I joined Gentoo over 15 years ago. I was a university student back then. I had lots of free time and energy. I was enthusiastic about novelties, and wanted to push them into Gentoo. Back then, bleeding edge was what I wanted out of it. Today, I have different priorities. I have less time to deal with breakage, and I want my Gentoo stable. I’m becoming somewhat wary of changes, and I find preserving what’s great about Gentoo more important than adding new stuff. And what’s really great about Gentoo is that it can accommodate both personas.
Gentoo has changed over these 15 years too. However, its core principles remained the same, and only recently I realized what they really are. The core value of Gentoo is respect. All the building from source, all the choice and flexibility, and all the community building power is because of this: Gentoo respects you. It doesn’t try to waggle the dog, it just does what you tell it do. It may warn you that you’re having a very bad idea and nobody will help you if you proceed, but in the end, you are free to pursue it.
However, respect goes beyond providing a working distribution for our users. It’s in providing a reasonably vanilla development environment for software authors. It’s in submitting patches upstream to ensure that everyone gets bug fixes. But most importantly, it lies in appreciating the human craft rather than taking the easy way out. And I believe that rejecting LLMs is important to keeping the Gentoo community whole and respected.
These days, I mostly handle Python packaging in Gentoo, build Distribution Kernels and a variety of odds and ends. I try to balance involvement in interesting high-level projects and the necessary ground work. I am employed at Quansight PBC where my work also primarily orients around Python packaging, but involving conda-forge and upstream work; it does not conflict with my Gentoo duties.