Back Original

Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

Gentoo Fireworks 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 in numbers

Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.

GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, has shown a decrease in activity. We have had 5813 commits in 2025, compared to 7517 in 2024. The number of contributors to GURU has increased, from 241 in 2024 to 264 in 2025. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!

Activity has slowed down somewhat on the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, where we’ve had 20763 bug reports created in 2025, compared to 26123 in 2024. The number of resolved bugs shows the same trend, with 22395 in 2025 compared to 25946 in 2024. The current values are closer to those of 2023 - but clearly this year we fixed more than we broke!

New developers

In 2025 we have gained four new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:

  1. Jay Faulkner (jayf): Jay joined us in March from Washington, USA. In Gentoo and open source in general, he’s very much involved with OpenStack; further, he’s a a big sports fan, mainly ice hockey and NASCAR racing, and already long time Gentoo enthusiast.

  2. Michael Mair-Keimberger (mm1ke): Michael joined us finally in June from Austria, after already amassing over 9000 commits beforehand. Michael works as Network Security Engineer for a big System House in Austria and likes to go jogging regulary and hike the mountains on weekends. In Gentoo, he’s active in quality control and cleanup.

  3. Alexander Puck Neuwirth (apn-pucky): Alexander, a physics postdoc, joined us in July from Italy. At the intersection of Computer Science, Linux, and high-energy physics, he already uses Gentoo to manage his code and sees it as a great development environment. Beyond sci-physics, he’s also interested in continuous integration and RISC-V.

  4. Jaco Kroon (jkroon): Jaco signed up as developer in October from South Africa. He is a system administrator who works for a company that runs and hosts multiple Gentoo installations, and has been around in Gentoo since 2003! Among our packages, Asterisk is one example of his interests.

Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2025 in Gentoo.

Distribution-wide Initiatives

  • Goodbye Github, welcome Codeberg: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that.

  • EAPI 9: The wording for EAPI 9, a new version of the specifications for our ebuilds, has been finalized and approved, and support in Portage is complete. New features in EAPI 9 include pipestatus for better error handling, an edo function for printing a command and executing it, a cleaner environment for the build processes, and the possibility of declaring a default EAPI for the profile directory tree.

  • Event presence: At FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Gentoo has been present once more with a stand, this year together with Flatcar Container Linux (which is based on Gentoo). Naturally we had mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famous self-compiled buttons… Further, we have been present at FrOSCon 2025 in Sankt Augustin with workshops Gentoo installation and configuration and Writing your own ebuilds. Last but not least, the toolchain team has represented Gentoo at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025 in Porto.

  • SPI migration: The migration of our financial structure to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is continuing slowly but steadily, with expense payments following the moving intake. If you are donating to Gentoo, and especially if you are a recurrent donor, please change your payments to be directed to SPI; see also our donation web page.

  • Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., is grateful to the speakers and participants of four online workshops in 2025 in German and English, on topics as varied as EAPI 9 or GnuPG and LibrePGP. We are looking forward to more exciting events in 2026.

Architectures

  • RISC-V bootable QCOW2: Same as for amd64 and arm64, also for RISC-V we now have ready-made bootable disk images in QCOW2 format available for download on our mirrors in a console and a cloud-init variant. The disk images use the rv64gc instruction set and the lp64d ABI, and can be booted via the standard RISC-V UEFI support.

  • Gentoo for WSL: We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that’s something we intend to fix soon.

  • hppa and sparc destabilized: Since we do not have hardware readily available anymore and these architectures mostly fill a retrocomputing niche, stable keywords have been dropped for both hppa (PA-RISC) and sparc. The architectures will remain supported with testing keywords.

  • musl with locales: Localization support via the package sys-apps/musl-locales has been added by default to the Gentoo stages based on the lightweight musl C library.

Packages

  • GPG alternatives: Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing. At the moment, the original, unmodified GnuPG, the FreePG fork/patchset as also used in many other Linux distributions (Fedora, Debian, Arch, …), and the re-implementation Sequoia-PGP with Chameleon are available. In practice, implementation details vary between the providers, and while GnuPG and FreePG are fully supported, you may still encounter difficulties when selecting Sequoia-PGP/Chameleon.

  • zlib-ng support: We have introduced initial support for using zlib-ng and minizip-ng in compatibility mode in place of the reference zlib libraries.

  • System-wide jobserver: We have created steve, an implementation of a token-accounting system-wide jobserver, and introduced experimental global jobserver support in Portage. Thanks to that, it is now possible to globally control the concurrently running build job count, correctly accounting for parallel emerge jobs, make and ninja jobs, and other clients supporting the jobserver protocol.

  • NGINX rework: The packaging of the NGINX web server and reverse proxy in Gentoo has undergone a major improvement, including also the splitting off of several third-party modules into separate packages.

  • C++ based Rust bootstrap: We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah’s Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations.

  • Ada and D bootstrap: Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge.

  • FlexiBLAS: Gentoo has adopted the new FlexiBLAS wrapper library as the primary way of switching implementations of the BLAS numerical algorithm library at runtime. This automatically also provides ABI stability for linking programs and bundles the specific treatment of different BLAS variants in one place.

  • Python: In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.13. Additionally we have also Python 3.14 available stable - fully up to date with upstream.

  • KDE upgrades: As of end of 2025, in Gentoo stable we have KDE Gear 25.08.3, KDE Frameworks 6.20.0, and KDE Plasma 6.5.4. As always, Gentoo testing follows the newest upstream releases (and using the KDE overlay you can even install from git sources).

Physical and Software Infrastructure

  • Additional build server: A second dedicated build server, hosted at Hetzner Germany, has been added to speed up the generation of installation stages, iso and qcow2 images, and binary packages.

  • Documentation: Documentation work has made constant progress on wiki.gentoo.org. The Gentoo Handbook had some particularly useful updates, and the documentation received lots of improvements and additions from the many active volunteers. There are currently 9,647 pages on the wiki, and there have been 766,731 edits since the project started. Please help Gentoo by contributing to documentation!

Finances of the Gentoo Foundation

  • Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations.
  • Expenses: Our expenses in 2025 were, program services (e.g. hosting costs) $8,332, management & general (accounting) $1,724, fundraising $905, and non-operating (depreciation expenses) $10,075.
  • Balance: We have $104,831 in the bank as of July 1, 2025 (which is when our fiscal year 2026 starts for accounting purposes). The Gentoo Foundation FY2025 financial statement is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
  • Transition to SPI: The Foundation encourages donors to ensure their ongoing contributions are going to SPI - more than 40 donors had not responded to requests to move the recurring donations by the end of the year. Expenses will be moved to the SPI structure as ongoing income permits.

Thank you!

As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributions for their relentless everyday Gentoo work. If you are interested and would like to help, please join us to make Gentoo even better! As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without its community.