Are you a crusty, a youngling, a noughtie or a baby-boomer?

[lilbthebasedgod]

A the median is a bit older than I thought, but not much more. Maybe I'm just used to more younger people in the communities I'm in.

I'm 19.

[steveL]

It's good to see younger people still getting involved with Gentoo; if it weren't for at least two (then) "younglings" in #gentoo-chat we'd never have started #friendly-coders (noxie is the reason we're labelled "friendly" at all, in fact. :-)

If you're new I heartily recommend IRC: chat.freenode.net for #gentoo support and #gentoo-chat for off-topic/general chat.

If you want to learn ebuilds, #bash for the base language (and an awful lot about portable scripting, and Unix), ##workingset for the base toolchain (especially autotools and make/gmake) and #gentoo-dev-help about how you tie them together in ebuilds, and with the rest of the tree.

[szatox]

I though 19-year-old would already know how to make young people
Unfortunately making gentoo either "easy" or "pretty" looks like a recipe for a disaster. You know, running gentoo is not about being cool, it's matter of speccific needs, a praticular mindset.
While I would like too see more people using gentoo (and OS in general) I'd rather it be due to concious choises they make. Too bad, not many people want and can afford it. If they can't or don't want, they better not be here. Tuning gentoo for "regular users" would mean making yet-another-mainstream-disrto that can be easily replaced with many other-mainstream-distros, and it would come at a price. Hard to say how big price, but we would have to pay it to give people we don't know thing they don't need.

In fact I also expected "a typical gentoo user" to be like 5 years younger than the pool shows it. On the other hand... Hey, we are still young. There is some hope for us

[steveL]

[MrFluffy]

Define user
I'm in the 40 range, but my kids are in the 0-10 and 10-20 brackets (daughter and son). They're both gentoo users in so much as they have gentoo installed on their computers but I wont give them root and neither *yet* has worked out how to get it without, the day of which will be the first time I really think they're ready for the magic wand ownership.
For the future? I thoroughly expect a ass kicking from my offspring technically one day (in fact I look forward to that day!), I just hope to have passed on the idea that open modifiable things are the way to keep control of your own destiny

[mrbassie]

I'm 34, my birthday's soon so I voted 35-39.

I've been on Gentoo roughly 18 months.

[evoweiss]

Fun survey... I'm 43, so (rapidly) approaching crustiness.

Gentoo has been on my primary desktop at home since 2002. At work I ran Gentoo on my first server from around 2005 to 2012. I since migrated that server to a slightly more up-to-date machine after getting a new desktop at work. Both systems run fine, though I had to replace the motherboard battery and maxed out the RAM on the home machine and had to replace a failing HDD on the server.

I like(d) Gentoo because it helped me learn a lot about Linux, it's easy to stave off bloat, and thus I am not caught in the endless update cycle. While I can easily afford new hardware, I just hate shopping for new stuff, period, and so typically wait until something is broken beyond easy repair before getting anything new.

My other two computers, my office desktop and work laptop, run Ubuntu and Mint, respectively. The laptop is ancient, but it's very light and speedy enough for most of my tasks when I'm away. I would have liked to put Gentoo on the desktop, but I needed to be up and running quickly. Maybe another time.

Some perspectives, dull as they may be. Personally, I've found Gentoo a dream to administer and work with. I suspect it's partly because of the lack of bloat. Stuff that I have loaded on there is solid and just works well. I've never had a crash or any flakiness that didn't involve my doing something silly early on. It is much more stable than Ubuntu in my view.

Given this, you can imagine how I feel about SystemD. I've not participated in any of the threads, but, should it come to pass, i.e., takes over the entire Linux ecosystem, I'll migrate to something else, maybe FreeBSD. It definitely looms large in what I will do with my laptop and work desktop, though, i.e., they will very likely be shifted over to Gentoo or FreeBSD at the next opportunity.

Best,

Alex

[ct85711]

I voted for the 30-34 range, as that's what I am in now. However, I got into linux when I was 12 and been with it since. I got into Gentoo, 1-2 years after it came out, but didn't make an account till a year later.