I’ve been using Gentoo Linux for several years now and have been growing increasingly frustrated. There has been a steady decline in quality assurance. The core utils team has repeatedly made changes that cause widespread breakages without warning. Many of the ebuilds languish without active maintainers. The Bugzilla database is growing rapidly out of control. There seems to be anamosity amongst the developers as they have been struggling to keep valuable developers (so devrel has failed horribly). Most importantly, the council has decided they don’t want to following the rules set forth for them (lack of attendence at meetings requires an election). The only really promising Gentoo project is the Sunrise project (users submit ebuilds), but even this comes off as an attempt to solve the problem of a lack of developers.

The problems go on and on, most of which stem from the fact that the organization has greatly strayed from it’s original purpose: source compilable meta-distribution. There has been a large focus on the management and increasingly less focus on Getting Things Done. This is usually what causes the death of a project.

Every so often, I venture into DistroWatch to see what has been popular. Most of the time, I don’t see any promise amongst the distributions to provide the same quality and features that I fell in love with when I found Gentoo. Almost every visit meets with a decrease in Gentoo popularity. Recently I have been watching the rise of a distro called Sabayon. It’s based on Gentoo and seemed to have promise.

Upon further inspection, Sabayon is nothing more than a pre-packaged Gentoo overlay. That’s right, you can check out the overlay from a Gentoo install and quickly change to a Sabayon install. This basically does not impress me. So I continue the search.

Arch looks promising but their application tree is very sparse. I used to use Slackware, and would happily switch back if there was something like an up-to-date repository for packages. The “current” repository is nice but the lack of dependencies with the package maintainer could make things very tricky.

I refuse to use a Debian or RedHat based distribution unless there is something very compelling, like Portage and eutils, to draw my attention away. So if anyone out there has an suggestions, feel free to share.