path: root/_posts/2024-01-22-new-year.md

---
title: '2023 in retrospect & happy new year 2024!'
---

<img align="right" height="100" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/2024.png" alt="Gentoo Fireworks">
A Happy New Year 2024 to all of you! We hope you enjoyed the fireworks; we tried to contribute
to these too with the binary package news just before new year! That's not the only thing in Gentoo that
was new in 2023 though; as in the previous years, let's look back and <a href="https://www.gentoo.org/news/2024/01/22/new-year.html">give it a review</a>.

<!--more-->

## Gentoo in numbers

**The number of commits to the [main ::gentoo repository](https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/) 
has remained at an overall high level in 2023**, only slightly lower from *126682* to *121000*. 
The number of commits by external contributors has actually increased from *10492* to *10708*,
now across *404* unique external authors.

**[GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user 
model](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GURU), is still attracting a lot of potential developers.**
We have had *5045* commits in 2023, a slight decrease from *5751* in 2022.
The number of contributors to GURU has increased clearly however, from *134* in 
2022 to *158* in 2023. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and 
greatest software. That's the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!

On **the [Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org](https://bugs.gentoo.org/)**, we've had *24795* bug reports
created in 2023, compared to *26362* in 2022. The number of resolved bugs shows a similar
trend, with *22779* in 2023 compared to *24681* in 2022. Many of these bugs are stabilization
requests; a possible interpretation is that stable Gentoo is becoming more and more current, 
catching up with new software releases.


## New developers

In 2023 we have gained **3 new Gentoo developers**. They are in chronological order:

1. **[Arsen Arsenović (arsen)](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Arsen)**:
   <img align="right" height="45" style="margin-left: 30px;" 
        src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/799095f570d33bcd8bc80df98ce1a4b0?s=45&d=retro">
   Arsen joined up as a developer right at the start of the year in January from Belgrade, Serbia. 
   He's a computer science student
   interested in both maths and music, active in many different free software projects, and has already
   made his impression, e.g., in our emacs and toolchain projects.

2. **[Paul Fox (ris)](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Ris)**:
   After already being very active in our Wiki for some time, Paul joined in March as developer from France. 
   Activity on our wiki and documentation quality will certainly grow much further with his help.

3. **[Petr Vaněk (arkamar)](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Arkamar)**:
   <img align="right" height="45" style="margin-left: 30px;" 
        src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/0b4f038d0a09bb9378ab900dbd40399a?s=45&d=retro">
   Petr Vaněk, from Prague, Czech Republic, joined the ranks of our developers in November. 
   Gentoo user since 2009, craft beer enthusiast, and Linux kernel contributor, he has already been
   active in very diverse corners of Gentoo.


## Featured changes and news

Let's now look at the major improvements and news of 2023 in Gentoo.


### Distribution-wide Initiatives

- <img align="right" height="95" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2023/larry-packages.png">
  <b>Binary package hosting</b>: Gentoo shockingly now also <a href="https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html">provides 
  binary packages</a>, for easier and faster installation! For <b>amd64 and arm64</b>, we’ve got
  a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice 
  to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.
  Also, would you think 9-year old <b>x86-64-v3</b> is still experimental? 
  <a href="https://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64-v3/">We have it already 
  on our mirrors!</a> For all other architectures and ABIs, the binary package files used for building the 
  installation stages (including the build tool chain) are available for download.
  
- **New 23.0 profiles in preparation**:
  A new profile version, i.e. a collection of presets and configurations, is at the moment 
  undergoing internal preparation and testing for all architectures. 
  It's not ready yet, but will integrate more toolchain hardening by default, as well as fix a
  lot of internal inconsistencies. Stay tuned for an announcement with more details in the near future.

- <b>Modern C</b>: Work continues on porting Gentoo, and the Linux userland at large, 
  to [Modern C](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Modern_C_porting). This is a real marathon effort 
  rather than a sprint (just see our [tracker bug](https://bugs.gentoo.org/870412) for it). Our
  efforts together with the same project ongoing in Fedora have already helped many upstreams,
  which have accepted patches in preparation for GCC 14 (that starts to enforce the
  modern language usage).

- <img align="right" height="40" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/logo-froscon.png">
  <b>Event presence</b>: At the <a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/">Free and Open Source 
  Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2023</a>, the <a href="https://froscon.org/en/">Free and Open Source Software 
  Conference (FrOSCon) 2023</a>, and the <a href="https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2023/en/">Chemnitzer
  Linux-Tage (CLT) 2023</a>, Gentoo had a booth with mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famous
  self-compiled buttons.

- <img align="right" height="100" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2022/logo-gsoc.png">
  <b>Google Summer of Code</b>: In 2023 Gentoo had another successful year participating in the 
  <a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/">Google Summer of Code</a>. We had three contributors
  completing their projects; you can find out more about them by visiting the 
  <a href="https://blogs.gentoo.org/gsoc/">Gentoo GSoC blog</a>. We thank our contributors Catcream, LabBrat, and 
  Listout, and also all the developers who took the time to mentor them.

- <b>Online workshops</b>: Our German support, <a href="https://gentoo-ev.org/">Gentoo e.V.</a>, organized 
  this year <a href="https://gentoo-ev.org/news/online-workshops-2023/">6 online workshops on building
  and improving ebuilds</a>. This will be continued every two months in the upcoming year.

