise
| contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets
| done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the
| code for free. It's a beautiful model.
|
| If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along
| with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at
| the top.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Red Hat employs a significant number of GCC core devs.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing
| for the overall Linux community. They give back far more
| than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of
| their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and
| open source version.
|
| For example: - Red Hat Identity Management
| -> FreeIPA (i.e. Active Directory for Linux) - Red
| Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello - Ansible ...
| Ansible. - Red Hat OpenShift -> OKD - And more
| I'm not going to list.
| cardanome wrote:
| Red Hat pushing for the disaster that is Wayland has set the
| Linux Desktop back decades.
|
| It is the Microsoft of the Linux world.
| reppap wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is just completely disconnected from
| reality. Wayland is being successfully used every single
| day. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean
| it's inherently bad.
| NERD_ALERT wrote:
| Why is Wayland a disaster? Most of the Linux community is
| strongly in favor of it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| This was exactly what I was going to comment on. Why are they
| not spending more money?? I don't even know what they should
| spend it on, but like.. it's Gentoo! I would have thought
| they'd pay the core devs something?
| distances wrote:
| What money? Doesn't sound like they have anything extra?
| f311a wrote:
| Yeah, especially when a CSS library makes $1M a year. I guess
| they have no incentive to improve funding.
| Philpax wrote:
| ...is Gentoo large and influential these days? As far as I'm
| aware, its current cultural status is that of a punchline, but
| I'm open to being corrected.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Also curious of Gentoo's influence in 2026.
| sekh60 wrote:
| ChromeOS is based in Gentoo.
| nextos wrote:
| Yes, Gentoo is like NixOS, sort of a meta-distribution.
|
| Being the base of ChromeOS makes it highly influential.
|
| ChromeOS market share is >5% in many countries, sometimes
| around double digits.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Gentoo's Portage build system is (or at least was?) part of
| Google's ChromeOS
|
| Gentoo also runs the backend infra of Sony's Playstation
| Cloud gaming service
|
| Anecdotal evidence claims it used to also run the NASDAq
| Thaxll wrote:
| Highly unlikely that PSN runs Gentoo. They're using AWS.
| malern wrote:
| I've no idea if Sony uses Gentoo or not, but you can
| definitely run Gentoo on AWS
| stabbles wrote:
| It would be interesting to have a more accurate estimate of the
| effective cost of maintaining Gentoo. Say 100 core developers
| spend 10h/week, and 380 external contributors 2h/week; that's
| well over 40 FTE, and at $150K per FTE that's $6 million a
| year.
| elcapitan wrote:
| OTOH, not having money also comes with upsides, like not having
| overpaid CEOs, managers, marketing people, or distracting side
| projects.
| TingPing wrote:
| That's a 20 million dollar problem, but plenty of projects
| would be better with a few hundred thousand to pay staff and
| infra.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Our society at its current state will not allow that,
| however, as it is seen as more important to do stock
| buybacks and increasing executive pay.
| kortilla wrote:
| The issue is that gentoo isn't very popular in the industry. If
| it catches on with a few well funded tech companies, then it's
| easy to get $10k or so from each one in sponsorships at
| conferences.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| ChromeOS uses Gentoo as a base. That doesn't seem to have
| helped get them any Google money.
| cramcgrab wrote:
| From the announcement it's a lot of unnecessary philosophical
| moves and less innovation moves. I like innovative Linux, but
| that's just my opinion.
| mehdi1964 wrote:
| Impressive recap! The work on RISC-V images, Gentoo for WSL, and
| EAPI 9 really shows how adaptable Gentoo is. I'm curious about
| the trend of fewer commits and bug reports--do you think it's
| just natural stabilization, or are contributors slowing down?
| Also, the move from GitHub to Codeberg is bold; how is the
| community reacting to that change so far? Would love to hear more
| about how new contributors are finding the transition and
| onboarding with these updates.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V
| support.
|
| While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their
| package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to
| catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture
| agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having
| achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that
| the meta-distribution model is the only scalable way to handle
| the explosion of hardware diversity we are seeing post 2025. If
| you are building an embedded platfrm or working on custom
| silicon, Gentoo is a top tier choice. You cross-compile the
| stage1 and portage handles the rest.
