Custom kernel (Accessory, rare):

• Must be crafted by the owner and cannot be sold, given away, or otherwise transferred. Sometimes explodes during the crafting process, causing unconsciousness and 2d6 damage.
• 10% attack and defense bonuses to weapons and armour that were equipped at the time of crafting, but -10% on new weapons and armour.
• Lightness grants +10 speed.

Thing is, even when Ubuntu’s software has been packaged outside Ubuntu, it’s so far failed to gain traction. Upstart and Unity were available from a Gentoo overlay at one point, but never achieved enough popularity for anyone to try to move them to the main tree. I seem to recall that Unity required a cartload of core system patches that were never upstreamed by Ubuntu to be able to work, which may have been a contributing factor. It’s possible that Ubuntu doesn’t want its homegrown software ported, which would make its contribution to diversity less than useful.

I’d add irrational hate against Canonical to the list of possible causes.

Canonical’s done a few things that make it quite rational to hate them, though. I seem to remember an attempt to shoehorn advertising into Ubuntu, à la Microsoft—it was a while ago and they walked it back quickly, but it didn’t make them popular.

(Also, I’m aware of the history of systemd, and Poettering is partly responsible for the hatred still focused on the software in some quarters. I won’t speak to his ability as a programmer or the quality of the resulting software, but he is terrible at communication.)

And you have fixed versions every half a year with a set of packages that is guaranteed to work together. On top of that, there’s an upgrade path to the next version - no reinstall needed.

I’ve been upgrading one of my Gentoo systems continuously since 2008 with no reinstalls required—that’s the beauty of a rolling-release distro. And I’ve never had problems with packages not working together when installing normally from the main repository (shooting myself in the foot in creative ways while rolling my own packages or upgrades doesn’t count). Basic consistency of installed software should be a minimum requirement for any distro. I’m always amazed when some mainstream distro seems unable to handle dependencies in a sensible manner.

I have nothing against Ubuntu—just not my cup of tea for my own use—and I don’t think it’s a bad distro to recommend to newcomers (I certainly wouldn’t recommend Gentoo!) Doesn’t mean that it’s the best, or problem-free, or that its homegrown software is necessarily useful.

On the one hand, diversity is usually a good thing for its own sake, because it reduces the number of single points of failure in the system.

On the gripping hand, none of Ubuntu’s many projects has ever become a long-term, distro-agnostic alternative to whatever it was supposed to replace, suggesting either low quality or insufficient effort.

I’m . . . kind of torn. Not that I’m ever likely to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu, so I guess it’s a moot point.

My experience (which is admittedly many years out-of-date) is that WINE isn’t very good at anything except games, because games are what the people who use it and work on it are most interested in. When other software works, it tends to be as much by coincidence as anything.

Switch to a distro lineage whose package manager builds in the necessary facilities? Someone’s already mentioned Nix, and Gentoo has the --fetchonly switch for Portage which will download (but not install) everything required for a specified package including dependencies, so you can copy all of the files to an external drive at once.

You just said “large”. I would consider any project with 10MB or more of source “large”. Firefox is certainly large by that standard, but so is openssl. If your standard for “large” is “has at least as much code as Firefox”, then according to you, the Linux kernel is a small project.

openssl is a vital part of the web, but it is a small tool

You consider 61.7MB of source code “small”? (That’s for openssl 3.3.2, and may not include some rust code that isn’t in the gzipped main code package.) I think maybe you need to recalibrate a bit.

A whole bunch of non-user-facing projects providing vital libraries that are largely ignored until something blows up in people’s faces, as happened with openssl some years ago. Some of them contain quite a bit of code (for example, ffmpeg, which underpins a lot of open-source media playback software). Among browsers specifically, Pale Moon has been around for years, is maintaining a lot of code no longer carried by Firefox along with a fair amount of original code, and has no cash source beyond user donations, which might stretch to paying for the servers in a good month.

The projects with corporate sponsorship, or even a steady flow of large donations, are in the minority. There’s a reason the xkcd about the “project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003” exists.

Money isn’t important. Some complex software is, in fact, maintained by unpaid volunteers who feel strongly about the project. That doesn’t mean it’s easy (in fact it’s quite difficult to keep the lights on and the code up-to-date), but it is A Thing That Happens despite being difficult.

What is important is the size of the codebase (in the case of a fork, that’s the code either written for the fork or code that the fork preserves and maintains that isn’t in the original anymore), the length of time it’s been actively worked on, and the bus factor. Some would-be browser forks are indeed trivial and ephemeral one-man shows. Others have years of active commit history, carry tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of novel or preserved code, and have many people working on them.

Gentoo supports either configuration, as it does with a lot of things. My systems were installed with split /usr and I have no intention of changing that, because the merge adds no value for me.

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.