- <img align="right" height="130" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://wiki.gentoo.org/images/b/b3/Larry-hi.png">
  <b>Documentation on wiki.gentoo.org</b> has been making great progress as 
  always. This past year the <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Wiki:Contributor%27s_guide">contributor's 
  guide</a>, <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Wiki:Guidelines">article writing guidelines</a>, and 
  <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Help:Contents">help pages</a> were updated to 
  give the best possible start to anyone ready to lend a hand. The Gentoo Handbook got updates, 
  and a new changelog. Of course much documentation was fixed, extended, or updated, and quite
  a few new pages were created. We hope to see even more activity in the new year, and hopefully
  some new contributors - editing documentation is a particularly easy area to 
  start contributing to Gentoo in, <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Wiki:Contributor%27s_guide">please
  give it a try!</a>

### Architectures

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/alpha-logo.png">
  <b>Alpha</b>: Support for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha">DEC Alpha 
  architecture</a> was revived, with a massive keywording effort going on. While not perfectly 
  complete yet, we are very close to a fully consistent dependency tree and package set for alpha again.

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2022/logo-musl.png">
  <b>musl</b>: Support for the <a href="https://musl.libc.org/">lightweight musl libc</a> has 
  been added to the architectures <a href="https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/#mips">MIPS (o32)</a> and <a 
  href="https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/#m68k">m68k</a>, with corresponding profiles in the Gentoo 
  repository and corresponding installation stages and binary packages available for download. Enjoy!

### Packages

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/dotNET-logo.png">
  <b>.NET</b>: The <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Dotnet">Gentoo Dotnet project</a> 
  has <a href="https://xgqt.gitlab.io//blog/posts/2023/12/17/-net-in-gentoo-in-2023/">significantly 
  improved</a> support for building 
  .NET-based software, using the nuget, dotnet-pkg-base, and dotnet-pkg eclasses. 
  Now we're ready for packages depending on the .NET ecosystem and for
  developers using dotnet-sdk on Gentoo. New software requiring .NET is constantly 
  being added to the main Gentoo tree. Recent additions include PowerShell for Linux, 
  Denaro (a finance application), Pinta (a graphics program), Ryujinx (a NS emulator)
  and many other aimed straight at developing .NET projects.

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2023/logo-java.png">
  <b>Java</b>: OpenJDK 21 has been introduced for amd64, arm64, ppc64, and x86!

- <b><a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Python">Python</a>:</b>
  In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.11. Additionally we have
  also Python 3.12 available stable - again we're fully up to date with upstream.

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/pypy-logo.png">
  <b>PyPy3 compatibility for scientific Python</b>:
  While some packages (numexpr, pandas, xarray) are at the moment still undergoing upstream bug fixing, 
  more and more scientific Python packages have been adapted in Gentoo and upstream for 
  the speed-optimized Python variant PyPy. This can provide a nice performance boost for 
  numerical data analysis...

- <b>Signed kernel modules and (unified) kernel images</b>: We now support signing of 
  both in-tree and out-of-tree kernel modules and kernel images. This is useful for those 
  who would like the extra bit of verification offered by Secure Boot, which is now easier 
  than ever to set up on Gentoo systems! Additionally, our kernel install scripts and eclasses 
  are now fully compatible with 
  <a href="https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Unified_kernel_image">Unified Kernel Images</a> and our 
  prebuilt gentoo-kernel-bin can now optionally install an experimental pregenerated generic 
  Unified Kernel Image.
     
- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/logo-gap4.png">
  <b>The GAP System</b>:
  A new dev-gap package category has arrived with about sixty packages.
  <a href="https://www.gap-system.org/">GAP</a> is a popular system for computational
  discrete algebra, with particular emphasis on Computational Group
  Theory. GAP consists of a programming language, a library of thousands
  of functions implementing algebraic algorithms written in the GAP
  language, and large data libraries of algebraic objects. It has 
  <a href="https://www.gap-system.org/Packages/packages.html">its own
  package ecosystem</a>, mostly written in the GAP language with a few C components.

### Physical and Software Infrastructure

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/gentoo-package.png">
  <b>Portage improvements</b>: A significant amount of work went into enhancing our 
  package manager, Portage, to better support binary package deployment. Users building 
  their own binary packages and setting up their own infrastructure will certainly benefit
  from it too.

- <b>packages.gentoo.org</b>: The development of Gentoo's package database website,
  <a href="https://packages.gentoo.org">packages.gentoo.org</a>, has picked up speed, with new features for maintainer, category, 
  and arch pages, and <a href="https://repology.org/">Repology</a> integration. Many optimization were 
  done for the backend database queries and the website should now feel faster to use.

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2024/bugs.png">
  <b>pkgdev bugs</b>: A new developer tool called <i>pkgdev bugs</i> enables us now to
  simplify the procedure for filing new stable requests bugs a lot. By just giving it 
  version lists (which can be generated by other tools),
  <i>pkgdev bugs</i> can be used to compute dependencies, cycles, merges, and will file
  the bugs for the architecture teams / testers. This allows us to step ahead much faster
  with package stabilizations.

### Finances of the Gentoo Foundation

- <img align="right" height="75" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="https://www.gentoo.org/assets/img/news/2023/dollar.jpg">
  <b>Income</b>: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $18,500 in fiscal year 2023;
  the majority (over 80%) were individual cash donations from the community.

- <b>Expenses</b>: Our expenses in 2023 were, as split into the usual three categories,
  *operating expenses* (for services, fees, ...) $6,000, only minor *capital expenses* (for bought 
  assets), and *depreciation expenses* (value loss of existing assets) $20,000.

- <b>Balance</b>: We have about $101,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2023 (which is when
  our fiscal year 2023 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical report
  for 2023 is [available on the Gentoo Wiki](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Gentoo_Foundation_Finances_FY2023).

## Thank you!

Obviously this is not all Gentoo development that happened in 2023. From KDE to GNOME, from 
kernels to scientific software, you can find much more if you look at the details.
**As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributions
for their relentless everyday Gentoo work.** As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist 
without them. And if you are interested and would like to contribute, please join us and
help us make Gentoo even better!