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Welcome @seemant. Happy to see you join the project. I think the challenge is communicating direction and progress in a way that is more fluid and responsive to development opportunities and user needs than the traditional "roadmap." As we've seen in this thread, we can't expect casual users to get an good view of the direction and activity of the project by gleaning it from available information scattered across sources. How do we communicate to users the value of the Funtoo approach over the mainstream roadmaps and checkboxes approach? How do we stop trying to be all things to all people without coming off as arrogant, dismissive, or incomplete when something a user is asking for falls outside our focus? This will arise more and more as the beard is trimmed.

The problem with traditional "roadmaps" is that they assume that you know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there. The typical business roadmap also includes a schedule for getting there. None of those things align with the objective of being a community distro. We have a general vision of what we want the distro to be and how we want to accomplish that, but exactly how that plays out depends on what the community wants and how much they can contribute. The ability to pursue an important opportunity or idea when it arises is more important than ticking boxes for comparison shoppers. With limited resources it's more important to be focused on what they community wants and needs than to create roadmaps that dictate a course that may not be appropriate. Wayland is a perfect example. Everyone has to support it because everyone else supports it and you have to check the boxes in the distro competition. Who cares? Nobody, really. Until it makes my desktop better without creating any fresh headaches, Xorg is fine thanks. As for BDFL, every pack has a leader. The pack spots opportunities and communicates them, but it's the pack leader that says go or no go. There needs to be an executive authority. We've seen that community distros go terribly wrong when they become distro by committee. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and and corporate paid developers can get very squeaky. There needs to be a single decision point that will put the needs of the distro first. Only those who trust drobbins to do that should join the pack.

@zoggalso, I should say that I do appreciate you connecting and communicating your thoughts. For someone who is not as involved, perception is the reality. So I will look at what I can do to improve this, and welcome your involvement as well to try to address these things. For roadmap, a lot of this has come down to LACK OF TRUST. On freenode, I had people actually doing 'silent forks' of Funtoo and ripping off my ideas. I have had people who I have told about future plans start to try to do them -- but leave me out! So many people are trying to 'make a splash' in software, and are not necessarily ethical about how they do it. So I am bitter about this. I am bitter because I actually LIKE to share my future ideas, but I have been REPEATEDLY BURNED by doing this. So now I am cautious. A lot of this relates to why we left freenode even before it self-imploded. There was too much 'sniping' of ideas and 'fake friends' who were just trying to get some ideas that they lacked themselves. But without any collaborative spirit. And even some outright nastiness. I got sick of it. I decided we'll move to discord, and have more of an independent space. And it will piss off some people -- but fortunately some of the people I pissed off (not all for sure) were those I wanted to get away from! So yes, there is a lot of bitterness about this. And then being asked to share more -- you can imagine how this triggers a lot of unpleasant feelings. Damned if I do, damned, if I don't. You probably had no idea you were touching such a nerve when you made your original post. So much to unpack here. This will at least be an interesting thread for people to read.

Linux, and Funtoo, are international. His (her?) native language (very likely) may not be English. Nor is mine ? It also means (s)he may not be aware of 'social rules' that govern (online) conversation in English. And even so, discussions on the web always miss a vital component in human interaction: non-verbal communication. Body-language. Smileys, and by extension emoticons, are a way to circumvent this, but generally do a poor job, TBH. To be frank, there is a valid point in his comments: not every Funtoo user is a coder. Not every Funtoo user wants to use Discord, let alone be online on it for 24/7, just to get the latest on the project. Not every Funtoo user tracks the latest issues on bugs filed on the bug-tracker. This forum is also a communication platform for the Funtoo project, as you obviously understand, but I notice it's not really treated as such as updates are not very frequent. Now, I understand you'd prefer working on patching code to improve Funtoo over posting updates here, but too little updates here ultimately leads to the above conversation. Just me tuppence ?

@zogg I will answer you. "From recent activity it seems like funtoo development (except autogenerated updates mostly) is getting to mostly none, including activity even in on this forum." This is an interesting and funny perspective, because it's actually just the opposite. Funtoo is more active than it has ever been, and we are starting to collaborate with Sabayon on next-gen projects, and we have been growing our Funtoo dev team too. One thing to realize is that Gentoo has 200+ developers and Funtoo up until recently has had maybe 2-3 developers at most active at a time, but often just one. Think of that. Over the past decade, what was often 'powering' Funtoo, was JUST ONE GUY. Sometimes -- many times -- it was not even me but a more junior developer. Why? Because I am often busy -- I have a full time job and also a toddler, a wife, two kids in college, and two more kids in elementary and middle school ? Now we have like 10 actively contributing it seems. So 3x-10x growth in the last few months is actually huge. And we seem to now be getting an influx of people from Gentoo (we don't actively try to recruit users or devs from Gentoo, so this is just an observation and not a 'boast'.) But I actually DO understand why you have your perspective. It is a PERSPECTIVE, but not reality. But it's interesting to wonder: why do you have this perspective? It is probably because you are incorrectly trying to compare the work of 200+ people to what has often been just the work of 1-2 people. Is that fair? I don't think so. But I am sure you can 'sense' that there is often fewer package updates and general upheaval than in Gentoo. Some people actually LIKE this about Funtoo! The reality is that actually we are doing many things that Gentoo is not doing, and solving problems that Gentoo is not solving. But these problems are not glamorous, and take time, and we care more about solving these problems than giving you the latest crap to run on your computer. I'm quite content with our progress. But I don't think that Funtoo is a distro for everyone, and if you feel that Gentoo is more up-to-date or aligns better with what you want, by all means please use it. It doesn't matter to me what you use. No one here is going to try to persuade you to use Funtoo. If you don't see the point in using it, then use something else. The reason why you did not understand @nrc is because you don't get an important point. You are assuming that Funtoo and Gentoo are trying to do the same thing, and be the same thing, and trying to get you to pick one over the other. This is actually not true. That is why you do not understand. So now that I have addressed the 2/3 of your post that was a troll, I can address your legitimate question -- update on the current state, and roadmap/future of the project. The current state is that the project is rapidly growing and we are working on getting our growing team to work well together. So we are recently moving beyond 1-2 devs into the 5-10 active devs range. Autogens will continue to be added to the tree by users. Thanks to user contributions we now have MATE stage3's available for download as well as updated Enlightenment. As far as I am aware, financially, Funtoo has more funding/resources available to it than the entire Gentoo project despite our small size, is fully independent of any external influences regarding our future, and I expect this to continue to be the reality. I have been regularly sending cryptocurrency to our most active volunteers as a 'thank you' from the Funtoo community for their contributions. We will continue to prioritize new and interesting ways of solving complex technical challenges rather than expending huge amounts of manual effort to maintain tens of thousands of packages. While we do this, we also hope that you will find Funtoo to be a useful tool for desktop workstation, laptop as well as dev and production servers for amd64 and arm(64) architectures, as well as riscv, which is being worked on. For everything else, you will find out about it when it is announced ? As always, Funtoo is a user-centric project so if there is something you want, you are encouraged to not be shy and explain why you personally want it on the bug tracker and if it is reasonable, the issue will be approved and a PR can then be submitted. Best, Daniel

One more thing to consider: not everyone wants to use Discord.