I had a conversation with a friend recently about Gentoo Linux. Although I haven’t posted much about Gentoo Linux or my history with it, I will say that I have been using Gentoo for about six years now. It was my main development environment most of that time. Currently, I consider myself to be a Mac OS X user and a fan of Gentoo.

As a fan of Gentoo, I am quite distressed about their current direction. Distrowatch recently had a very good summary of the current issues, but doesn’t really place emphasis on the fact that this is a problem that has been around for a while now. It has been relatively common knowledge amongst Linux folk since at the least August of 2006 when this article was published. Personally, I think the first signs that there were issues was the website redesign that went no where.

There are several reasons for these problems, but the primary one is, in my opinion, people like Ciaran McCreesh. He is absolutely the Terrel Owens of the Gentoo Linux team, only less talented. Although he has contributed code and some actually good ideas to the Gentoo projects that he’s worked on, he is by far a net negative contributer. To put it lightly, he rubs people the wrong way. At best, he is polarizing, meaning that people either love him or hate him. However, from what I’ve seen most people just get pissed off at him. He’s been petulant and annoying almost from the very beginning. Almost every topic he posted on in the forums ended up like this one. Recent events seem to indicate that he’s still at it.

Compound people issues with a general lack of direction and a comparatively new hot thing in Ubuntu and you end up with the decline of a once great distribution. Being a developer on a Linux distribution is like most development jobs - primarily maintenance or mundane implementation. There are a lot of very un-sexy jobs that just need to be done efficiently and with high quality. The people who actually do these jobs tend to also be the people that don’t put up with the kind of idiotic crap that has been plaguing Gentoo for some time now.