| cb321 wrote:
| While I was always a sourced-base/personalized distribution
| personality type, this is also a big part of why I moved to
| Gentoo in early 2004 (for amd64, not Risc-V / other embedded
| per your example). While Pentium-IV's very deep pipelines and
| compiler flag sensitivities (and the name itself for the
| fastest Penguin) drove the for-speed perception of the compile-
| just-for-my-system style, it really plays well to all
| customization/configuation hacker mindsets.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| That is a fantastic historical parallel. The early amd64 days
| were arguably Gentoo's killer app moment. While the binary
| distributions were wrestling with the logistical nightmare of
| splitting repositories and figuring out the /lib64 vs /lib
| standard, Gentoo users just changed their CHOST, bootstrapped
| and were running 64-bit native. You nailed the psychology of
| it, too. The speed marketing was always a bit of a red
| herring. The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my
| mail client" and have the package manager actually respect
| that is cool. It respects the user's intelligence rather than
| abstracting it away.
|
| Since you've been on the ride since '04, I'm curious to hear
| your thoughts. How do you feel the maintenance burden
| compares today versus the GCC 3.x era? With the modern
| binhost fallback and the improvements in portage, I feel like
| we now spend less time fighting rebuild loops than back then?
| But I wonder if long time users feel the same.
| plqbfbv wrote:
| > Since you've been on the ride since '04, I'm curious to
| hear your thoughts. How do you feel the maintenance burden
| compares today versus the GCC 3.x era? With the modern
| binhost fallback and the improvements in portage, I feel
| like we now spend less time fighting rebuild loops than
| back then? But I wonder if long time users feel the same.
|
| I'm another one on it since the same era :)
|
| In general stable has become _really_ stable, and unstable
| is still mostly usable without major hiccups. My
| maintenance burden is limited nowadays compared to 10y ago
| - pretty much running `emerge -uDN @world --quiet --keep-
| going` and fixing issues if any, maybe once a month I get
| package failures but I run a llvm+libcxx system and also
| package tests, so likely I get more issues than the average
| user on GCC.
|
| For me these days it's not about the speed anymore of
| course, but really the customization options and the
| ability to build pretty much anything I need locally. I
| also really like the fact that ebuilds are basically bash
| scripts, and if I need to further customize or reproduce
| something I can literally copy-paste commands from the
| package manager in my local folder.
|
| The project has successfully implemented a lot of by-
| default optimizations and best practices, and in general I
| feel the codebases for system packages have matured to the
| point where it's odd to run in internal compiler errors,
| weird dependency issues, whole-world rebuilds etc. From my
| point of view it also helped a lot that many compilers
| begun enforcing more modern and stricter C/C++ standards
| over time, and at the same time we got Github, CI
| workflows, better testing tools etc.
|
| I run `emerge -e1 @world` maybe once a year just to shake
| out stuff lurking in the shadows (like stuff compiled with
| clang 19 vs clang 21), but it's really normally not needed
| anymore. The configuration stays pretty much untouched
| unless I want to enable a new USE for a new package I'm
| installing.
| redeeman wrote:
| > so likely I get more issues than the average user on
| GCC.
|
| its been years since I had a build failure, and I even
| accept several on ~amd64. (with gcc)
| cb321 wrote:
| I am replying here as a kind of "better place to attach".
|
| Anyway, to answer grandparent, I basically never had
| rebuild loops in 19 years.. just emerge -uU world every
| day or sometimes every week. I have been running the same
| base system since..let's see: qlop
| -tvm|h1 2007-01-18T19:50:33 >>> x11-base/xorg-
| server-1.1.1-r4: 9m23s
|
| I have never once had to rebuild the whole system from
| scratch in those 19 years. (I've just rsync'd the rootfs
| from machine to machine as I upgraded HW and gradually
| rebuilt because as many others here have said, for me it
| wasn't about "perf of everything" or some kind of
| reproducible system - "more customization + perf of some
| things".) The upgrade from monolithic X11 to split X11
| was "fun", though. /s
|
| I do engage in all sorts of package.mask/per-package
| use/many global use. I have my own portage/local overlay
| for things where I disagree with upstream. I even have an
| automated system to "patch" my disagreements in. E.g, I
| control how fast I upgrade my LLVM junk so I do it on my
| own timeline. Mostly I use gcc. I control that, too. Any
| really slow individual build, basically.
