Is Gentoo dying?

Message

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 4:21 pm

@Sprotte: Very fair points.

It sounds like you're in a very similar position to where I am with Gentoo. As soon as I start using my desktop again and get it in order, it'll definitely have an install of Gentoo on it (probably alongside Ubuntu) and I'll use it as is really, with maybe installing updates every couple of weeks as I need.

Maybe my whole point behind this is that when I came back from travelling I expected to see exciting developments on the Gentoo scene... and I didn't see that (at least not from what I've seen so far). That's not a bad thing if behind the scenes it's all going swimmingly.

I really do still stick to my point that the website needs a make over. Who's in charge of it anyway?

@baaann: That sounds brilliant about the package sets - I havn't read about it yet, but I'll certainly go and look. That's exactly what I was describing when I was saying that each "release" could be a set of packages in portage which were officially supported at that release stage. Sounds like it's been implemented - brilliant

.

Sprotte · Post by **Sprotte** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 5:06 pm

I also toyed with the idea of installing ubuntu... I installed FreeBSD at one point... but I keep thinking, after installing it, it's really the same thing

OK, no compiling... I also don't have the time to learn the ins and outs of another distro. I'm pretty effective with Gentoo, even if a few points piss me off sometimes. It was astonishing how many things pissed me off in FBSD, after using it for a week.

Instead of installing another distro, and learning how it works, I could just get work done... I understand the impulse to explore new things though. So don't let anybody stop you.

You should use whatever thing gets the job done; for me, that is a Gentoo system with some Windows apps on top of it (ones that either can't be replaced or are faster than their GNU counterparts.)

About the website, what do you want to see on it? I just looked at it for the first time in months, and there is a host of news that I probably should read at some point... *g* there are a couple news posts by dberkholz, that's about the same as having Bill post news on the M$ site... (yeah, I know it's not really accurate) - so it looks as if stuff is happening. The GWN has been turned into a MN, which is reasonable, and I see a couple of them on the front page.

If you think the design should change, fair point, I think there was/is a discussion about that somewhere on the forum. Some people seem to agree with you there. I do agree to a point, but it doesn't bug me enough to do something about it. I also got my hands full with other work. If it really bugged me, I would volunteer and lobby for it until I get what I want

Are you on the Gentoo mailing lists? Also, such questions (who does the website, etc) should be much more quickly answered on IRC. I think it is #gentoo on freenode. I remember over a hundred ppl being in the channel.

Perhaps most of us are just busy getting work done instead of tuning their LDFLAGS? If so, it seems like a healthy development.

nixnut · Post by **nixnut** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 6:31 pm

Dying? Hell no. Gentoo's been dead for years. We're having the afterlife party now. It's just heaven here.

Vininim · Post by **Vininim** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 7:11 pm

1. meta-distribution
2. different target audience
3. But no, it's already dead.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 9:52 pm

nixnut wrote:Dying? Hell no. Gentoo's been dead for years. We're having the afterlife party now. It's just heaven here.

Ah ha, loving that post.

I'm also loving that people who actually have been around Gentoo for a long time have started posting to my thread - and quite noticeable the difference in posts. (Not in the sense that they're agreeing with me, more that they're being friendly/funny).

Anyway, nice to hear people's comments.

simon_irl · Post by **simon_irl** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 12:24 am

mattjgalloway wrote:I'm also loving that people who actually have been around Gentoo for a long time have started posting to my thread - and quite noticeable the difference in posts. (Not in the sense that they're agreeing with me, more that they're being friendly/funny).

yeah, friendly is good...although based on the forum join dates, the first person who replied to you has been around the longest, and most of us have been around for a while, so i'm not sure there's any pattern there. anyway, nobody has flamed anyone else, which is pretty impressive after two pages on this topic.

Sprotte wrote:The ricers are mostly gone, and the hype has subsided. Again, that's not the same as dying.

true...and yet it could look like dying from the outside...especially if there were developers who left with the hype/ricer culture. that's maybe the best explanation i've heard for why people keep asking "is gentoo dying?": it's not dying, it's just less obnoxious.

maybe when people say they feel gentoo needs "direction" or a "makeover" and so on, it comes from a sense that gentoo has outgrown its old identity (that of the distro of choice for 1337 h4ck3r5) but hasn't asserted a new one. it's great if gentoo is slowly reinventing itself internally as a mature distro that can support "choice" and "fun" without thereby being saddled with a huge community of spotty script kiddies who think neo, trinity and morpheus use gentoo. some kind of external reflection of this (artwork and design changes, etc.) would probably make it clearer to the likes of distrowatch that gentoo is a new kind of beast; not dying, just settled down. on the other hand, i guess that for the gentoo veterans--the ones who've been with it since before the hype and the ricers--it's not a new kind of beast at all. it's still doing what it's done all along, and the rise and fall of the hype is just an irrelevant distraction from the development and maintenance of the distro itself.

one thing i'm curious about: where did the hype come from in the first place? did distrowatch etc. cream their pants at their first sight of gentoo, or did all the hype travel directly from fanboy to fanboy? i remember being rather excessive in my praise of gentoo when i first started using it, but i can't see how that kind of thing could lead to a massive influx of ricers. every distro has fanboys, and if anything the effect of someone going, "oh my god, my distro is so great" is just to encourage others to notice and point out all the distro's faults!

