Is Gentoo dying?

Message

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 8:54 pm

Hey all,

I havn't been active on the forums for a LONG time - mainly because I had a year out after uni and travelled the world.

I bought a MacBook 2 years ago and have been using that ever since, with the use of my Gentoo desktop slowly dying out. I absolutely hated working on a laptop until I got my MacBook - I always found the keyboards too small, but the MacBook has a truly awesome design.

But, since getting back from my travels, I had to decide what to do with my Linux desktop computer... I had always had problems with it being an AMD64 for things like flash, etc, but I didn't let it bother me, I just happily used Gentoo and it was fine. But I decided to install Ubuntu on it about a month ago... (alongside my Gentoo install)

I like Ubuntu a lot, it really is a great Linux distribution. It's a brilliant thing for the Linux community I think. But since installing it, I have been questioning Gentoo a bit. It seems that it's dying out a bit to me - or am I wrong? The Gentoo homepage hasn't changed since I've been using it and that's a fairly long time!

Basically what I'm trying to say is, I think Gentoo needs something to change. It could keep going as it is and be more and more a distribution for 1337 people who want to be "cutting edge", or it could perhaps change ethics slightly and become more mainstream. Maybe people will shoot me down for saying that, but hey, it's just what I've noticed.

I work in IT now and the other day we were talking at work because NFS was being annoying for us. The server is running Debian and it's a problem which is fixed in an upgrade, but installing that upgrade caused other problems. Now from my Gentoo days, I had the thoughts of being able to easily fix the problem because portage just allows you to upgrade packages as you go along, rather than the complete upgrade path which you have to go down with a lot of the other distributions.

But of course portage is also a hindrance at times, because you have almost too much choice - causing you to easily lose track of what you've got installed - something which could be a problem if admining lots of servers.

Anyway, that's the thoughts I have at the moment. I really like portage, absolutely love it.

But, is Gentoo dying?

jonnevers · Post by **jonnevers** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:03 pm

mattjgalloway wrote:am I wrong?

yes.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:06 pm

Brilliant! You only serve to point out the underlying feeling I have of the Gentoo community at current.

Do you realise that I have actually put thought into what I said? Why did you come back with such thoughtless reply?

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:23 pm

What kind of answer do you expect? These kind of posts come up every now and then and yet... Gentoo is still here.

i92guboj · Post by **i92guboj** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:32 pm

mattjgalloway wrote:Brilliant! You only serve to point out the underlying feeling I have of the Gentoo community at current.

Do you realise that I have actually put thought into what I said? Why did you come back with such thoughtless reply?

It's not a thoughtless reply. It's the truth.

You have been out for two years, you have no idea what's going on, you ask, and people answer. No pun intended. It's just that the people are tired of this kind of thread, which has been around since far before you left Gentoo the first time. Yet the response continues to be: "no".

To tell the truth, I hadn't see the "Gentoo is dying" post of the month so yours is the one this month.

You want numbers, well, let's see some.

Portage is evolving, with lots of new features.
This is the most active linux forums nowadays by many orders or magnitude, amongst those that I visit (mainly linuxforums.org and linuxquestions.org). That alone is a sign that something in moving.
The number of overlays is growing.
The users mailing list is *very* active, not to talk about the other lists. There are dozens of official ones.
As far as I know (though admitedly I don't use it very much) the irc is very active as well.
If you sync, you will get new packages to update *every* day, that's strange for a dying distro, when most distros do releases only once or twice a year.

That's just the surface. Bugzilla is burning everyday, and the developers are doing an excellent work. For the rest, there are lots of overlays.

About the design of the page, I wonder why do you think that is a fair argument. There are famous websites that hasn't changed the basic design for many years, and, sincerely, the developers have more things to care about that a shinny web page. The Google web is a good example: it does it's job, and doesn't get in the middle of your way.

So, if you are back, welcome. Gentoo is in good shape, healthy and moving everyday. Of course, it can't please everyone, it was never meant to do so.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 10:16 pm

I think I need to explain...

I never said gentoo is dying. I wanted to see what people think at the moment.

I didn't leave gentoo, never have, never will. But the gentoo community needs to get to grips with people being realistic. Why are these sort of posts so common? It's because people get frustrated.

Anyway... Maybe I just need to look back at gentoo and see the changes to find out what's been going on.

i92guboj · Post by **i92guboj** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 10:50 pm

mattjgalloway wrote:I think I need to explain...

I never said gentoo is dying. I wanted to see what people think at the moment.

I didn't leave gentoo, never have, never will. But the gentoo community needs to get to grips with people being realistic. Why are these sort of posts so common? It's because people get frustrated.

