I first ran into Gentoo in high school, about twenty years ago. I told an upperclassman that I wanted to learn Linux, and he told me to install Gentoo from stage1. His only advice was to print the handbook before starting, because I wasn't going to have a browser in my pocket once the install went wrong.
I had no idea what I was getting into. For almost two weeks, I basically didn't have a working home PC. Every day was the same: fight with the install at night, go to school the next morning, read docs on the school computers, ask him what I'd broken, then go home and try again.
At some point it clicked. By the end I had accidentally learned what a chroot was, how to build a kernel badly, why /etc/fstab mattered, and how easy it was to make a machine not boot. I also picked up Vim somewhere in that stretch, and never stopped.
I don't run Gentoo anymore, but I'm still grateful for those two weeks.
Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?
If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:
1. Gentoo is independent.
There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.
2. Gentoo aims to be secure.
We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.
3. Gentoo is made by humans.
We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.
4. Gentoo supports sustainability.
This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.
Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.
And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.
What do you appreciate in Gentoo?