I remember when I first started using Gentoo (back in the Gentoo 1.4 days), the community activity was just amazing. Each and every day or week, there was always something new and exciting going on in the Gentoo community. I looked forward to the GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) coming out each week, so I could try to catch up on what I might have missed or not even realized was happening. Sure, the other Linux users would say, “Gentoo, that’s for ricers.”, but at least Gentoo was still regularly mentioned in a fairly positive manner.
Fast forward to today. What happened to my beloved Gentoo? I’m not necessarily referring to the distro… not yet anyway. What happened to the Gentoo community and the thriving young developer community?
The exciting buzzing Gentoo community seems to have fizzled out. Surely, they haven’t all switched to Ubuntu have they? The number of posts in the Gentoo forums seems to have steadily decreased lately. The #gentoo irc channel doesn’t have half the users it used to. Gentoo Planet used to contain dozens of posts every day from different all of the different developers. Now, sometimes a day goes by without even one post. Worst of all, the front page of Gentoo shows a two month old GWN as being the latest news.
Surely my beloved Gentoo isn’t destined to die a slow painful death, is it?