Anyway... Maybe I just need to look back at gentoo and see the changes to find out what's been going on.

I think it's because people get bored, and instead of silently choosing another distro they feel the need to explain here why they don't like Gentoo.

As said, Gentoo is not meant for everyone, it will always have his lovers and detractors, like ubuntu has as well.

These posts have been common since Gentoo started, if it was about to die, it wouldn't have lasted that many years. Besides that, lots of persons are happy with it. For sure it can get better, and it *does* get better each day that passes by. Of course, not at the rate and on the aspects that everyone would like.

You can see rants about any distro. Just google for them. Gentoo is not different from any other existent entity in that regards. That's my opinion. I don't see anything wrong with Gentoo, so I can't say otherwise.

PS. I am obviously biased, but since we are talking about personal preferences, so is everyone.

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:12 pm

The way I read your post and subsequent replies, you basically stopped using Gentoo, have only just come back, not done any reading up on what's been changing recently and decided that "Gentoo is dying" for some particular reason (you said it in your post title - people don't "ask" that question unless they thing the answer is yes).

Gentoo is not Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora or any other distro. Gentoo is not a distro for those who care what the front page looks like. The website design doesn't change because:
1) It works fine as it is now.
2) The developers are far too busy doing more useful tasks.

Gentoo never has been a "mainstream" distro and I don't believe it should try to be - there are plenty of distros that fill that "niche" already.

I believe Gentoo is and always will be a distro for those who want choice, configurability and control over their system that they can't get from other distros and aren't afraid of reading documentation. It's for people who want to learn more about Linux.

The amount of choice Gentoo provides isn't likely to change soon - it's part of what makes Gentoo what it is.

You say a change is needed but don't suggest anything ("Going mainstream" isn't a suggestion you've thought through for more than half a second, so it doesn't count).

As for servers, have you even tried administering even 1 server? Gentoo's choice, configurability and control make it perfect for servers. I run a web server which is basically a holdover from my days as a freelancer. I've just finished switching from Debian to Gentoo. The live server is installed using binary packages generated on a xen guest, which is kept as a clone of the live server. I update both about once every 1-2 months, which generally consists of syncing the package tree, checking what's going to be upgraded, checking changelogs to make sure there are no major changes and finally updating, which takes no more than 30 minutes (and that's mostly reading changelogs). The server is secure, up-to-date and stable as a rock.

I also update my EeePC 701 in the same manner.

For both I keep a backup stage4, updated once every 6 months, along with rsync'd backups of anything that's not covered by the packages (once per month for the Eee, daily for the server).

Gentoo is perfect for use on the desktop, server and environments where resources are restricted (you just build on a system with spare resources and clone that - old PCs can be cheaply obtained)

In my opinion, as long as you use depclean and remove directly installed packages you don't need any more, Gentoo makes it easy to keep track of what you have installed. Far easier, in my opinion, than binary distros, which compile with every option and thus force you to pull in every dependency, and all their dependencies ad infinitum.

I don't believe you put much thought at all into your post because:
1) You selected a title to which there are only 2 answers and the reply of most users is going to be obvious. It's also a thread title that pops up about once every six months and is generally posted by users who are probably discovering Gentoo isn't what they want.
2) You ramble on lots about other distributions, saying very little about Gentoo.
3) You say change is needed, but can't suggest. "Going mainstream" doesn't count - it's an extremely generalist, short, bland suggestion, with no detailed explanation as to what you think this means or what you think needs to change for Gentoo to become "mainstream".
4) The only question in your entire post is, again, "Is Gentoo dying?"

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 7:12 am

Some nice comments and some harsh comments, again. Don't have a go at my post saying it was thoughtless, please. Trying to have a proper discussion would be nice.

I had a thought yesterday about the way portage could be made to be more easily supported by system admins and that would be to provide a way of selecting a certain state to have portage in whereby everything is masked except the versions of packages which are part of the supported set for that version. This would then allow admins to make sure that they had the exact same packages on each of their systems. Of course then they have the option to unmask a package to go out of the "supported set" if they find the need for it.

I really like portage and the way it works, it's a lot better than pretty much all of the other package managers I've used.

That's a perfectly good comment that Gentoo shouldn't go "mainstream" - it's kind of what a lot of the offshoots have done, allowing Gentoo to stay in its own niche. I don't expect Gentoo to go mainstream.

Anyway, I'd like to see some statistics about Gentoo such as how downloads of the ISOs, etc have been going over the years, along side statistics for the growth of Linux as a whole. Is Gentoo increasing its "market share" or is it decreasing it? That's basically the whole point of my post, along with getting some useful comments.