|
| If over the decades, they ever did anything that made it
| look like crazy amounts of rebuilds would happen, I'd
| tend to wait a few days/week or so and then figure
| something out. If some new dependency brings in a
| mountain of crap, I usually figure out how to block that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail
| client" and have the package manager actually respect that
| is cool.
|
| I tried Gentoo around the time that OP started using it,
| and I also really liked that aspect of it. Most package
| managers really struggle with this, and when there is
| configuration, the default is usually "all features
| enabled". So, when you want to install, say, ffmpeg on
| Debian, it pulls in a tree of over 250 (!!) dependency
| packages. Even if you just wanted to use it once to convert
| a .mp4 container into .mkv.
| InfamousRece wrote:
| To be fair it was not that difficult to set create a pure
| 64 bit binary distro and there were a few of them. The real
| issue was to figure out how to do mixed 32/64 bit and this
| is where the fight about /lib directories originated. In a
| pure 64 bit distro the only way to run 32 bit binaries was
| to create a chroot with a full 32 bit installation. It took
| a while before better solutions were agreed to. This was an
| era of Flash and Acrobat Reader - all proprietary and all
| 32 bit only so people really cared about 32 bit.
| redeeman wrote:
| gcc 3.3 to 3.4 was a big thing, and could cause some issues
| if people didnt follow the upgrade procedures, and also
| many c++ codebases would need minor adjustments.. this has
| been much much less of a problem since.
|
| Additionally gentoo has become way more strict with use
| flag dependencies, and it also checks if binaries are
| depending on old libs, and doesnt remove them when updating
| a package, such that the "app depends on old libstdc++"
| doesnt happen anymore. It then automatically removes the
| old when nothing needs it anymore
|
| I have been running gentoo since before 04, continously,
| and things pretty much just work. I would be willing to put
| money that I spend less time "managing my OS" than most who
| run other systems such as osx, windows, debian etc. Sure,
| my cpu gets to compile a lot, but thats about it.
|
| And yes, the "--omg-optimize" was never really the selling
| point, but rather the useflags, where theres complete
| control. Pretty much nothing else comes close, and it is
| why gentoo is awesome
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| All distributions are source based and bootstrapped from
| source. They default to binary packages by default (while
| offering source packages) whereas Gentoo defaults to source
| packages (but still has binary packages). There's literally no
| advantage to Gentoo here. What you're saying doesn't even make
| logical sense.
|
| Other distros don't support Risc-V because nobody has taken the
| time to bother with it because the hardware base is almost
| nonexistent.
| chungy wrote:
| Fedora and Debian have been shipping RISC-V versions of stable
| releases for a while. I don't think anyone is really
| struggling.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I used Gentoo from 2006 for a decade or more and loved it. Later
| I got more into embedded systems and low compute hardware and
| flirted with other distros. Gentoo is still running on my server
| but desktop and notebook are now on more conventional distros.
| flipped wrote:
| How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with
| nix/arch or harder?
| jonfw wrote:
| In my experience (this was about 5 years ago mind you) it was
| no more complex than an arch installation, but with a smaller
| community and less documentation.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I have not directly used Gentoo in years. It was chosen so I
| could learn, maximize system performance, and have proper AMD64
| support before the other distros supported the new CPU specs.
| Gentoo also had the best documentation in those years.
|
| Id Software provided a Doom 3 Linux client when the game was
| first released. I found Doom 3 ran better on a custom built
| Gentoo Linux system compared to Windows XP.
|
| Are you look at Gentoo to maximize performance with compiling
| everything with custom build parameters and kernel
| configuration versus pre-built binaries and a generic kernel
| loaded with modules?
|
| Custom Gentoo just adds more time with having to wait to
| install software upgrades. It is like having all your Arch
| packages only being provided by AUR. There is also a chance the
| build will fail and the parameters might need to be changed.
| Majority of the time everything compiles without issue once the
| build parameters are figured out. It was rare when something
| did not.
| anthk wrote:
| Tecnically with just a kernel optimized for your CPU,
| realtime patches, NTSync and a custom MESA build (with -O2
| and -march set to your CPU) would give a good boost instead
| of trying to recompile verything.
| speed_spread wrote:
| 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.
| flipped wrote:
| I don't understand the time sink. Isn't spending time knowing
| intricate details about your system a good thing? You know
| better than most if you've gone that deep.
| M95D wrote:
| TLDR: Installation is a pain, initial configuration is a pain
| and there's always something more to tweak, update is a lesser
| pain, but still a pain. But it's fun, BDSM-style...
