Although we do not usually receive much news about the Gentoo distribution, the truth is that its development continues. We have recently heard surprising news, surprising at least for those who use the SPARC platform. Despite being few users who use this platform, there are still users who use this platform, for this reason only the security support to the platform will be removed for the moment.
This means that a user who has a computer with the SPARC platform can still install Gentoo on the computer but the development team will stop releasing security updates for this platform, which makes Gentoo for SPARC a kind of Windows XP spice for older computers.
The news release has been issued by Yuri German, the leader of the Gentoo security team who has notified the change through the mailing list official. In the official Gentoo documentation the SPARC platform has already been removed, leaving the following platforms, x86, amd64, Alpha, HPPA, PPC (PowerPC) and PPC64 (64-bit PowerPC), as supported by the security team.
As we have said previously, this does not leave the teams with the SPARC platform without Gentoo, but it does initiates a path where users of this platform will no longer have or receive updates from Gentoo. More and more distributions are draining or eliminating support for certain platforms.
While it is true that SPARC is a platform that many distributions have already removed from their development, there are still distributions like Gentoo that support it (or supported it). In any case, if we have a computer with this hardware, we may now is the time to change it for a more powerful and modern equipment, that this will not prevent us from continuing to use Gentoo, but that it will reduce headaches in the not too distant future.