Sometimes it just hits me how different my relationship with technology really is compared to others.

I've grown up in a family that valued privacy, and then my very first friend group from early on exclusively consisted of gay – later #trans – autistic furry hackers. I've never known a life of being careless about #technology and #privacy, and a DIY mentality wasn't counterculture, it was just the way #tech worked.

To me it had been completely normal that my phone would obviously have some #degoogled #LineageOS on it (or rather, #CyanogenMod back in the day). It was just part of the setup process. Same with some #Linux flavour everywhere.

Self-hosting services was just the way to get those services. I never had any cloud accounts anywhere. I had always been on my girlfriend's Nextcloud or e-mail infrastructure or whatever, later my own. I always self-hosted my game servers. My websites would never be on any random hoster.

This came with a bunch of habits and quirks I just accepted as part of the tech experience. I am used to not getting any notifications on mobile, for example. I always have cookies and site data disabled out of habit.

I don't buy smart devices that I haven't vetted and rather choose the 'dumb' version, i. e. an infrared remote instead of a bluetooth one. My first instinct when looking for software is to check the repos or the Arch Wiki/FSF Directory and such sites. I haven't used Google in forever.

All this isn't to brag or whatever at all, it's just to illustrate what my worldview is like and how I grew up. I'm not even super intense about all this; I still watch YouTube videos for example and I (have to) use some proprietary software, e. g. for work. I'm not RMS, yknow?

...

But imagine growing up like this, and now it's 2026 and you see someone use a phone. The sheer contrast??

I see people live a life where their most used app on their phone is now ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. They use it more often than a search engine, they micromanage chats so it 'remembers' all of their emotions and thoughts. They ask for life advice, questions, make it write e-mails, everything.

They are on Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and whatnot and actually use all of those features I've only ever heard of second hand, such as a "for you page".

They have YouTube accounts and actually are able to comment, like and subscribe – that's something that feels weird to even think about to me as someone resigned to passive use of such sites!

They have all the flashy features just available to them, like these live notifications, voice control, smart connectivity and whatnot that I accepted long ago I just "couldn't get".

It's such a different life to live, it's almost like a different culture.

New on #blog (this time with quotes from Fedi): "Why Gentoo?"

blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/0…

"""
Multiple times in the past I’ve been thinking of how #Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.

To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.

There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
"""