For all the contempt with which they were treated, ricers loved Gentoo and were enthusiastic about GNU/Linux, and (based on browsing through their forum posts over time) most of them eventually got a handle on reality and stopped ricing. I think the problem with Gentoo is that it attracted too many geeks (sometimes via the Way of Rice) with egos tightly linked to notions of technical prowess, and not enough human beings with social skills.

I left the community fairly early in its decline, precisely because the geeks running the show would not (and STILL will not, in many cases) admit that any decline was taking place. Low-status users like myself were asking, "hey, what's going on here, it feels like Gentoo is dying", and developers would snap back, "bla bla bla, everyone always says Gentoo is dying, get over it, look at this technical evidence that it isn't..." etc. etc.

For a couple of years I visited now and then, and installed Gentoo for brief test-drives (portage is still a beautiful thing), but always it was the same: things were getting steadily worse, and the worse they got, the louder the developers and veterans insisted that everything was fine.

The rejection of Daniel's offer was the last straw. 90% of users wanted him back: the alpha geeks' refusal to acknowledge this and step aside demonstrated once and for all that they were there to compare virtual penis sizes and defend their technical turf rather than lead a free software community. Technical skills are great for dealing with software, but the great distros (of which Gentoo used to be one) are not merely software: they're communities of people using software, and to lead those you need social skills.

The ricers weren't always paragons of maturity and communication either, but they were better than the geeks who are killing Gentoo. The artwork at the bottom of the http://funroll-loops.info/ home page turned out to be prophetic: down goes the ship, while the crew scream at everyone about how it's still a technically superior ship to all the ones that aren't sinking.

I used Ubuntu for a while, but I am back with Gentoo. I am sure others will also return back to Gentoo:

Gentoo offers for me the best way to work with Linux.

- I need to be able to streamline my system for special scientific software.

- I want to understand my system

Still, even with reading the manuals, installing some programmes seems too difficult. My feeling is that the online manuals are often not entirely up to date. Nobody to blame, it is too much work, and other distro's still do not have such good online manuals. That said, I often have the feeling that the great online manuals reflect a great history, but that there is some decline.

I wished some software would be easier to install, such as KDE4 and programmes such as KDENLIVE and OPENMOVIEEDITOR.

It is difficult to believe Gentoo is not in decline given that KDE4 is still so difficult to install. And even compile Gnome does not just work with "emerge gnome", it kept me tinkering with failed dependencies. The package management needs to be improved, or otherwise people will just leave this distro.

I start gentoo using 2005 and found that it is better that other dis. Redhat Suse Ubantu.. all need bins from them. Once if the dis not working, one have to rebuild the whole disk.
I have my 2007 on my amd duel core and swithing gcc glibs and kde and and so on. Never a big rebuild again. I did crashed the usr subdirectory, rebuild with 2007 stage3 have to switch off autoclean and recomplied all and restore full. At the same time I am still using the web browser at another login.
Those spinoffs like "jackass project" and "sabayon" are nice dis. I can install and switch to gentoo fast. Jackass can boot my "transmeta" cpu. sabayon looks pretty.
Look if there is any spinoffs from other dis. that works for specific user?

I got started with gentoo because I was wanting a highly tweaked system and I wanted to ride the bleeding edge. I admit that gentoo has had problems, but I am working on seeing what I can do to help fix some of those problems.

Hi,

Gentoo represents the best of Linux and BSD and thats why Gentoo is so special !

