I remember when I first started using Gentoo (back in the Gentoo 1.4 days), the community activity was just amazing. Each and every day or week, there was always something new and exciting going on in the Gentoo community. I looked forward to the GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) coming out each week, so I could try to catch up on what I might have missed or not even realized was happening. Sure, the other Linux users would say, “Gentoo, that’s for ricers.”, but at least Gentoo was still regularly mentioned in a fairly positive manner.
Fast forward to today. What happened to my beloved Gentoo? I’m not necessarily referring to the distro… not yet anyway. What happened to the Gentoo community and the thriving young developer community?
The exciting buzzing Gentoo community seems to have fizzled out. Surely, they haven’t all switched to Ubuntu have they? The number of posts in the Gentoo forums seems to have steadily decreased lately. The #gentoo irc channel doesn’t have half the users it used to. Gentoo Planet used to contain dozens of posts every day from different all of the different developers. Now, sometimes a day goes by without even one post. Worst of all, the front page of Gentoo shows a two month old GWN as being the latest news.
Surely my beloved Gentoo isn’t destined to die a slow painful death, is it?
12 Responses to "Good ole Gentoo. Where art thou?"
1 |
wm
December 17th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Gentoo probably is compiling itself in the background.
Sad indeed.
2 |
John Alberts
December 17th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
LOL. You know, you’re probably right.
3 |
Dale Pontius
December 17th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I’m still running Gentoo - on all but 1 of the 9 boxes I manage. (My daughter’s machine at college runs Ubuntu - no expert needed.) I see the effects you say - even though the software continues to run, and continues to be updated, the politics seems to have driven people away. I’m hoping that those days seem to be over, though Uberlord (Ray Marples) left just a month or two back.
What else offers what Gentoo offers? For all the “waiting to compile” jokes, the other Linux distros haven’t “just worked” as well, especially installing new stuff and seeking dependencies. (Plus Ubuntu seems to load a whole pile of crap in the name of a “one size fits all” kernel, and unused modules don’t seem to have the decency to unload themselves.)
4 |
viper1
December 18th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Always gotta be an us vs. them snipe. It can’t stay on track…oh no…..as an ubuntu user since its first release, I’ve followed along with gentoo as well……..and I personally find it sad when a community starts to lose its way, as gentoo seems to be doing.
See? No snipe necessary. :/
5 |
Jon Snow
December 18th, 2007 at 2:24 am
I’m a less sophisticated user of gentoo. I can compile a non-bloated kernel for my machines and keep them current and consistent without too much fuss. But it took about 2 years to get to that level, and I have a Ph.D. in a technical field. Gentoo is not a distro for the masses and never will be. Nor should it try to be.
It *is* fun to run an OS of 1, customized and compiled just for me. It feels like I built it with my own hands. That beats one-size-fits-all vista or ubuntu any day.
It’s sad about the decline of the community — I’m afraid if it doesn’t bounce back soon it will be curtains. But still I log onto the forums and explain to newcomers what revdep-rebuild is for. Interestingly, most people on the gentoo forums these days are pretty knowledgeable. Not nearly so many people asking simple gentoo-specific questions as there used to be, I guess that’s a lack of new users.
Sad sad sad.
6 |
Alex Bogak
December 18th, 2007 at 2:56 am
I feel the same
Even as user rep, I don’t even know or like what happens with Gentoo. All the communications seem dead, and all the bitterness got into everyone.
Maybe Gentoo needs some saint person a-la Mark Shuttleworth?
7 |
John Alberts
December 18th, 2007 at 11:51 am
@viper1
I don’t think Dale’s comment was any kind of snipe or rip on the quality of Ubuntu. It’s just a basic fact. If you want to have a distro work for the majority of users who install it, it’s going to need a fairly generic kernel. Services that may or may not be needed will need to be started, just in case they are needed. That’s exactly what makes Gentoo different from Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, or most of the others. Instead of having a quick and painless install, you spend days, weeks, or months installing and tweaking your Gentoo system. In the end, you *should* have a system that runs noticeably faster than your average quick install Linux distro. I say ’should’, because that really depends on the knowledge and determination of the person installing it.