|
| Installation is done by booting a liveCD, manually partitioning
| your storage, unpacking a Gentoo STAGE3 archive, chrooting in
| it, doing basic configuration such as network, timezone,
| portage (package manager) base profile and servers, etc.,
| compiling and installing a kernel and then rebooting into the
| new system.
|
| Then you get to play with /etc/portage/make.conf which is the
| root configuration of the package manager. You get to set CPU
| instruction sets (CPU_FLAGS), gcc CFLAGS flags, MAKE flags,
| video card targets, acceptable package licenses, global USE
| flags (those are simplified ./configure arguments that usually
| apply to several packages), which Apache modules get built,
| which qemu targets get built, etc. These are all env vars that
| portage (the package manager) uses to build packages for your
| system.
|
| The more you use Gentoo, the more features of make.conf you
| discover. Never ending fun.
|
| Then, you start installing packages and updates (same
| procedure):
|
| 1) You start the update by reviewing USE flags for each
| added/updated package - several screens of dense text.
|
| For example, PHP has these USE flags:
| https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-lang/php - mouse hover
| to see what they do. You get to play with them in
| /etc/portage/package.use and there's no end to tweaking them.
|
| If you have any form of OCD, stay away from Gentoo or this will
| be your poison forever!
|
| 2) Then the compilation begins and that takes hours or days
| depending on what you install and uses a lot of CPU and either
| storage I/O or memory (if you have lots of memory, you can
| compile in a tmpfs a lot faster).
|
| I'm not sure it is OK to compile the updates on a live server,
| especially during busy hours, but Gentoo has alternatives,
| including binary packages (recently added, but must match your
| USE flags with theirs), building packages remotely on another
| system (distcc), even on a different arch (crossdev). You could
| run an ARM server and build packages for it on a x86
| workstation. I didn't use "steve", so I can't tell you what
| wonderful things that tool can do, yet.
|
| 3) Depending on architecture, some less used packages may fail
| to compile. You get to manually debug that and submit bug
| reports. You can also add patches to
| /etc/portage/patches/<package> that will automatically be
| applied when the package is built, and that includes the
| kernel.
|
| I recommend you to run emerge with --keep-going to have the
| package manager continue after an error with the remaining
| packages.
|
| 4) When each package is done compiling, it's installed
| automatically. There are no automatic reboots or anything. The
| files are replaced live, both executables and libraries.
| Running services continue to use old files from memory until
| you restart them or reboot manually - they will appear
| red/yellow in htop until you do.
|
| There were a few times, very very few, when I had crashes in
| new packages that were succesfuly built. It only happened on
| armv7, which is a practically abandoned platform everywhere. In
| those cases you can revert to the old ones and mask the bugged
| version to prevent it from being updated to next time.
|
| 5) Last step is to review the config changes. dispatch-conf
| will present a diff of all proposed changes to .ini and .cfg
| files for all updated packages. You get to review, accept,
| reject the changes or manually edit the files.
|
| That's all. Simple. :)
| flipped wrote:
| That's a very well painted picture for what to expect. I am
| gonna try it soon, since it's been on my task list for too
| long. Thanks :)
| vstrien wrote:
| Interesting name for the jobs erver: "steve"
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Thanks, steve!
| entropie wrote:
| 2025 I switched to nixos and will probably stay. I used gentoo
| for like 20 years. Its the distro of my heart.
|
| With some notebooks, some of which were getting on in years, it
| was simply too resource-intensive to update. Only GHC, for
| example, often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks.
| mirpa wrote:
| I tried to list available packages on NixOS and nix-env
| consumed more than 6 GB Ram. Everyone told me not to use nix-
| env; everyone except NixOS manual. Trying to understand NixOS
| environment is a deep rabbit hole.
| Zambyte wrote:
| The Nix documentation is what drove me away from it years ago
| when I tried. I ended up landing on GNU Guix, where I have
| been for about 5 years now. I found the OS documentation to
| be much nicer (info pages!) and the decades of Scheme
| documentation makes the language easier to pick up too.
| narag wrote:
| "Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage
| for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the
| migration of our repository mirrors and pull request
| contributions to Codeberg."
| rwmj wrote:
| Any more information on the Github move (away)? While the AI
| features of github are annoying, I've so far been able to
| completely ignore them.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I still send PR's for ::gentoo to their github mirror, I would
| be surprised if they shut this off.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| 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.