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 3:23 am

Since a noob like me feel that gentoo is dying, then it must definitely be dying.
So, I will let it die a peaceful death on my machine, and I will wait patiently till that happens.

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 3:53 am

Sprotte · Post by **Sprotte** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 4:05 am

Yes.

QFT.

I'd like more Larry on the website plz. if someone decides to do something about it.

yngwin · Post by **yngwin** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 12:55 pm

We are so dead! I mean, what would 900+ people be doing in the #gentoo channel on freenode? Having a wake, of course! And the 100+ developers in #gentoo-dev must be talking about the good old days before Gentoo died... And the thousands of ebuilds in the portage tree must feel so abandoned now that there haven't been commits for weeks! And just look at the forums here, no new problems, only regurgitating the old stuff from way back when Gentoo was alive. I mean, doesn't everybody run Ubuntu nowadays?

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 12:56 pm

I sense sarcasm!

loki_val · Post by **loki_val** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 1:19 pm

omp wrote:I sense sarcasm!

Not at all. This distro has passed on. It is no more, has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff, bereft of life, rests in peace. If you hadn't necromanced it, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now no more. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortail coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. This, my friends, is in fact an EX-DISTRO.

NathanZachary · Post by **NathanZachary** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:26 am

If one reads the articles on DistroWatch or many other sites, it is understandable that one might think Gentoo is dying a slow death. However, I've not seen any validated evidence of such a decline. As has already been brought up, the fora are incredibly active, there are new ebuilds daily, and if you are using the ~ repositories, you will see updates nearly every day for your packages. I have tried MANY distributions now, and have quite a few currently installed on my testbox. However, none feel quite like Gentoo to me.

@mattjgalloway,

You make some good points about the website and such. There are many internal and infrastructural changes in the works right now. As mentioned on the main page, the release cycle is going to undergo a nice revitalisation process in the near future. The website does sometimes get neglected, but the beautiful thing is that much of the documentation is updated anytime that some large aspect of a respective package changes. In my opinion, that is much more important than the news page.

In essence, I don't think that Gentoo is dying at all, but the FUD that has been spread around lately certainly justifies your question.

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 9:03 am

peteralf wrote:
omp wrote:I sense sarcasm!
Not at all. This distro has passed on. It is no more, has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff, bereft of life, rests in peace. If you hadn't necromanced it, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now no more. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortail coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. This, my friends, is in fact an EX-DISTRO.

Did you say exherbo? =P

isilia · Post by **isilia** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 9:48 am

simon_irl wrote:one thing i'm curious about: where did the hype come from in the first place? did distrowatch etc. cream their pants at their first sight of gentoo, or did all the hype travel directly from fanboy to fanboy?

wikipedia wrote:Compilation issues revealed problems with the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), used to build from source code. Daniel Robbins and the other contributors experimented with a fork of gcc known as egcs developed by cygnus that produced binaries with at least a 10% real world speedup over pgcc. At this point, Enoch gained a reputation for its speed, prompting the name change to Gentoo Linux (the Gentoo species is the fastest swimming penguin). The modifications eventually became part of the official gcc (version 2.95), and other Linux distributions experienced similar speed increases.[4]

This, I think. Or did the hype start later than that?

Juggernaut42 · Post by **Juggernaut42** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 10:55 am

Well I am 'n brand new Gentoo User (swtiched from Ubuntu) And I and loving it.
And I have mananged to turn another two Ubuntu users.

I don't think a dying distro will get new users.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 11:25 am

Indeed, Gentoo as I can see, isn't dying.

It's good to know that there's work going on behind the scenes on the release plan and the website - the two things which did worry me a little.

Anyway, good stuff, here's to a long life of Gentoo-ing!

BTW, loving the Monty Python reference! Made be laugh a lot!

huhn_m · Post by **huhn_m** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 11:29 am

Don't get me wrong, I love gentoo, and I think most of the developers are doing a marvelous job..

The Problem ist, and that is also what distrowatch critisizes that there are huge instabilities.

It is one thing to critisize the new kde4 packages. Sure they are not out, but I can accept the rebuild of the ebuild structure for kde4 as a very good excuse.

HOWEVER, I use gentoo on all of my computers and there is a reason, that some of them run a stable gentoo install.