Things may slow down a bit for sometime. However, in todays flat world there will be a turn around !

thanks
Saifi Khan

Twincling Technology Foundation
Hyderabad AP, India
http://www.twincling.org/

The best thing I personally love about gentoo is that through gentoo, I learned how linux functions. The documentation of gentoo is not only useful to configure your machine, it is useful to learn linux. Before that, I have used Slackware and SuSE, with no impressive results. Some time ago,I slightly believed the speculations like "gentoo is dying" and tried out Ubuntu. This was really a bad decision - it didn't work for me (sorry Ubuntu users, that's the truth). After 3 days, my amd64 was running gentoo happily again. The system is rock stable, easy to configure, damn fast, has great instant support from the devs, has a big community, etc.
I think all this is marketing - a worker for distro "X" writes a critical article about other distributions just for profit, then a worker for distro "Y" does the same and so on - this is how the world functions. But at the end of the day, gentoo is a great distribution, just like some of the other distros. It's just that gentoo devs do not write articles of this type about other distros.

i switched from LFS to Gentoo 2 years ago and have been very happy. LFS was a great learning experience and gave me a good background when it came to using Gentoo. granted Gentoo has had some problems of late but i am happy with the state of portage quite frankly because i don't use kde. furthermore judging portage based on the status of one package seems a bit harsh as it is quite a project to package kde. anyway i'm happy with gentoo and intend to keep using it. thanks.

I tried Gentoo about 4 or 5 years back and that time I thought let me try with stage 1 but I didn't succeed. Later, after 6 month I tried it again, this time I simply went with stage 3 and it was a success.That day and today,

I have tried Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEl, Mandrake, DSL, Puppy and I don't regret that I had selected Gentoo. It is kind of distro that doesn't need frequent releases. Something missing ? make your own overlay and you write an ebuild. Yes, this is true for other distors too but the way gentoo presents config file and utilites it makes difference.

Still I remember that day how happy I was to have first Gentoo install and I don't feel any different yet as I am still using Gentoo as a proud user.

OpenSource is made from community and Gentoo has great community as good developers.

"Once you use and understand Gentoo, its a piece of cake"

Gentoo for me started to decline when Robbins left. I don't care what anyone says of the man, he is and was Gentoo. Since his departure, Gentoo as a distro has declined steadily. At least, this is my view of it.
When I was running Gentoo (from 2002 to 2007) it was great. Except the last few years were starting to show troubles.

I left simply because of the way they treated Robbins. I don't care what people say. Robbins was the founder of Gentoo. At least show more respect. Just look how it's going without his guidance.. It's going pretty much no where.

I started using LFS to learn more about OS development and still use it on my secondary machine. On my main Machine I use FreeBSD 64bit and PC-BSD x86 in a dual boot, (mainly for development purposes). FreeBSD for me has been simply awesome. I used it before Gentoo, and now I'm thinking about contributing to the Gentoo fbsd project. . . I need more time to learn though..

--Cheers.

Quality control sinks to the abyss (unless the release of a major distro after 14 months is not considered a major event), disorganization skyrockets to the sky (no updates for months on the website, no existence of any pragmatic timeline).
Why did I look forward for the new distro? Because I had a new rig for computations and I wanted to get most of it.
I imagine the same negligency applied to security updates etc.
Congratulations to whomever is responsible for transforming gentoo a really inspiring distro to a one with no sence of organization, planning and security
Ex gentoo user

Actually, I don't see any reason for this FUD, so I won't come to paranoic assertions...
Well... I still use Gentoo, Portage is still one of the (if not THE) package management system where you find a great number of packages (12649 for x86) and I really don't waste time if I run an update every 15 days during office hours.
What a pity about KDE4, but this is one package, this is not symptomatic of the whole decline of Gentoo, stop kidding...

My box main WAS Gentoo. This past year, there have been a lot of problems with my 'emerge'ing new and updated packages. I'd pretty much given up and gone to Arch. That is, until the dreaded KDE 4 hit their mirrors. I have had nothing but problems with it. So now I'm mostly using Sidux, Debian, and one of my boxes has FC8 (the one I'm using right now, incidentally). I happen to think FC8 is/has been WAY underrated, and it may eclipse my love for FC6. I have never really liked the 'buntus, with the exception of Mythbuntu; just personal preference, I guess (please don't flame me!).

I think you have some numeric errors. I'd like to speak to those, plus the general perception here. Of the Linux distributions I've seen, they tend to have explosive growth in the early years if they are going to be successful, followed by much longer periods of slower but sustained growth.