Just for a point of comparison, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop 2 days ago to give it a spin. I had Vista and Gentoo on it. Gentoo worked for the most part and it was fast, but I needed to spend more time getting my wireless, webcam, and printer working. Vista just keeps crashing.
Anyway, I’ve been using Ubuntu since I installed it and it’s working great. It also seems very fast, even to boot, and everything works except my webcam. I haven’t even tried to get it to work yet. It isn’t as fast as my Gentoo install was though and there are LOTS of unused modules. lsmod shows 86 modules loaded, 36 of which are not being used.
@Jon Snow
I completely agree. I don’t expect Gentoo to ever become the most popular distro, because it is really an administrator’s distro. I’m just starting to get worried that things are falling apart and Gentoo may disappear.
@Alex Bogak
It’s very sad that the user reps are now gone. The whole user rep thing seemed very mismanaged from the beginning. It could have turned out to be a very good thing for Gentoo if the user rep role was more clearly defined and they were given the tools they needed to succeed.
8 | Finding Gentoo | Mindless Techie
December 18th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
[...] is more or less a follow-up to my previous blog post Good ole Gentoo. Where art thou? Anyone can just complain about the status of things, so I thought I would provide a little [...]
9 |
eris23
December 18th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
In much the same say that Debian has lost column-inches to Ubuntu, Gentoo has lost out to, for instance, SabayonLinux. SabayonLinux “just worked” on my MSI laptop far better than anything else. I’ve learned a lot about Gentoo/portage/ebuilds/etc since.
10 |
Chekdalaypa Chimchumoushkin
December 24th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
As a Gentoo user, what can I do to help things get somewhat back to the way they were?
I enjoy using Gentoo and was hoping it would be supported and around for the next 50 years or so. Unless my power supply dies of course, LOL.
Later
Chek.
11 |
Codifex Maximus
January 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Well, as far as Gentoo goes, the main problem is getting it installed. The 2007.1 installer went a long ways to make it easier but it needs to be easier still.
Forgive me if I seem a little rusty regarding Gentoo installs… it’s been a long time since I had to do one…
There should be a canned system for new users that doesn’t require much if ANY configuration at all. Hold their hands. Install the networking, portage, X and their choice of WM, and finally a very nifty package chooser app that frontends for emerge. (Some user analysis is necessary here.)
There should be a bare minimum install that is done with one click. Partition, Filesystems, GRUB, networking and portage. Drop user to a bare command line. Nothing else.
Also, wireless networking in Gentoo is not too easy. This needs addressing.
After all that, I love Gentoo and wouldn’t run anything else. Booyah!~
Codifex Maximus
12 |
John Alberts
January 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
@Chekdalaypa Chimchumoushkin
Well, 50 years is a long time. I would be surprised if we even recognize a computer 50 years from now, much less the operating system on it. The best way to help, of course, is to get involved. There’s lots of ways to get involved, whether it be, answering questions in the forums, helping out with the wiki, writing documentation, or (if you have the skills) become a dev. It looks like the GWN is becoming a GMN, so they will need some articles, send them some articles.
@Codifex Maximus
Are you sure you’ve actually used Gentoo? Gentoo isn’t really geared towards the type of user that wants a 5 minute canned install and tons of gui’s for everything. At the core, Gentoo is really for the person that wants to spend time making their system exactly how they want it. It sounds like Sabayon might be suitable for your needs. I’ve tried it, and it’s ok. It’s based on Gentoo, nice Anaconda installer, includes lots of programs, wireless and printing works out of th e box, and they even install a gui frontend for portage.
I do like your idea of a bare minimum install with one click, although I would hope it would actually take more than one click so I know what it’s going to do.
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