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So I haven't really touched my Gentoo desktop in over a year since I bought my new laptop, it's biggest use now is that it's plugged into my 5.1 speakers so I run MPD on it and remote control it for music use. However, I just got a gorgeous new 22" LCD screen for it so I plan on using more now, at least for movie viewing. So I decided it was really time to upgrade the software on it, so I did an emerge --sync, changed to the newest 2008.0 profile and started looking at what shiney new software I'd get.
Well, Gnome 2.24 is still unstable. A bit disappointing, but there was a gentoo wiki page detailing all the packages I needed to put in /etc/portage/packages.keyword to get Gnome 2.24. So then I was looking at Xorg. xorg-server 1.3 is still the only stable release under Gentoo. It's like 2 years old now! Really? That is the best Gentoo can do? So then I started looking at other stuff. GCC 4.1 is still the latest stable release (4.3.* has been out for a year and 4.1's latest release is 2 years old). At which point I realized that if I wanted a current modern Linux system I either would HAVE to run a unstable Gentoo system, or change distros.
Looking at the fact that if I wanted to stay with Gentoo, I'd have a day or two of compiling a head of me, and then who knows what integration head aches as programs and config files change just to get a vaguely working vanilla Gnome system on an "unstable" Gentoo system, I balked. It just didn't seem worth it. Also, Gentoo is a system that really depends on the compiler, so having the only stable compiler be a two year old version really surprised me and kind of was the nail in the coffin.
So I'm downloading Ubuntu 8.10 and I'll have it installed probably before even 'emerge --system' would be done. And it will be modern, and cutting edge, and all the desktop software will work and be integrated together in all the ways that Gentoo never really does with out lots of extra work.
And so I'm forced to ask: is Gentoo dying? It used to be easy to at least have a cutting edge system with Gentoo. That was one of it's big appeals, that software hit portage before anywhere else. But now, lots of "new" stuff is off in an overlay, and stable in the main portage tree is shockingly (at least to me) old and conservative. It seems way to much hassle to get a cutting edge desktop out of Gentoo now, especially with Ubuntu doing a decent job of it so trivially.
I still have Gentoo on my server, but again, I just had to install a new overlay, just to get the "new" Ruby 1.9 line which has been out for a year, and everyone, even Debian stable is carrying (do you know how weird that is to me?). And what is the point of having a "stable" if it's so old as to be half unusable and older than even Debian stable? This is not the Gentoo I remember, and I'm even a little surprised with how easy I decided to abandon it on my desktop, but when it came down to it, it really didn't offer me much of a compelling or even difficult choice. :(
February 25th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
who runs stable? gentoo’s about development. just did a pkg_add on my openbsd system and i forgot how nice that is, but I don’t think though that you’re gonna get a modern linux with ubuntu and have any less problems with ubuntu. just my take.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
learn to go unstable…
Gentoo still is cutting edge (alot more then the VAST majority of distrobutions)
The thing is STABLE is means no bugs and no bugs in any dependancies thus STABLE can lag.
I have GNOME-2.24, OpenOffice-3 (and what version of OpenOffice is Ubuntu stuck at?) and so on
Yes sure some big package, big packages that some other distro’s time their releases around (I mean next ubuntu and gnome-2.26) but everything else gentoo is still out there
I guess it is just cool to rag on Gentoo…
February 25th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Gentoo is dying ? old topic man, we died 2 years ago already :p
Seriously though, want to give a hand stabilizing ?
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260063 -> Gnome 2.24
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251832 -> xorg-server 1.5.3 and friends
“It used to be easy to at least have a cutting edge system with Gentoo”, want to get a now so borked system, sorry it sometimes has to go through delays. Did you asked for stuff to go stable ? Did you fill stabilization requests in bugzilla (because forums are not made for that nor blogs) ?
You could also apply to be a dev, new hands are always welcomed.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Seriously, do you know how much work it is to get gcc-4.3 marked stable? I spent at least 4 hours bug-wrangling and working on amd64 bugs to get glibc-2.8 marked stable and I was the “new guy” to the front. For gcc-4.3, well, that was a sucky upgrade because of the header file changes, which I’m sure you know about. We have to wait for these changes to trickle down into the stable tree or else we are going to get a even bigger problem for stable users. Gentoo doesn’t have the luxury of compiling the base system with gcc-4.1 and offering gcc-4.3 for your userland like Ubuntu does – we need everything to work. Anyway, what have you done to help? Besides complaining on your blog? =)
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198121 -> All the issues that gcc-4.3 caused.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245160 -> All the stablereqs that need to be done before gcc-4.3 can be marked stable.
We are getting there, just takes time.
February 26th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Or maybe we are all just getting old?
I still enjoy mucking around with etc-update and so on, but I only use it on one machine. For the rest, I just bung on the stock Ubuntu. Otherwise I would spend my whole week emerging things.