The website is a completely valid point in my opinion. I use the forums, the wiki and the portage search site a fair amount, but it's bad I think that they're not all integrated better. Just one thing I could see being better with the site anyway. I've had people before not even realise there is a wiki with so much good information on it.

But just to reiterate... this is NOT a "I'm leaving Gentoo because it sucks" post. I simply wanted a few comments. I am starting to get frustrated by people on the Gentoo forums who get all defensive of Gentoo...

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 8:35 am

See this is where Gentoo has an advantage...

We're needing to install postgresql on a machine at work, running Ubuntu. But we need 8.1.11. Hardy Heron has 8.3 and so it's going to be a lot harder to install an older version than if we had portage at hand!

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 8:44 am

Maintaining the exact same packages across a collection of machines is easy - you just use the same copy of the portage tree across all of them. If this is a lot of machines, you probably set up your own rsync mirror. For my server I push the copy from the development box to the live box, while the Eee just nfs mounts the same copy its clone uses (I use rsync's exclude feature so that my Eee's tree is lacking in gnome and server specific packages while the servers tree doesn't have anything graphical).

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 8:48 am

Some interesting things:

http://www.linux.com/feature/143570

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity

Gentoo popularity seems to be stable, which is good, but "market share" quite low for the feature base of Gentoo in my opinion.

On DistroWatch, Gentoo is 2nd bottom of the list of major distros and I quote:

"Cons: Occasional instability and risk of breakdown, the project suffers from lack of directions and frequent infighting between its developer".

It seems I am not the only one with these feelings at present. I did however feel encouraged by the Linux.com review saying that Gentoo is getting back on tracks and that the reviewer had a good time installing - even after a few problems he/she said they would stick with Gentoo

.

@AllenJB : Yes keeping a tree the same is easy, but that's not the same as keeping the installed packages the same.

simon_irl · Post by **simon_irl** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:38 am

mattjgalloway wrote:It seems I am not the only one with these feelings at present.

you most certainly are not. i don't think the regular "is gentoo dying?" posts (or the regular bad press on distrowatch etc.) should just be dismissed offhand as sour grapes from people who would prefer to see gentoo working differently. certainly when i wondered about gentoo's health a few months ago, it was because (a) the website was unmaintained and had been for months, and didn't even explain or comment on the fact that (b) the long overdue scheduled release (i think it was 2007.1) showed no signs of appearing, (c) drobbins was claiming that gentoo was in trouble, etc. etc. i learned from users in these forums that gentoo is still perfectly healthy (in terms of code maintenance and so on) and i see that the website is being maintained again...but i do think a project that has people asking "are you dying?" all the time is likely to have a problem, even if only a public relations problem.

what about some of the specific criticisms made on distrowatch? is it true that kde 4.1 is still not even ready for ~x86? i remember when the only way to have a more up-to-date system than gentoo was to grab the sources manually and configure and build them yourself: other distros were typically weeks or even months behind. glancing through portage today, it appears that "emerge --sync && emerge -uD world" would leave me with some packages older than the ones i'm using on this slackware box...or is gentoo-portage.com ("browse gentoo portage") not kept in sync with portage itself, so that this is another case of the project looking worse to outsiders than it does to those who are actually using it?

image and pr do matter, because more users = more testing = more solid apps. i stopped using gentoo on our computers because rice-free "stable" x86 built with -O2 was still occasionally flakey, and as much as i loved gentoo (and still do), trusting software to work reliably is my first priority. even if the endless rumours of gentoo's decay are all entirely baseless and false, they're still a concern to me, because they can't be helping to grow gentoo's user base, and i want it to grow. i can fully understand that some developers and users may NOT want it to grow (i can think of several perfectly good reasons), but i'm sure many other users like me do, and drobbins seemed to have ambitions of growing the project: surely having over 90% of respondents to the forums poll "should the gentoo trustees accept daniel robbins offer?" answer YES (and there were hundreds of respondents) indicates that things are not really so rosey as the regular "no, it's perfectly fine" answers to the regular "is gentoo dying?" questions seem to suggest?

i think you're right that some of us who ask this question just want gentoo to be different and this is our way of expressing that. but, have you considered the possibility that the thing we want to be different about it is that we want it NOT TO BE DYING?! lol.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:49 am

@simon_irl: THANK YOU! Finally someone who is understanding what I'm saying and responding in an objective manner.

I agree with you 100% there matey, especially the point you make that lots of the people who make these posts (including me) want Gentoo to NOT be dying.

