It broke a bash script that’s going to be gone within a month. The continuous integration stack in Gentoo (which probably doesn’t do quite what you think it does) is basically a stack of bash hacks that causes as many problems as it solves, so it’s being retired. ( relevant gentoo-dev ML thread )
When I first installed Gentoo, it was because it was one of only around three distros that supported x86_64 at the time. Yes, that was a long time ago.
I’ve kept it as a daily driver for a number of reasons. First, because I’m a control freak, and Gentoo goes out of its way to allow me to select exactly the packages I want, and gives me access to all the knobs and switches that other distros may hide in the name of user-friendliness.
Second, because once installed it’s surprisingly solid and trouble-free—Portage is an excellent (if slow) package manager that, judging from what I’ve heard from people running other distros, is better than the average at preventing breakage, and since it’s rolling-release there are no whole-distro upgrades to complicate things. I ran one system on rolling updates for 17 years without reinstalling, and it was still pretty much up-to-date on all packages when I retired it back in March—try that with Ubuntu. (The replacement system also runs Gentoo.)
Thirdly, I’ve been with Gentoo for so long that I know how to create packages, unbork a system that I’ve messed up by doing something really stupid, and various other tricks. If I went to another distro, I’d have to relearn much of that from scratch.
(A fourth reason for some might be that it supports a wider range of CPU architectures than any other distro except possibly Debian.)
Writing a custom GTK3 theme for my own use a couple of years back was an extremely painful process. There’s no list anywhere of the possible themable element types (I had to go through the actual source code to compile one) or the possible nonstandard options (never did manage to compile that list). I haven’t had to look at GTK4 yet, but I doubt it’s any better.
(As for how people use dark themes: put borders on things if you need to, and/or use hover options to distinguish what the active element is.)
The X3D CPUs are very sensitive to overvolting, and some mobo manufacturers had their boards set to overvolt out of the box before this was discovered. Result: fried CPUs.
There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.
Github is only used to mirror the main repo (which is on gitweb.gentoo.org). I assume that was done to attract driveby patches and reduce load from Portage git syncs on the Gentoo servers.