Post B6CCAkDbb9mGnAj2SO by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
(DIR) More posts by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
(DIR) Post #B6BcyJm8aeyIuTDUuG by mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
1 likes, 4 repeats
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?
(DIR) Post #B6Bw2lj8VVHJt5eHU8 by mycelialinn@mastodon.social
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mgornyI love Gentoo's approach to licenses. It allows people to choose which licenses they are or are not okay with accepting, even on a per-package basis, and defaults to free software, which is a great way to get people to find out the licenses of proprietary software before installing it.
(DIR) Post #B6BwREAsOMFT48HqCG by demize@unstable.systems
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mgorny honestly, whenever gentoo comes up for me, I end up praising the stabilityI run ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" in my make.conf, so I get pretty frequent updates. I run an LLVM profile with mold as my system linker and LTO enabled for everything. even with all that, I have a more stable experience with gentoo than I’ve had with basically any other desktop linux. sure, sometimes I find myself opening a cursed issue on b.g.o, but my system hasn’t ever broken!the work the gentoo devs put in to make sure everything is stable and everything works well across many different setups is incredible, and the stability that comes with portage sure doesn’t hurt either
(DIR) Post #B6C2urtAPgPoMPWJrE by flewkey@layer8.space
1 likes, 0 repeats
@mgorny Among other things, I like that Gentoo generally doesn't bend over backwards to package software with outdated dependencies or batshit insane build systems, that the infra is easy to navigate, and that it's easy to get involved indirectly via GURU & overlays or directly via proxy maintenance and whatnot (compared to some other distros where you kinda have to break into an in-group before you can do anything).
(DIR) Post #B6CBuBNhM2cq74Y66a by stuartl@longlandclan.id.au
0 likes, 0 repeats
@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.
(DIR) Post #B6CBuCVt94lrclO9Vg by ethorsoe@sauna.social
0 likes, 0 repeats
@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.
(DIR) Post #B6CBuCj0MJGMHRWcxE by mid_kid@fosstodon.org
1 likes, 0 repeats
@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..
(DIR) Post #B6CCAkDbb9mGnAj2SO by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mid_kid @ethorsoe @stuartl @mgorny Heh I think I'll now keep not capitalizing popos, looks much funnier that way.
(DIR) Post #B6CDTBYyln3wlc51do by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mgorny One that's very different about Gentoo compared to others I've used is having this shared ability to make choices about your own machines (of course some with their consequences), instead of being stuck with all the choices the packager(s) made in a way or another.And it's not just a sort of personal-freedom thing, as I feel like it allows to avoid so much drama about how a package should be made.
(DIR) Post #B6CDUS38xVXOBknDUG by mid_kid@fosstodon.org
1 likes, 0 repeats
@lanodan pipis
(DIR) Post #B6CDl6dfohxEhtoxhg by josh0@babka.social
1 likes, 0 repeats
@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.
(DIR) Post #B6CEIs2AckApFyNZy4 by mid_kid@fosstodon.org
1 likes, 0 repeats
@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.
(DIR) Post #B6CEIsRL7AJ4W29gCO by mid_kid@fosstodon.org
0 likes, 0 repeats
@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.