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.
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.
Gentoo is LFS but with the interdependence between packages mapped out for you (all hail the USE flags!) Or, alternatively, Arch with even more customization knobs to twiddle.
I have had Gentoo in at least one nearby system (physical and/or VM) since about 15 years ago. It's always a blast interacting with it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
...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.
Thanks for posting this! It's been a nice first year as a Gentoo developer. Everyone has been kind and helpful to me as I've been figuring things out.
I want to highlight something: Gentoo's developer onboarding system is EXCELLENT. Starting as an active member of the general community, you talk an existing developer into being your mentor and fill out an open book test ( https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/ebuild... ) which later is graded/corrected in a couple of meetings which I'd equate to the "job interview". I wish more open source projects (including my own) had such well-documented, straightforward processes to gain commit access. I appreciated the process of doing the quiz as it helped me close gaps in my knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] malwrar|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raphinou|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pepoluan|2 months ago|reply
I have had Gentoo in at least one nearby system (physical and/or VM) since about 15 years ago. It's always a blast interacting with it.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Fiveplus|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] irishcoffee|2 months ago|reply
I can speak for yocto being completely built from source and has a huge variety of BSPs, usually vendor-created.
[+] [-] ltbarcly3|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Y_Y|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] elcapitan|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] f311a|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] notepad0x90|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stabbles|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kortilla|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Philpax|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] snvzz|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jayofdoom|2 months ago|reply
I want to highlight something: Gentoo's developer onboarding system is EXCELLENT. Starting as an active member of the general community, you talk an existing developer into being your mentor and fill out an open book test ( https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/ebuild... ) which later is graded/corrected in a couple of meetings which I'd equate to the "job interview". I wish more open source projects (including my own) had such well-documented, straightforward processes to gain commit access. I appreciated the process of doing the quiz as it helped me close gaps in my knowledge.
[+] [-] entropie|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] idorosen|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] OsrsNeedsf2P|2 months ago|reply
[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/481872/how_linux_mastered_wa...
[+] [-] lifetimerubyist|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] danielscrubs|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gylterud|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] notme43|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] shevy-java|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] givemeethekeys|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] solaris2007|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bashkiddie|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BoredPositron|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tgtweak|2 months ago|reply
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|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] YarickR2|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vstrien|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ece|2 months ago|reply
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. :)
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mehdi1964|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|2 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] yakk0|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Crontab|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] techcode|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] flipped|2 months ago|reply