For one, it is largely responsible for supporting and maintaining OpenRC on Linux, and is often the go-to-distro that other distros piggyback off its OpenRC configs and scripts.

Being probably the biggest source-based distribution, it provides invaluable work on developing a system which can be compiled from source that other distro maintainers can look to for guidance.

Portage is also one of the best package managers I have used. It takes into account packages that need to be rebuilt when build dependencies also update. On Arch Linux, I sometimes have to manually reinstall a package like qt6ct when KDE dependencies update. Portage takes care of this automatically when doing a deep update.

In a time when many dystopian laws and surveillance tools like age verification and facial recognition are being enforced, we do not have many distros left that could provide security and privacy measures to bypass these issues by supporting alternative tools. Tools like systemd, which has merged the pull request to include a birth date field in preparation for age verification, tend to develop a monopoly on most distros because of the limited capacity and free time developers have to support alternatives while trying to keep up with other projects. I’m not trying to bash systemd, though, but the fact it is the most dominant init system on most major distros creates a problem for users, especially activists and journalists, who need to protect their identity in this increasingly threatening and dangerous capitalist hellscape.

Gentoo supports many, many packages. It provides the ability to create a system using various combination of tools coming from the GNU, BSD, systemd, and other families. While other distros like Arch may also provide some alternatives, not many distros come close to scale that Gentoo offers. If Gentoo cannot survive, it would be a massive blow to FOSS and our technological sovereignty overall.

Probably the worsening economy.

I’m giving Gentoo $10/month now.

There will soon be a decade of weeks where decades happen.

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I use marginalia search and wiby to find “small web” content. Good for finding more human created resources deeply buried in most search indexes.