So how come, that for over 2 WEEKS there are bugs in the STABLE tree, that do not get resolved? There is a reason that there is a stable and a testing tree and I do not like my stable systems not to compile when they are on stable (while I'm perfectly fine with this hapening in ~arch).

So why come that this: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237428

Bug is STILL not resolved? I mean, it is for the stable branch and this should please get a little more attention (especially bug reports concerning these packages should get a higher priority)!

srunni · Post by **srunni** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 7:33 pm

AllenJB wrote:
peteralf wrote:
omp wrote:I sense sarcasm!
Not at all. This distro has passed on. It is no more, has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff, bereft of life, rests in peace. If you hadn't necromanced it, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now no more. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortail coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. This, my friends, is in fact an EX-DISTRO.
Did you say exherbo? =P

Exherbo...ex-distro...they're the same, right?

monsm · Post by **monsm** » Tue Sep 30, 2008 4:52 pm

srunni wrote:
AllenJB wrote:
peteralf wrote:
omp wrote:I sense sarcasm!
Not at all. This distro has passed on. It is no more, has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff, bereft of life, rests in peace. If you hadn't necromanced it, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now no more. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortail coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. This, my friends, is in fact an EX-DISTRO.
Did you say exherbo? =P

Exherbo...ex-distro...they're the same, right?

Maybe we should rename Gentoo to "Norwegian Parrot Linux"

When I joined about a year ago there was a lot of discussion around the leadership. I am glad that seems to have been resolved. I guess from the outside, and in these tabloid times, a cancelled release will be seen as a bad thing. It took me some time to get used to the fact that releases have no meaning in Gentoo.
So here's an idea. How about creating a press release, and a regular prominent splash on the front page of the website that lists the latest versions of the big packages. On the website I am thinking of something on the lines of "Looking for the latest Gentoo release?". Clicking that will give you a nice screen with the latest kernel, latest KDE, Gnome, Openoffice, etc versions listed and maybe links to download mini CD and a link to the handbook.
No need to actually make a release in the conventional sense. E.g. send out this as a press release every quarter or half yearly. Could even give it a release number to satisfy the convention. Other then keeping that miniCD up to date, there would be no need for any actual release to be created, just read the latest version numbers from portage.

Mons

srunni · Post by **srunni** » Tue Sep 30, 2008 9:22 pm

Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems with Gentoo's structure from a PR standpoint is that it is difficult for users of non-FOSS OS's and most other FOSS distros to understand that a ``release'' is not significant for Gentoo.

The only thing we really need to do is provide frequently updated stages. Once again, I really think we should just point users to the SystemRescueCD download in the installation handbook and stop wasting time by unnecessarily duplicating work. It's not like Gentoo has a bunch of extra developers sitting around with nothing to do. A live CD distro's developers are going to be the best making a live CD - we should leave that task to them.

a.b. · Post by **a.b.** » Tue Sep 30, 2008 9:27 pm

monsm wrote: No need to actually make a release in the conventional sense. E.g. send out this as a press release every quarter or half yearly. Could even give it a release number to satisfy the convention. Other then keeping that miniCD up to date, there would be no need for any actual release to be created, just read the latest version numbers from portage.

That way we could create arbitary numbers of releases a year to get into the news:

Gentoo 2008.45 released!

srunni · Post by **srunni** » Tue Sep 30, 2008 10:19 pm

a.b. wrote:
monsm wrote: No need to actually make a release in the conventional sense. E.g. send out this as a press release every quarter or half yearly. Could even give it a release number to satisfy the convention. Other then keeping that miniCD up to date, there would be no need for any actual release to be created, just read the latest version numbers from portage.
That way we could create arbitary numbers of releases a year to get into the news:

Gentoo 2008.45 released!

Sounds like a plan, let's do it!

Ray ishido · Post by **Ray ishido** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 2:18 pm

A week after gnome 2.24 goes out, it is running smoothly on my computer. Ubuntu users will still wait for one entire month until they can experiment it. I didn't notice it is planned soon for Suse (but I can be wrong). Not bad for a dead thing.

As already said, distrowatch isn't a good poll, and the obvious fact that their is more Ubuntu users than gentoo's one is not a sign of decline, it's just means that more people are interested in Linux, thanks to an agressive marketing, a very well design distro and a great hardware compatibility.
Now, I don't really understand the need of marketing for Gentoo: Advanced linux users (geeks?

) will always hear about Gentoo, and perhaps feel the need to try it, while noob will very happy to begin with Ubuntu and others (until turning themselves into advanced users).

a.b. · Post by **a.b.** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 5:22 pm

Marketing Gentoo might even be dangerous. If someone hears of Linux and tries *Gentoo* he won't have a good impression of the whole thing.

Is Gentoo dying?

signs of dying