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| Neither Void or Arch are a "modern Gentoo". Gentoo is it's own
| thing. If anything, Gentoo's closest "competitors" in terms of
| OS customisation would be NixOS or Guix, not Void or Arch, but
| Gentoo is forging it's own path, it doesn't need to follow any
| other distro.
| bashkiddie wrote:
| I have heard rumors that at one point in time gentoo lost its
| forum - basically a catastrophic strike such as deleting Arch
| Linux wiki
| filmor wrote:
| Not its forum, there was an unofficial wiki that disappeared
| due to issues with the hoster in 2008. There is an official
| wiki nowadays.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the
| fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was
| running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I
| mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything
| (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install
| time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags
| correctly it produced heavily tailored and optimized binaries. I
| feel like a staged/graduated (downloading/running precompiled
| initially while a flag-optimized compile runs in the background)
| would be a good way to get around some of the downsides here
| (namely that it takes 45 minutes to install firefox with
| emerge/pacman and that builds fail more often than packages fail
| to install).
|
| Very cool to see that it's still going strong - I remember
| managing many machines at scale was a bit of a challenge,
| especially keeping ahead of vulnerabilities.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| 45 minutes hah, it used to take us three days to build kde ;)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I used Gentoo back in 2003. It's nice to see that it's still
| going strong. I don't have as much free time now it's not the
| distro for me, but perhaps when I retire I will come back to it.
| malwrar wrote:
| 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 hardware + rsync to update.
| Probably one of the coolest things I've ever built, at this point
| I'm effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it's
| all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the
| Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how
| little they operate on I'm definitely setting up a recurring
| donation.
| raphinou wrote:
| Did you document this somewhere? I'm interested to know more
| malwrar wrote:
| 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.
| url00 wrote:
| I would also be very interested in reading that blog post!
| scorpioxy wrote:
| I would encourage you to write about it as well. It seems
| interesting and unconventional.
|
| I used to tinker a lot with my systems but as I gotten
| older and my time became more limited, I've abandoned a lot
| of it and now favor "getting things done". Though I still
| tinker a lot with my systems and have my workflow and
| system setup, it is no longer at the level of re-compiling
| the kernel with my specific optimization sort of thing, if
| that makes sense. I am now paid to "tinker" with my
| clients' systems but I stay away from the unconventional
| there, if I can.
|
| I did reach a point where describing systems is useful at
| least as a way of documenting them. I keep on circling
| around nixos but haven't taken the plunge yet. It feels
| like containerfiles are an easier approach but they(at
| least docker does) sort of feel designed around describing
| application environments as opposed to full system
| environments. So your approach is intriguing.
| arendtio wrote:
| I think it is a great learning opportunity, but after using
| Gentoo for a decade or so, I prefer Arch these days. So if you
| want to learn more about Linux and its ecosystems, go for it,
| do it for a few months or years.
|
| That said, I haven't tried Gentoo with binaries from official
| repositories yet. Maybe that makes it less time-consuming to
| keep your system up to date.
| blaerk wrote:
| Been happily and very successfully using the official
| binpkgs, it works really well, sometimes there's a slight
| delay for the binary versions of the source packages to
| appear in the repositories, but that's about it. I guess it's
| kind of running Arch, but with portage <3! And the occasional
| compilation because your use flags didn't really match the
| binaries
| BeetleB wrote:
| Been running it for over 20 years:
|
| https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/
|
| Prior HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989311
|
| Edit: Curious, why the downvote?
| Crontab wrote:
| > why the downvote?
|
| I can see no reason for it.
| bicolao wrote:
| I'm more amazed you run the same machine for 20 years. Another
| 20+ years user, but I've reinstalled 5-6 times when I change
| laptops.
| BeetleB wrote:
| No, I changed the machine, but just installed Gentoo every
| time. I merely kept the emerge.logs from each machine.
| Crontab wrote:
| Odd this came up as I am considering revisiting Gentoo. I might
| have to take this as a sign.
| idorosen wrote:
| This is a remarkably small number given that Gentoo Portage is
| load bearing infrastructure under ChromeOS.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| just typical corporate open source bloodsucking
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| And the NASDAQ[0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/481872/how_linux_mastered_wa...