AllenJB · Post by **AllenJB** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:51 am

KDE 4.1 is in progress. It's taking so long because the KDE team are using it to completely revamp the KDE packages, laying the groundwork for the package setup that will most likely be used for a number of years. Because 1 set of packages is taking a while to get to a state where the developers are happy to put them into the main package tree, it does not mean the distro is dying.

Distrowatch is a pile of FUD. They don't do any research and build their articles on rumour and speculation.

If anything, I believe frequent "Is <project> dying?" posts is a sign of success, not problems. Go search for "Is ubuntu dying" or "Is debian dying" - they also get such regular posts.

Nobody has yet answered the questions of "WHY do you think Gentoo is dying?" and "What exactly needs to change?"

90% of the respondants to the forum poll regarding drobbins offer had no clue what they were talking about. They wouldn't have to deal with the result. They probably barely looked at what exactly would happen from the point of view of the developers. All they saw was hype, and they responded as most people do to hype.

gentoo-dev · Post by **gentoo-dev** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:55 am

mattjgalloway wrote: http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity

Gentoo popularity seems to be stable, which is good, but "market share" quite low for the feature base of Gentoo in my opinion.

On DistroWatch, Gentoo is 2nd bottom of the list of major distros and I quote:

"Cons: Occasional instability and risk of breakdown, the project suffers from lack of directions and frequent infighting between its developer".

It seems I am not the only one with these feelings at present.

distrowatch stats are meaningless. They show at best how much curiosity distros generate. Their strong bias against Gentoo is well-known and makes anything they write about Gentoo irrelevant.

gentoo-dev · Post by **gentoo-dev** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:57 am

simon_irl wrote:...or is gentoo-portage.com ("browse gentoo portage") not kept in sync with portage itself, so that this is another case of the project looking worse to outsiders than it does to those who are actually using it?

Are you not aware that this site is neither hosted by gentoo, nor run by gentoo, nor endorsed by gentoo?

simon_irl · Post by **simon_irl** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 11:50 am

gentoo-dev wrote:Are you not aware that this site is neither hosted by gentoo, nor run by gentoo, nor endorsed by gentoo?

lol. no, i wasn't: although looking at it now, it should have been fairly obvious from the domain and the lack of official logos. it's very handy for someone without portage, though: is there an official equivalent? should i be browsing packages.gentoo.org instead?

allenjb: thank you for addressing so many of my concerns. the explanation for the kde delay is perfectly reasonable, and should have been taken into account by distrowatch etc. perhaps you're right that they don't bother researching their articles. and interestingly, whereas a google search for "is ubuntu dying?" returns just three hits (as opposed to 21 for gentoo), "is debian dying?" returns a staggering 650 hits (a lot for that specific phrasing of the question)!

it's also interesting because i was going to answer your questions "WHY do you think gentoo is dying?" and "what exactly needs to change?" in terms of movement and growth (which are, incidentally, part of the biological definition of "life"): given the pace of change in the gnu/linux world, i'd expect a healthy project to be changing and/or growing fairly rapidly. gentoo seems to be sitting here doing business more or less as usual with roughly the same number of users, so...bearing in mind the rapid growth of gnu/linux overall...i'd be tempted to call that "dying". however, debian is a very good counterexample: people have obviously felt the same way about debian (i.e. it just does what it does without fanfare, explosive growth, etc., so it seems to be "dying" in comparison to ubuntu) but of course debian is still the fine distro it always has been.

as for the 90% having no clue what they were talking about, well, ok...but again, maybe that's a problem in itself? maybe a rate of 90% cluelessness is just what we ought to expect from any population, but then, could it be a developers/users communication issue? perhaps not...i do understand that FUD can be unstoppable (y2k, anyone?). anyway, as i said before, FUD or not, i don't think bad pr is good for gentoo, because i'd prefer to see gentoo's user base growing. more users = more testers, and today's users are presumably tomorrow's developers.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:53 pm

Why do you think gentoo is dying?
I see that Gentoo has been much less active than once it was. There's definitely less being posted in the way of news, the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter seems to be lacking in content a lot of the time and there seems to be just less buzz around Gentoo than a few years ago.

What exactly needs to change?
I would say that the project needs some firm direction in the way of releases. Gentoo doesn't really need releases because of the way you install / maintain the system. So perhaps don't bother with specific releases at all. Or make a definite attempt to have a reason for releases - that might be such along the ideas I said about providing a set of packages which are "officially supported" at each release stage, but then allowing the user to upgrade certain packages if they want.

Basically I just think Gentoo needs some sort of facelift and some direction from the developers.