February 27th, 2009 at 2:56 am
Try our windows7. It will never get old and will never die.
February 27th, 2009 at 5:14 am
You know, I was getting nervous. This is a time of the year when another Gentoo drama should start, but nobody came up with it
First part of your post is valid, of course, but it was always the case that such major and big products as Gnome and KDE were long to be marked as stable. And GCC is THE package that has to be compliant with everything else.
Then you go on the fact that installing takes time. Now how is that different from the times when Gentoo wasn’t dying? Oh wait, I actually can’t remember when it wasn’t.
As for overlays — well, it’s actually one of the main reasons to use Gentoo. When it comes to casual things, you really don’t get much from Gentoo compared to binary distros. But when you start to better understand your needs, tools Gentoo provide (and overlays is one of them) become very valuable
February 27th, 2009 at 7:06 am
better switch to archlinux rather than ubuntu. i did that 3 years ago and i don’t regret it.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:52 am
I too used Gentoo for several years. It was fun to use and had the most updated software. I still like all the philosophy around Gentoo and might consider using it again. However, at this moment I don’t use it, because I eventually got tired of compiling everything. Alhtough I use Ubuntu in some machines I’m also quite fond of Arch, which somehow reminds me of Gentoo.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:39 am
Use Regen2 I haven’t started stabilizing much, but I am trying to get things out faster. Ultimately it’s going to come down to how many people are willing to hack on the git tree, I can’t maintain 15k packages by myself.
lot of work needs to be done yet. but it is usable.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:44 am
Feel free to jump over to Arch Linux land. We have very up-to-date packages and you can source compile them instead if you want :) (plus making ‘packages’ is easier on Arch than any other distro i’ve tried)
February 28th, 2009 at 9:03 am
If you really want everything ‘cutting edge’ go with Arch. Though after reading one of the comments above, a lot of soft in my Arch is ‘unstable’ according to Gentoo. For example, I just installed XFCE 4.6 and there are a few errors :- like desktop icons showing weird behaviour and similar things in KDE 4.2. Again, my Ubuntu XFCE desktop has crashed and does not start even after reinstalling. Such things won’t happen with Debian and perhaps with Gentoo. I think there should be separate tags for released and bug-free software. Gentoo is a great concept and gets you the benefits of compiling without building from scratch and downloading tarballs. Gentoo could do with releasing just the made ebuilds in the released sections. I think it needs a bit more love and support.
March 1st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Gentoo dying….no, I think the newness is just wearing off. Just because there are fewer developers does not mean the end, the community is likely to just become smaller, leaner, and more self-sufficient as only the most core users hang around. Also, there is liable to be changes in the philosophy and structure in order to make maintenance easier and more efficient, as illustrated by some of the current work of Daniel Robbins.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:44 pm
@neo there is no such thing as ‘bug-free’ software. if it’s bug free it’s not software.
gentoo’s slow at stabilizing and releasing new code these days. They are too cautious if you ask me.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:09 am
I followed the same path. Enjoyed being on the cutting edge with Gentoo event if it required a lot of manual tweaking. I learned a lot. Then I noticed that my config was slowly running behind what was available with other distros. I switched to OpenSUSE on the desktop. I still have a server running Gentoo.
Also Portage was a great idea but it failed to evolve in any significant way. Lately I found NixOS (http://nixos.org/nixos/) that is really what Portage could/should have evolved into. I can’t wait for NixOS to be more mature to start using it on a production system.
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
I think you and some of the commenters make a valid point about being too cautious with stable. Perhaps the criteria for “stable” need to change. I mean, when I tell people about Gentoo, I do sell “cutting edge” as one of its selling points, and I hate seeing that become any less true. Though, in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with running a bunch of unstable packages as they come up. I just don’t run the whole system unstable. The one time I tried to switch to that… eesh… The system died before the compiling was done.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:58 am
I really like having a rock stable base and being able to activate just the testing packages I want.
That’s what Gentoo does for me.
I don’t want to test everything. Instead there are a few things I really want to follow (for example KDE 4 – so much for “few” :) ).
With Gentoo I can decide exactly what I want to test, and to be frank, writing an ebuild for a program with standard build process isn’t that painful, and only one of us has to do it.
To do that I applied for sunrise access yesterday, since I wanted to add an ebuild and didn’t want to wait for the main devs to add it.
Why don’t you join sunrise, too, and help getting some ebuilds from bugzilla into the tree?
-> http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise/wiki/HowToCommit
It takes just about half an hour to read their guidelines and get an existing ebuild ready for inclusion. You also get very good help in #gentoo-sunrise to polish your ebuild.
As soon as the ebuild is ready, you just have to wait for one of the sunrise devs to be at home (scarabeus: europe evening), so they can create your account, and you can commit away.
April 2nd, 2009 at 4:47 am
I bet you anything my gentoo system is more cutting edge than any ubuntu system on the planet.
Bugzilla is where its at if you want to help out.