Firstly, in measuring the size of the tree simply by snapshot tarball, you neglect that we removed all of the $PKG/files/digest-* files at the end of January this year, as the final removal of the old Manifest1 system. This saved 3MiB in the snapshots overnight when it was done. We also used to permit much larger patches in the tree, and they are now on the mirrors instead. It used to be any patches larger than 400k had to be on the mirrors, now the limit is 20k, and we'd like to reduce it to 10k. Right now, there is 1.8MiB in patches larger the limit, which would be a reasonable saving, but not anywhere near as much as it used to be years ago.

I'd like to see somebody dig out old data and chart the number of packages that Gentoo has had over time, with markers for when things like X and KDE went to split versions. Plot it both as absolute graph, and as a relative graph

Secondly, there is something badly wrong in your counting of the developer tally.

Your 'developers retired' column adds up to 633.
However, if you count the number of active and retired developers, there are only 654 developers in history of Gentoo. 407 developers are presently retired, and 247 are listed as active. By the 654 total, less your 633 loss, we should only have 22 non-retired developers, which is VERY far from the truth.

Your join counts are also too low. Here's the join data pulled out of LDAP:
9 gentooJoin: 2001
78 gentooJoin: 2002
87 gentooJoin: 2003
143 gentooJoin: 2004
103 gentooJoin: 2005
70 gentooJoin: 2006
45 gentooJoin: 2007
27 gentooJoin: 2008
It's off by 4-5 developers for exact year, but the total is accurate because if they left and came back, the join date is their most recent return. It also adds up to 562, as there are about 90 old developers that we don't have join dates for.

I don't have LDAP data recorded for when old developers retired, I've got one data source starting at about mid-sept 2007 for recording the exact dates, but nothing from early on. Please also note that it's only in the last 2 years that we started heavily retiring for inactivity.

How were you counting data from bugzilla? Did you just go by the summary line, or did you read each bug? There is no consistency in bugzilla between reuse of a bug for recruitment and retirement. Sometimes they are seperate bugs, sometimes not. The bugs might also get reused for disciplinary issues. Not all the bugs are public either, because sometimes the developer has their private info in there (like birthday or real-world contact info).

I started with Gentoo in 2003, after using Debian and Fedora. Quite frankly, I wanted to learn more about Linux and wanted to use up-to-date software.

At the time, I did not want to use Debian as its packages marked "stable" were 2-3 releases behind, sometimes missing the new or desired features that made some of the software desirable.

Fedora frustrated me with software maintenance, because I was used to APT. I tried APT for RPM and was hooked for a bit. However, 2 or 3 extra "non-official" repositories later and my system hosed with each core Fedora update (GCC, libraries, etc).

Gentoo was great. Though the installation was difficult (I always did stage 1 installs), I learned a tremendous amount about how linux functioned and what it did behind the scenes. I appreciated how easy startup and shutdown services were. Configuring X was a bit of a pain, but I noticed speed differences between Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo on the same hardware. Gentoo was always faster. Something was also uber-geeky about watching software compile. I felt like my computer was doing something.

However, as time went on, I got tired of having to wait for the compilations. I just wanted to have the software and have it work. Compilation issues crept in every so often. Then, there was a decision to "only support stage 3 installations". Well... why do that, just to turn around and have to recompile the whole system from scratch several times just to get everything from i686 to my Athlon64's capabilities, including SSE, etc. Ooops... I missed a USE flag. Need to recompile.

Ubuntu came out, then Kubuntu, then Xubuntu. I jumped on Xubuntu, because I was using XFCe more and more in Gentoo as my lightweight desktop.

I now use OS X and Windows XP (in Parallels, for work stuff) simply because it works. I like Apple hardware. I like the iLife suite. DVD playing and everything else works out of the box. I have only had to add WMV and Divx codecs, along with Flash. Otherwise, all else is smooth.

System usage became more important to me that tweaking and fooling around. I have to work. I want to play. I would rather the system function than have to figure out why sound doesn't work for my $60 PC game.