Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.
↫ Gentoo’s 2025 retrospective
We don’t talk about Gentoo very often, and I consider that a good thing. Gentoo is just Gentoo, doing its thing, seemingly unaffected by the shifting sands of any community or world events. Gentoo will always just be Gentoo, and we’re all better for it.
The past year brought a ton of improvements to both Gentoo as a distribution and as a wider project and community. Because of Github’s insistence to shove “AI” into everything, the project is currently moving to Codeberg instead, EAPI 9 has been approved and finalised, there are now weekly Gentoo images for WSL, the project welcomed several new developers, they’ve got a second build server, and so much more. Sadly, the project did have to drop the hppa and sparc architectures down a peg due to a lack of hardware, which hurts my soul a tiny bit but is entirely understandable, of course.
Gentoo is doing great, and I doubt it’ll ever not be doing great. Gentoo is just Gentoo.
Gentoo is one my favorites of all time. Wish I still had patience to try it out.
Thought, it is also great as a “meta” distribution. For a long while Google’s Chomemium OS for example was based on Gentoo. It is extremely easy to build your own custom distributions (or easier than say debian or redhat)
I keep my pc and two home servers with Gentoo (a NAS/Jellyfin and another with mailcow) and I must say: no breaks in years.
And yes, they do demand effort at every single update, don’t dare to do unassisted updates with a Gentoo unless you enjoy BDSM. And in return, you get a degree of control and fine tunning of each package that is simple marvelous to have.
HPPA and Sparc are not dropped entirely, they are just “destabilised” which means the packages generally haven’t been so thoroughly tested but should still build and run successfully in most cases. Whenever i was running Gentoo i was using so called “unstable” packages anyway as being on the bleeding edge is part of the appeal of Gentoo.
Generally the people who would want to run these architectures are capable of doing their own testing and minor bugfixing if needed.
I’ve played with Gentoo on almost all of the architectures it supports although just for fun, the main reason you’d even have this kind of exotic hardware is to run and learn about its native OS. If you want to run Linux there is much newer, cheaper, more performant and less power hungry hardware available.