Gentoo Linux marked 2025 with notable progress in development and infrastructure, despite operating on just $12,066 in income. The open-source distribution added new developers, expanded hardware support, and enhanced community resources, all driven by volunteers. This retrospective highlights the project's resilience amid financial constraints.
Gentoo Linux, known for its customizable source-based approach, released a year-end retrospective for 2025 that showcased steady advancements. The project added four new developers to its team, boosting the main repository's activity with a high volume of commits and contributions from 421 external authors—a 2.4% increase from the prior year. Financially, the Gentoo Foundation reported $12,066 in income, primarily from donations, which funded server maintenance and developer stipends. As noted in Phoronix coverage, this modest budget underscores the efficiency of Gentoo's volunteer-driven model, where passion often substitutes for funding.
Key infrastructure shifts included migrating financial operations to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) for better stability and moving development from GitHub to Codeberg to promote decentralization and privacy. Gentoo also added a second build server at Hetzner in Germany, speeding up the creation of installation stages, ISO images, and binary packages. By year's end, the repository held 31,663 ebuilds, with mirrors hosting 89GB of x86_64 binary packages to appeal to users seeking faster setups.
Technically, Gentoo advanced RISC-V support by optimizing toolchains and ebuilds for this emerging architecture, popular in embedded and high-performance computing. It also improved compatibility with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), refining installation and package handling. Programming tools saw upgrades, including stabilization of GCC 14 through the Modern C initiative and KDE enhancements like stable Plasma 6.5.4.
Community efforts flourished, with the GURU repository aiding new developers and the wiki expanding to 9,647 pages and over 766,731 edits. Looking ahead, Gentoo plans to feature its binary package advancements at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels from January 31 to February 1. These steps reflect Gentoo's commitment to balancing customization with accessibility, sustaining its niche in the open-source landscape despite competition from more user-friendly distributions.
