Gentoo is a choice

Gentoo is freedom of choice. We said this so often that we no longer want to repeat it again. However, following the recent skirmishes in the mailing list, in which I also took part, and among the free software community as a whole, I believe that repetition is appropriate in this case.

Okay, be patient a little, I'm going to talk about systemd . This is not a systemd post, but without mentioning it, this message probably will not be worthwhile. So let's talk about why I am raising this topic.

How did we get here?

Systemd caused a wave of indignation in the Linux community, and most of the popular distros chose it. This created a vacuum for those who very much did not want to get involved with him, and many of the discontented switched to Gentoo (Slackware became another major alternative), and soon some of them began to make their own contribution. Demographic growth has created some friction in the community, and it seems to me that it caused us to focus on what is our peculiarity?

Where are we now?

Each distr occupies a certain niche - this is a kind of mission, which gives meaning to its existence. This is what the community of supporters unites around. When the distr loses its purpose, it dies or it has a fork, it is due to the flight of supporters or lost profits. Goals may evolve over time, but they continue to bring everyone together.

For many years we have been striving to give the user the opportunity to choose. Sometimes, we give him the opportunity to shoot his leg, and sometimes we give them the opportunity to spoil everything so much that they don’t want to figure it out. To limit the choice means for us to go against our own values, even if we do not have enough hands to support all the variety of possibilities.

The result of this philosophy is all that we see around. Gentoo is a distribution that can be used to create the most popular Linux OS (ChromeOS), and that used on NASDAQ servers ^[1] . Not surprisingly, Gentoo supports at least 7 types of device managers and 4 initialization systems.

And yet, many in the Linux community do not understand us properly. They confuse our commitment to choosing one of these opportunities. Gentoo does not choose winners . We are not opponents of systemd , even though we don’t like many of them and it’s quite simple to do it during installation so that systemd not present anywhere in the file system. We are also not supporters of systemd , despite the fact that we (IMHO) give you to experience one of the best and uncomplicated systemd environments. We are a distro in which users and developers with different interests come together in order to use various tools, collaborate and work together to get the system we need at the output.

Where do we want to be?

I see Gentoo in good health, where we all have our preferences, share experiences, but speak in a united front so that the user has the opportunity to make his choice. The choice of default settings will always generate conflicts, let's take them not as a given, but just a convenient tool. We will reasonably maintain the default settings, but this is not a litmus test by which we evaluate mainteners and packages. In the end, the criticism is to our advantage, we can take inspiration from it for the right decisions that otherwise would not have been noticed.

When we stop putting Gentoo before a choice and instead turn freedom of choice into an integral part of Gentoo, then we are again on the right track.

1. ↑ How Linux mastered Wall Street