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Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardware + rsync to update. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever built, at this point I’m effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it’s all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how little they operate on I’m definitely setting up a recurring donation.

For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V support.

While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that the meta-distribution model is the only scalable way to handle the explosion of hardware diversity we are seeing post 2025. If you are building an embedded platfrm or working on custom silicon, Gentoo is a top tier choice. You cross-compile the stage1 and portage handles the rest.

> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations.

It's crazy how projects this large and influential can get by on so little cash. Of course a lot of people are donating their very valuable labour to the project, but the ROI from Gentoo is incredible compared to what it costs to do anything in commercial software.

This is a remarkably small number given that Gentoo Portage is load bearing infrastructure under ChromeOS.

2025 I switched to nixos and will probably stay. I used gentoo for like 20 years. Its the distro of my heart.

With some notebooks, some of which were getting on in years, it was simply too resource-intensive to update. Only GHC, for example, often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks.

Really hope I can return to Gentoo soon. It was just the most stable and most hacker friendly distro Ive ever used. Hats off to all the contributors!

Thanks for posting this! It's been a nice first year as a Gentoo developer. Everyone has been kind and helpful to me as I've been figuring things out.

I want to highlight something: Gentoo's developer onboarding system is EXCELLENT. Starting as an active member of the general community, you talk an existing developer into being your mentor and fill out an open book test ( https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/ebuild... ) which later is graded/corrected in a couple of meetings which I'd equate to the "job interview". I wish more open source projects (including my own) had such well-documented, straightforward processes to gain commit access. I appreciated the process of doing the quiz as it helped me close gaps in my knowledge.

I used Gentoo from 2006 for a decade or more and loved it. Later I got more into embedded systems and low compute hardware and flirted with other distros. Gentoo is still running on my server but desktop and notebook are now on more conventional distros.

Gentoo has many smart people. Having said that, I can't help but feel that ever since the rise of Arch, Gentoo lost a lot of grounds. This may not be primarily due to Arch, but it kind of felt that way to me. I feel that the Gentoo devs should really look at its main competitors such as Void or Arch, IMO. These seem to be more like a modern Gentoo, even if they are different and have a different focus too.

I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags correctly it produced heavily tailored and optimized binaries. I feel like a staged/graduated (downloading/running precompiled initially while a flag-optimized compile runs in the background) would be a good way to get around some of the downsides here (namely that it takes 45 minutes to install firefox with emerge/pacman and that builds fail more often than packages fail to install).

Very cool to see that it's still going strong - I remember managing many machines at scale was a bit of a challenge, especially keeping ahead of vulnerabilities.

Been using Gentoo since 2004 on all my machines. They won me over after I started playing around with their Unreal Tournament demo ISO.

The game changer for me was using my NAS as a build host for all my machines. It has enough memory and cores to compile on 32 threads. But a full install from a stage3 on my ageing Thinkpad X13 or SBCs would fry the poor things and just isn't feasible to maintain.

I have systemd-nspawn containers for the different microarchitectures and mount their /var/cache/binpkgs and /etc/portage dirs over NFS on the target machines. The Thinkpad can now do an empty tree emerge in like an hour and leaving out the bdeps cuts down on about 150 packages.

Despite being focused on OpenRC, I have had the most pleasant experience with systemd on Gentoo over all the other distros I've tried.

Reading this while doing emerge @world on my personal workstation, and preparing a fresh annual portage cut for our IT infrastructure (some 600+ VMs, 400+ bare metal servers), running Gentoo.

Interesting name for the jobs erver: “steve”

Looking forward to using Gentoo in WSL more easily. I currently use Ubuntu for some scripting but would switch as I also use Gentoo on the desktop. Also good to see the Rust toolchain and BLAS packaging improvements.

What has kept me on Gentoo since the first Opteron days (20+ years ago) is that once you do an install, you also learn in part how to fix the things you installed, which can be helpful later on. I also do world rebuilds often which I think is just the equivalent of testing an OS backup for a source based OS. :)

I used Gentoo back in 2003. It’s nice to see that it’s still going strong. I don’t have as much free time now it’s not the distro for me, but perhaps when I retire I will come back to it.

I haven't used it in years, but when I was first using Linux I used Gentoo for a long time. Building Gentoo from scratch really helped me learn a lot and probably more quickly than dual-booting a system like I had been. I'll always have a soft spot for Gentoo.

Been running it for over 20 years:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989311

Edit: Curious, why the downvote?

Impressive recap! The work on RISC-V images, Gentoo for WSL, and EAPI 9 really shows how adaptable Gentoo is. I’m curious about the trend of fewer commits and bug reports—do you think it’s just natural stabilization, or are contributors slowing down? Also, the move from GitHub to Codeberg is bold; how is the community reacting to that change so far? Would love to hear more about how new contributors are finding the transition and onboarding with these updates.

Odd this came up as I am considering revisiting Gentoo. I might have to take this as a sign.

"Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg."

How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?

I used to use Gentoo, it helped me learn Linux and I loved it. Waiting for things to compile took a while, but I learned about distcc and set up another machine to help the compiling! I don't use Gentoo anymore, since I don't really have the time anymore to deal with it - like having to fix compile issues - but it did feel really cool to have my system custom-tuned just for me.

(I use Fedora, btw)

I saw a comment in a "I moved from Windows to Linux" thread implying Windows has more configuration potential than Linux. I wonder what that commenter would make of Gentoo.

I wish I had more time I could dedicate to maintaining my system, I'm marooned on Arch due to lack of time, such a shame.

It’s so crazy to me that there are languages whose maintainers don’t make it absolute #1 priority to always have a clean golden path for bootstrapping.

So Google says Bye Bye to Gentoo as ChromOS mutated into AluminumOS??

As a kid 25+ years ago, it was fun tweaking use flags, compiling with Intel cc, diving into every menu in that blue kernel configuration screen. System recompiles I think took 4 hours back then. Learned so much back then and it can even be useful to this day, I don't think I'd even know what a glibc is without tweaking out it's use flags just for kicks.

Now I am happily gaming on arch Linux and while generally developing on a Mac, need to jump into debian in docker and such. But I do hope kids these days end up trying Gentoo, the hacker skillset it builds is priceless. No offense to adults still using it! I just hope there aren't as many "my system doesn't build anymore" situations as I remember.

Any more information on the Github move (away)? While the AI features of github are annoying, I've so far been able to completely ignore them.

Amazing project, great people behind it, but it is a time sink.

From the announcement it’s a lot of unnecessary philosophical moves and less innovation moves. I like innovative Linux, but that’s just my opinion.