2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026! – Gentoo Linux

2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026! – Gentoo Linux
2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026!
Jan 5, 2026
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Featured changes and news
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.