Gentoo Saw Total Commits Rise By 42% In 2020, Great Progress On Wayland

[dev_null]

IMHO gentoo is simple the best, especially if you are C or C++ developer, I use it already longer than for 10 years. You really can debug OS at which you work, always freshest soft, ability to build anything from sources, right in place without looking and installing dependencies and of course unlimited abilities to tune the system at any level including compilation flags. The only notice: to feel good at gentoo you need the fastest cpu and disk drive possible. Else compilation will take years to complete. 16 core ryzens + nvme solves the problem. Arch linux though has better documentation , I think I will make them some donation just for this.

[NateHubbard]

IMHO gentoo is simple the best, especially if you are C or C++ developer, I use it already longer than for 10 years. You really can debug OS at which you work, always freshest soft, ability to build anything from sources, right in place without looking and installing dependencies and of course unlimited abilities to tune the system at any level including compilation flags. The only notice: to feel good at gentoo you need the fastest cpu and disk drive possible. Else compilation will take years to complete. 16 core ryzens + nvme solves the problem. Arch linux though has better documentation , I think I will make them some donation just for this.

Yeah, I'm a long time Gentoo user also. However, I know it isn't for most people.
It requires more effort to configure and more effort to update and install new software than any other distro that I'm aware of.
It's perfect for me, but I suspect the majority of users would run away in terror from the use flags, or be much too impatient to wait for everything to compile.

[marios]

IMHO gentoo is simple the best, especially if you are C or C++ developer, I use it already longer than for 10 years. You really can debug OS at which you work, always freshest soft, ability to build anything from sources, right in place without looking and installing dependencies and of course unlimited abilities to tune the system at any level including compilation flags. The only notice: to feel good at gentoo you need the fastest cpu and disk drive possible. Else compilation will take years to complete. 16 core ryzens + nvme solves the problem. Arch linux though has better documentation , I think I will make them some donation just for this.

As a Gentoo user, the only flaws I can find for Gentoo are:
0. The recent decision to drop Libressl. It has some reasons, but I hate this decision.
1. Using python (=slow interpreted language) for packman manager (which already has a more computationally demanding job than package mangers like pacman).
2. Sometimes the testing packages (and the stable ones of course, but for those it is intentional) are out of date. Especially the ones maintained by the gnome team.

That being said, Gentoo is an excellent distro, and imo one of the 2 "useful" distros (the other being Arch).

[Yttrium]

What really turned me off from gentoo is the inability of choosing binaries for firefox, chrome or qemu for example. I'm sure there is a workaround like downloading another packet manager or chrooting a distro but it feels silly to have the best source compiling packet manager and not having any options for binary packages.

[pafnucy]

What really turned me off from gentoo is the inability of choosing binaries for firefox, chrome or qemu for example.

Gentoo has been providing binary packages for firefox for years. Chromium-bin was also there but got dropped for various reasons (see https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...0.html#8180950). There is also thunderbird-bin, libreoffice-bin, openjdk-jre-bin, rust-bin, scala-bin etc. Since not long ago there is even a binary kernel package available (http://www.gentoo.org/news/2020/09/1...on-kernel.html).

[scottishduck]

What really turned me off from gentoo is the inability of choosing binaries for firefox, chrome or qemu for example. I'm sure there is a workaround like downloading another packet manager or chrooting a distro but it feels silly to have the best source compiling packet manager and not having any options for binary packages.

Gentoo has provided binary options for quite a few packages for a long time. Typically ones that are extremely intensive and time consuming to compile (firefox and chrome are good examples).

[scottishduck]

Gentoo seems to have really turned a corner in the last year or two. They seemed to be really struggling with keeping packages up to date and stabilising in a timely manner. These days I can be pretty confident that 1) a package is the latest version and 2) should I ever go stable branch I'd still get fairly new versions. It's still my favourite distro because of the deep customisation.

[marios]

Gentoo seems to have really turned a corner in the last year or two. They seemed to be really struggling with keeping packages up to date and stabilising in a timely manner. These days I can be pretty confident that 1) a package is the latest version and 2) should I ever go stable branch I'd still get fairly new versions. It's still my favourite distro because of the deep customisation.

I am using it for only a few years, so I do not know what was going on before. Currently, most packages are up to date, but not all. There are even, some packages that still depend on python 3.8 for no apparent reason, although python 3.9 is out for about a year.

[Yttrium]

Gentoo has been providing binary packages for firefox for years. Chromium-bin was also there but got dropped for various reasons (see https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...0.html#8180950). There is also thunderbird-bin, libreoffice-bin, openjdk-jre-bin, rust-bin, scala-bin etc. Since not long ago there is even a binary kernel package available (http://www.gentoo.org/news/2020/09/1...on-kernel.html).

Ofcourse I dont use any software they provide bins for. firefox gives me problems in recent years and qemu doesn't have a bin package. Updating gentoo was always painfull. I never had to worry what to update until gentoo locked up all my cores for hours in order to gain 3% performance improvements that I never felt. Gentoo overall is great, not every codebase takes hours to compile. base kernel + utilities compiling from source was neat.

[mazumoto]

Nice to hear that gentoo (my distribution of choice for quite some years now) is alive and growing. I have had the impression that it's slowly dwindling (packages not as up to date, documentation stale) in the recent years, but those numbers are encouraging.
I'm not even that much into optimizing or customizing anymore (that got me started with gentoo when resources were scarce) - but having a stable rolling release distro and portage as the package manager keeping everything syched up is most important to me nowadays.
The only real downside for me is the java support which seems very neglected (still on java 8 by default).