OSNews

Hmm, it is still among the biggest distributions though. It is just that no other distribution is so release-less as gentoo is, which again results in little news. Arch Linux comes close, and has without a doubt received some gentoo-refugees fleeing the former dev-wars.

But things has cooled down since then, and drobbins is still around in gentoo-land, though he isn't a dev anymore.

"The little perks that Gentoo offers are offered better by other distributions, in a less chaotic / unstable way."

I find this incredibly hard to believe. Can I install, say, MPlayer on one of such distributions with only those features of MPlayer that I need?

Maybe Gentoo is irrelevant to some people, but it is definitely relevant to people who care about what gets installed on their systems.

Does it really matter? In most cases, shouldn't software just be compiled with all the features it was designed to have? In those cases that it really absolutely doesn't, you can always rebuild from the source RPM, which is far more configurable than silly USE flags anyways.

And why would you ever build software WITHOUT support for something unless there's a security risk, or you only have 20 MB of disk space?

There are so many people in the Gentoo community who seem to have these insane obsessions, like only using GTK+ programs because the 10 MB of Qt libraries is too much, or using ancient underpowered Window managers and text-mode only programs because they can't stand having more than 5% of their 4 gigs of RAM filled. I think some of those people need to go into therapy.