Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Gentoo’s Appeal, Stability & Learning Value

  • Many commenters describe Gentoo as their favorite or “distro of the heart,” especially from long-term use (15–20+ years).
  • Core appeal: Portage, USE flags, and ebuilds as bash scripts give fine‑grained control over features and dependencies; great for learning how Linux fits together.
  • Past (2000s) reputation: updates often broke, requiring manual intervention.
  • Current view from several long‑time users: “stable” really is stable now; even ~arch/unstable is mostly smooth when you know the tools (revdep‑rebuild, package.mask, per‑package USE, etc.).

Time, Maintenance & Performance Tradeoffs

  • Biggest downside: time sink. Compiling large stacks (GHC, KDE, etc.) can take hours to days on older hardware.
  • Some argue the time spent understanding system internals is a net positive; others switched to Arch/NixOS/Guix once free time shrank.
  • Performance gains from blanket “-O3 -march=native” are seen as secondary; real win is tailored feature sets (e.g., no unwanted LDAP in your mail client).

Servers, Scale & Binary Builds

  • Administration effort is said to be similar to Arch once installed; the pain is initial install and the temptation to keep tweaking.
  • Several users run Gentoo on fleets (hundreds of VMs/servers) or all personal machines, often via build hosts, binpkg caches, distcc, and systemd‑nspawn containers.
  • Official binary packages and binhosts now make laptops and weaker hardware more viable.

Architecture Agnosticism & RISC‑V

  • Thread highlights Gentoo’s strong RISC‑V support and argues a meta‑distribution model scales well to new ISAs and custom silicon.
  • Others counter that major binary distros (Debian, Fedora) already ship RISC‑V and that embedded work typically depends on Yocto/Buildroot, not Gentoo.

Funding, Corporate Use & “Free Riding”

  • Reported cash income is very small relative to Gentoo’s size; commenters estimate millions of dollars of unpaid labor.
  • Some see low funding as a mixed blessing: fewer managers/CEOs, but also no capacity to pay core devs.
  • There is frustration that heavy corporate users (e.g., ChromeOS, possibly finance/console backends) don’t visibly fund Gentoo; described by some as “bloodsucking.”

Role of Red Hat/SUSE & Desktop Stack Debates

  • Broad agreement that Red Hat and SUSE contribute heavily to kernel and ecosystem (GNOME, virtio, libvirt, OpenShift/OpenStack, etc.).
  • Simultaneously, strong criticism of Red Hat for:
    • Driving controversial components (systemd, pulseaudio, Wayland, PipeWire, “GNOME‑ification”).
    • Allegedly centralizing control over the Linux desktop and making it “incomprehensible” for some users.
  • Counter‑arguments:
    • Claims of “pushing decisions” are called conspiratorial; other distros adopt these technologies by choice.
    • Many users report Wayland and PipeWire now “just work” and outperform X11, though others insist Wayland remains unreliable and regressive on legacy setups.
  • systemd is seen as pleasant for service management but overreaching elsewhere; some praise how NixOS layers configuration on top of systemd.

Gentoo vs Arch, NixOS, Guix & Others

  • Arch is often chosen over Gentoo for being “good enough” with much less time investment; Gentoo remains attractive to those wanting maximal configurability.
  • Some see Arch/Void as successors to the Gentoo ethos; others insist Gentoo’s real peers are NixOS and Guix due to deeper system‑level customization.
  • NixOS/Guix are praised for declarative configs but criticized for steep learning curves and documentation issues (especially Nix).

GitHub → Codeberg & AI Concerns

  • Gentoo is planning migration of mirrors/PRs from GitHub to Codeberg, explicitly citing pressure to adopt Copilot.
  • Some users say GitHub’s AI features are currently easy to ignore; others welcome the principled move. Details of timelines and exact workflows remain unclear.

Community, Onboarding & Documentation

  • Developer onboarding process (mentorship + structured quiz + review meetings) is widely praised as clear, thorough, and rare among FOSS projects.
  • Gentoo’s documentation and wiki are still considered strong; an early unofficial wiki loss is mentioned as past turbulence, now resolved.