Practical jokes

Todo:

• Find more evidence of jokes in Gentoo from 1999-2012.

This article serves as an archive for practical jokes that have been undertaken - in good humor - around the greater Gentoo ecosystem and community.

The developers and community behind Gentoo have performed many practical jokes, a number of them on or around April Fools' Day. This kind of practical trickery and playfulness has been a tenet of the Gentoo community.

The following text has been 'imported' from the Gentoo Linux Wikipedia article. It is unfortunately no longer available on the Wikipedia page due to not enough sources from third-party references, so we'll keep a copy of it here.

History of practical jokes

Rebranding

On April 1, 2021 the distribution "rebranded" itself as "Genchu" with the logo edited to appear as a kawaii anthropomorphic mouse, satirizing the anime and furry fandoms. The prank also satirized the adoption of systemd in other Linux distributions by temporarily setting it as the default init in their stage3 tarballs.

Wiki

On July 28, 2017, the Gentoo wiki had a satirical news announcement entitled 'Word crimes'. Embedded in the announcement was a link to the Weird Al] video of the same name.

Website

On April 1, 2015 the Gentoo Linux team, namely Alex Legler, Robin H. Johnson, and a few other associates, announced the launch of a "totally revamped and more inclusive website which was built to conform to the CGA Web™ graphics standards [...] with a 16-colour palette and an optimal screen resolution of 640 x 200 pixels". The joke website was displayed with the appearance of a CGA ("16-colour") palette. According to the release announcement, the new site was available via the Gopher protocol at gopher://gopher.gentoo.org/.

Live DVD

To salute the 2012 phenomenon, on December 21, 2012 Gentoo released an End Of World Edition Live DVD.

Install wizard

On April 1, 2012 an April Fools' joke named "Install Wizard" was "released" as part of the 12.1 Live DVD.