@nyanide @arcana @Cyrillic @mischievoustomato How bleeding edge Gentoo is depends on the kind of ebuild and who is maintaing it.

It's trivial to update many ebuilds yourself - you copy the file into a custom repository, do a version bump with GNU mv, run ebuild <ebuild> manifest, compile it and it usually works.


Proprietary software ebuilds that take the users freedom are generally well maintained (how terrible for the users freedom).

Free software ebuilds typically sit unmaintained for months or years until you go do the version bump yourself and submit that and then finally the assigned maintainer, version bumps to the latest stable, or the ebuild gets removed.


Typically, the stable keyword takes at least several weeks or months before it is applied to an ebuild, but mixing stable and unstable isn't an issue on Gentoo (unlike on Debian) and you can trivially unmask as needed or set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" to always use the newest ebuild (excluding often broken 9999 git versions).