Thorror · Post by **Thorror** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 1:18 pm

mattjgalloway wrote: Gentoo doesn't really need releases because of the way you install / maintain the system. So perhaps don't bother with specific releases at all. Or make a definite attempt to have a reason for releases

Just read the news from 22.09.2008

In future releases, Gentoo will focus on a more back-to-basics approach that will give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis and make much better use of our human resources. We're looking into automated weekly builds of the minimal CDs and stage tarballs as well as maybe an annual LiveCD release. We will keep you updated as we decide on the details of this new approach.

Consequently, we're canceling the 2008.1 release.

jonnevers · Post by **jonnevers** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 1:56 pm

mattjgalloway wrote:Why do you think gentoo is dying?

I find your use of the word 'dying' to be an overly dramatic interpretation of Gentoo's current state. If you consider that thoughtless so be it but you asked the question.

mattjgalloway · Post by **mattjgalloway** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 2:07 pm

jonnevers wrote:
mattjgalloway wrote:Why do you think gentoo is dying?
I find your use of the word 'dying' to be an overly dramatic interpretation of Gentoo's current state. If you consider that thoughtless so be it but you asked the question.

Oh my word... I'm just replying to what someone had asked me to answer those two questions! Don't flame me for answering the question!

nativemad · Post by **nativemad** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:30 pm

simon_irl wrote:gentoo seems to be sitting here doing business more or less as usual with roughly the same number of users, so...bearing in mind the rapid growth of gnu/linux overall...i'd be tempted to call that "dying".

I personally don't think that the overall growth and acceptance of OSS has really this direct influence on a distro like gentoo.
Just because if you look around WHO is using those out-of-the-box distros nowadays... Those arent the early-adaptors/techies like say 4 years ago. Sure, there are some! But i think years ago, mainly it-people used linux for servers... Nowadays, even elderly persons who aren't that geeky use it as desktop!
I think those (nowadays) tech-distros like slackware,debian,gentoo,crux,sourcemage,lfs and so on are now really used by people who are aware what they are doing. Are they all dying?
You can't easily satisfy everyones desires. And i think its much better to focus on one thing (choices in gentoos case, even if that means that some devs might work on their own things, instead of a long awaitet package), and doing it right, than trying to do everything a bit.

Cheers

Sprotte · Post by **Sprotte** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 4:04 pm

"Cons: Occasional instability and risk of breakdown, the project suffers from lack of directions and frequent infighting between its developer".

First, even if that were the truth, it's not remotely the same as dying.

Second, Gentoo is slowly changing. The ricers are mostly gone, and the hype has subsided. Again, that's not the same as dying.

There is a lot to say, and there is nothing to say... Gentoo has become a little more like a toaster. It works (TM). It no longer tries to have flashing lights on top, and to toast in 0.6578 seconds less than other toasters.

What's the problem with not being #1 at distrowatch?

Gentoo runs just fine on my machines. I find new releases in portage pretty often. If I need the newest wine or something, it'll probably be there! I wouldn't know because I don't emerge sync && emerge -ud world && emerge -e world every day anymore. But that is a good thing, not a bad one, don't you think?

Honeymoon is over. So? I look forward to another couple years using gentoo. It's unlikely that something will apear and blow it away tomorrow.

There are a handful of specific things that I'd like to change in Portage (the application). That doesn't mean I'll leave Gentoo.

There are a number of things I don't like in GNU land. But that's not Gentoo's problem.

I guess it works just fine. So, no, it's not dead, Bones.

baaann · Post by **baaann** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 4:18 pm

mattjgalloway wrote:
jonnevers wrote:
mattjgalloway wrote:Why do you think gentoo is dying?
I find your use of the word 'dying' to be an overly dramatic interpretation of Gentoo's current state. If you consider that thoughtless so be it but you asked the question.
Oh my word... I'm just replying to what someone had asked me to answer those two questions! Don't flame me for answering the question!

Hmm, 1st you accuse jonnevers of being thoughtless and then when he explains himself you consider he is flaming

To address some of the points you have made, IMHO Distrowatch is geared to distributions that have release cycles and the appeal of the site to me was to find a new release that would have the latest version of a particular application. That was until I tried Gentoo, now I have no need to regularily click through the different distros, I can get pretty much everything I require either through portage or layman. With the new release policy, hopefully Gentoo will not be subject to all the negative hype it has received in the past.

@AllenJB : Yes keeping a tree the same is easy, but that's not the same as keeping the installed packages the same.

I would think that the new portage feature of package sets may well be your answer(although I haven't tried them myself), it hasn't reached stable keywording yet but there are positive comments to be found in the forum. In particular this thread which includes documentation links. This is also a good example of how Gentoo is progressing.