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Reading this while doing emerge @world on my personal
| workstation, and preparing a fresh annual portage cut for our IT
| infrastructure (some 600+ VMs, 400+ bare metal servers), running
| Gentoo.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| All the VMs run Gentoo? That's really interesting, what do they
| do?
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| I saw a comment in a "I moved from Windows to Linux" thread
| implying Windows has more configuration potential than Linux. I
| wonder what that commenter would make of Gentoo.
|
| I wish I had more time I could dedicate to maintaining my system,
| I'm marooned on Arch due to lack of time, such a shame.
| notme43 wrote:
| Been using Gentoo since 2004 on all my machines. They won me over
| after I started playing around with their Unreal Tournament demo
| ISO.
|
| The game changer for me was using my NAS as a build host for all
| my machines. It has enough memory and cores to compile on 32
| threads. But a full install from a stage3 on my ageing Thinkpad
| X13 or SBCs would fry the poor things and just isn't feasible to
| maintain.
|
| I have systemd-nspawn containers for the different
| microarchitectures and mount their /var/cache/binpkgs and
| /etc/portage dirs over NFS on the target machines. The Thinkpad
| can now do an empty tree emerge in like an hour and leaving out
| the bdeps cuts down on about 150 packages.
|
| Despite being focused on OpenRC, I have had the most pleasant
| experience with systemd on Gentoo over all the other distros I've
| tried.
| strangedude wrote:
| I'm so interested to learn more about this. Do you still run
| all your emerge commands on the thinkpad? What's the benefit of
| mounting /etc/portage over nfs?
|
| I have this dream of moving all my ubuntu servers to gentoo but
| I don't have a clear enough picture of how to centralize
| management of a fleet of gentoo machines
| notme43 wrote:
| Yes - still use emerge on the Thinkpad like I would on the
| host, like emerge -avuDN @world and such. This is the wiki
| article [1] I used to set up most the portage side of things,
| it covers NFS as well.
|
| I use NFS to mount the container's /etc/portage to
| /mnt/portage and symlink the files to the Thinkpad's
| /etc/portage so I can cherry pick what I want to keep in sync
| with the build container. Don't have to mess with repos.conf
| either because portage will look to /var/cache/binpkgs by
| default.
|
| make.conf is a directory on both machines and has files like
| 01-common-flags.conf and 02-binhost-flags.conf. The Thinkpad
| has 01-common-flags.conf and 03-target-flags.conf with
| EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--with-bdeps=n --usepkgonly" set, so
| running emerge -avuDN on the Thinkpad will only update with
| binaries from the mounted /var/cache/binpkgs. I keep the
| software in sync by using /etc/portage/sets instead of the
| world file. Then all the package.* dirs are symlinks as well.
|
| The Thinkpad binhost is a znver3, so the build container has
| CFLAGS="--march=x86-64-v3 --mtune=alderlake" set. There's
| some SIMD extensions that two don't have in common and it has
| to build code that runs on both machines, otherwise you could
| use the target architecture in --march. Using the --mtune
| option in my case apparently sets the L2 cache size of the
| produced code to that of the Intel chip.
|
| Systemd-nspawn containers are super easy to spin up, as you
| basically install Gentoo from stage3 and it works like a
| chroot but with a full init. I run updates irregularly,
| there's still some manual effort for maintenance, but it's
| mostly just kicking off emerge and letting it build in a tmux
| session.
|
| [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide
| yakk0 wrote:
| I haven't used it in years, but when I was first using Linux I
| used Gentoo for a long time. Building Gentoo from scratch really
| helped me learn a lot and probably more quickly than dual-booting
| a system like I had been. I'll always have a soft spot for
| Gentoo.
| binary132 wrote:
| It's so crazy to me that there are languages whose maintainers
| don't make it absolute #1 priority to always have a clean golden
| path for bootstrapping.
| ece wrote:
| Looking forward to using Gentoo in WSL more easily. I currently
| use Ubuntu for some scripting but would switch as I also use
| Gentoo on the desktop. Also good to see the Rust toolchain and
| BLAS packaging improvements.
|
| What has kept me on Gentoo since the first Opteron days (20+
| years ago) is that once you do an install, you also learn in part
| how to fix the things you installed, which can be helpful later
| on. I also do world rebuilds often which I think is just the
| equivalent of testing an OS backup for a source based OS. :)
| alekq wrote:
| Amazing project, great people behind it, but it is a time sink.
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