Been gone for a couple years and curious how Gentoo is doing

[PM17E5]

I ran nothing but Gentoo on every computer I had for years but then got wrapped up with work and got really lazy thanks to Lenovo's built in Verizon 4G access through Windows and not feeling like setting up Gentoo. It turned into a really bad habit. But now I'm trying to catch up on some unmaintained machines and it got me curious on what the future of Gentoo is and how well it's doing as far as support/popularity goes?

It kind of makes me worried to see the number of logged in users on the forum so small when I remember it always being quite a few lines. I know distrowatch is a poor way to rank anything but I just wanted to see what the big picture as far as the trend of Gentoo is going. Will this mean that documentation and package support will become more scarce as time goes on? Is it a general trend with Linux or just a change in general with computers? Personally I'm even bummed to see a lot of regular folks not even care to own a computer any more and rely on their tablets for everything.

I know this topic is probably like beating a dead horse but I'd love to hear what everyone else has to say.

I still can't bare the thought of ever trying Ubuntu or other distributions for the bloat and nonsense when Gentoo just feels so right.

[BlueFusion]

In my views, packages are still maintained well, with the exception of a few oddballs. I run stable amd64 on servers, desktops, and laptops and rarely do I get any issues. All of which can usually be resolved with some Portage mask/use sorcery.

Update your systems and don't worry about it.

I happened to plug the hard drives loaded with Gentoo I had in my old desktop into the motherboard last week. It was running Windows XP for the past year and a half because my roommates "needed" Netflix and Linux support was bad. Now it's a non-issue with Chrome on Linux. It took a while to update, but even after a year and a half offline, the update was a piece of cake.

[PM17E5]

Glad to hear it . I'm updating a few servers I haven't even touched in a couple years and actually surprised at how the process is going so far. I just hope at the very least Gentoo stays like this but doesn't get any smaller. Back when I was running a minimalist Openbox setup and enjoying all the features of Gentoo on a daily basis I never thought I'd be making a thread like this and feeling nostalgic about the whole deal years later.

But I'm excited to get back into it at the same time. The biggest thing that holds me back is I need to figure out if the Sierra Wireless 4G access is possible on Linux. But in worst case scenario I can tether off my phone. I also partially blame Epiphan's VGA2USB Linux support which is a complete joke. Funny how two pieces of hardware made me develop such a bad habit when I used to be such a devoted Linux user and despised everything about Windows.

[davidm]

I just returned as a Desktop Gentoo user in December. I'm using Open RC with KDE amd64 stable. So far it has mostly been smooth sailing with minor use flag corrections. Zero compile errors or breakage. I even have a fairly complex setup with 5 disks using a four disk btrfs array and it works well. I don't remember it being this easy before so either Gentoo is better than before, I'm a bit smarter than before, or I just got lucky. Perhaps a combination of these three.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Portage is noticeably better than it was several years ago (resolution of blockers, @preserved-rebuild, etc.).
_________________
Clevo W230SS: amd64, VIDEO_CARDS="intel modesetting nvidia".
Compal NBLB2: ~amd64, xf86-video-ati. Dual boot Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
OpenRC udev elogind & KDE on both.
Fitzcarraldo's blog

[Roman_Gruber]

Less show stoppers for a personal desctop machine.
At least the box is always useable and bootable in the past I had many X related issues.
I assuem it is ATI fault because I use now nvidia and ~amd64 all the time.

the only annoying thing is becaues everyone has more than 4gb of RAM the software tends to have / to be memory hungry which is nuts.

google chrome fills up memory quite fast.

So when I want to rant about something is the memory hungry applications and about the systemd / udev nonsense but else everything better as it used to be. well my box is 6 years old and therefore when it breaks the memory issues will be solved ... anything has 16gb ram these days.

I gave up automounting / plug and play USB drives as these worked and did not work randomly. There were lots of software out there which claims to work and do not work. Basically to enter mount in a shell takes as long as to use a fancy software which than ma ywork or not work and than you have to look up for the mount point. they changed mounting from /mnt/usb_drive to /media and than to something else fancy. kinda annoying which is easily preventalbe to mount it yourself.
especially with those nfts drives in teh past the open source part was used which was than read only. sigh.
sometimes using a shell to mount something is kinda straigtforward and hasslefree as to rely as redmond like to some fancy mounting app.

sound also works better. OSS was a pain, than pulseaudio / skype issues ... these days I have hardly any sound related issues.

MAybe because I stick to long term supported kernel org 3.10 kernel branch. The fancy use the newest kernel thing is kinda nuts, hardly any benefit.

it seems ext4 is stable now, i had minor issues in the past with ext4. ext3 had some design flaws and i had to repair it a few times, never happened with ext4 though. but maybe it is because it is lvm + luks + ext4 which has several layers and therefore several bits to get the data in a right way.

i also ignore the fact that ssds omg never use for / and never use swap on it. my drive is ~3 years for a ssd on sata1 and whatever still running. though smart annoys me it will break. I asked plextor bc it has 5 years warranty and they told me it is fine. therefore I gladly ignore it now