Viva Gentoo

There is some hooha again over on Distrowatch that Gentoo would be dying. Again! How come we're still not dead, you may ask. Well, maybe things are not as bad as they seem. Some random blog whipped up a post with some stats — hmm, remember that quote about “lies, damn lies and statistics”?

For a good retort, read my mentor Steve Dibb on Gentoo's growth. And, as I replied on the original article, I'd rather work for positive change than being overly dramatic from the sidelines. There is certainly a lot to do, a lot that could be improved. So let's try and do that. May Gentoo live long and prosper!

As one of these areas is release engineering, I'd like to point my readers to the announcement that was just published on the Gentoo website about the new release strategy. I recently joined the release team as PR liaison in order to improve communication with our users, which was a point of frustration in the months leading up to the 2008.0 release. I am really happy about the new developments here, and we should soon be able to give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis.

I've also added a few more packages to portage lately. We are the first distro to have added app-cdr/recorder to our official repository. It is a nice, simple and to the point graphical CD and DVD burner application. Especially for people who find k3b too heavy or bloated, and want a lighter desktop app to do this job, recorder is a package to check out.

Talking about a light desktop, there is now a Gentoo project to bring LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, to our beloved distro. I already committed PCManFM, a fast and lightweight, tabbed GTK+ file manager, which is used as the default file manager in LXDE. It also uses Openbox as default window manager, although this is easily interchangeable for another one. The Gentoo LXDE team is developing ebuilds in an overlay (available through layman), and I hope to get the latest release into portage soon. The overlay also has live ebuilds, in case you want to go with the latest code, which is actually very stable, at least in my experience.

23 Sep 08 - 18:23 | and

Responses to ‘Viva Gentoo’:

  1. robbat2 on 24 Sep 08 - 00:20

    I left multiple comments on that guys page about his statistics, and he corrected some of them, but not all.

  2. Knilteldeni on 28 Sep 08 - 14:51

    favorited this one, bro

  3. LethAL on 30 Sep 08 - 11:52

    It's really nice to see that people are still working on improving gentoo. I guess that the people saying that it's 'dying' think that perfection is a state, one which gentoo strives for. Perfection is a process, and you're a part of it. Keep it up! :-)

  4. fstephens on 1 Oct 08 - 16:16

    I really hope Gentoo gets back on track. While the problems may be exaggerated, there are so many reported issues that something must be wrong.
    I ran Gentoo as my main OS for 3-4 years, but about a year ago it seemed to be taking me too much time to keep everything working properly. Due to personal issues constraining my time, I switched my main box to Kubuntu. I learned allot from installing and using Gentoo since it is very cutting edge and has excellent documentation.
    Thanks to all on the Gentoo team an good luck.

  5. -SPM-Draget on 20 Oct 08 - 05:56

    Viva gentoo =)
    Let'd do our best for the best distro out there!

    I siwtched from Ubuntu to gentoo and it was the best choise in operating systems I ever made :P

    Greetings
    -Draget-

  6. magnet on 28 Oct 08 - 12:07

    viva gentoo !

  7. Chris Bryant on 6 Nov 08 - 18:39

    It's nice to see that Gentoo is starting to change for the better after a bit of a slump and efforts like yours are just what's needed!

    Also, Daniel Robbins is back at it and doing some work that will hopefully benefit Gentoo soon. It would be great to see him more closely involved with the project leaders as well.

    Thanks again and keep up the good work!

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