Gentoo Proud
Just about two weeks back, the article “ The Decline of Gentoo Linux” created an rippling avalance of Gentoo scantiness that caromed into an an awkwardly tied Cnet article of Gentoo vs. Ubuntu.
Distrowatch Weekly recalled attention to the original article several days later and amplified the lightly trolling post. The past two weeks Gentoo has taken a beating.
First Thomas Capricelli (a Gentoo user) voiced his disappointment that KDE-4.1 is not in the tree yet.
This has become a big issue because 4.1 essentially marks KDE out of beta and because it has been more than a month of KDE-4.1’s official release. Marcus Hanwell (part of Gentoo’s KDE team) noted three weeks ago that the KDE-4.1 delay is partly do to Portage’s new EAPI 2 standard and how KDE-4.1 can be multi-slotted. Jan Kundrát, another Gentoo KDE team member, points out the new spec as well as that several of Gentoo’s KDE team left recently.
The gong really sounded on an article last week not because of it’s content but rather it’s title. This article generated alot of unwanted buzz and stopped a few hearts (including yours truely). “Gentoo Linux Cancels Distribution” the article was largely optimistic though, and was probably just written by someone new to Linux definitions.
Justin Dugger also pondered “Is Gentoo Dying? and Loren Bandiera asks “What happened to Gentoo?“
The “ The Decline of Gentoo Linux” loosely posited Gentoo’s decline by three criteria: long delay of installation media releases, KDE-4.1 not being in the portage tree yet, and the project’s fewer developers. Criteria hardly indicating his assertion that Gentoo is barely holding it together.
I’ve used Gentoo for one and a half years now and I have no evidence that Gentoo is declining. Gentoo’s package system almost always has the newest version of a package I need in the portage tree. Gentoo recently has changed it’s voting method so it is more likely the most experienced, most active developers make the decisions as part of the Council that best influence Gentoo. I also still see a good volume of postings in Gentoo’s forums, and the Gentoo-wiki.
Gentoo is in a change of flux more than usual (I believe) because of the new leadership structure. And I think you can argue here that there is a warning signal going off on Gentoo’s decentralization. Many people choose to create their own projects. But is this decentralization going to cause an unraveling of Gentoo? I don’t think so.
Gentoo is a hobbyist’s distrobution so fluxes are expected, to predict it’s demise by those three criteria is a loose exposition at best. The Gentoo Council seems to be more homegenous than I have known it for the last year and a half. So I look to a greater Gentoo later. Gentoo is a great distrobution and I plan to use it for a long time.
