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Signed-off-by: Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@gentoo.org>

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+---
+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!