drobbins

All good things must come to an end. I've decided to end the Funtoo Linux project. Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else. You can expect the project to wind down through August. If you have a Funtoo container, it will continue to be online through the end of August so you have time to find another hosting solution if you need one.

All good things must come to an end. I've decided to end the Funtoo Linux project. Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else. You can expect the project to wind down through August. If you have a Funtoo container, it will continue to be online through the end of August so you have time to find another hosting solution if you need one.

Everyone,
We are officially retiring 1.4-release in 2024, which means that if you have not yet done so, now is the time to upgrade to next-release. The official way to do this is to do a REINSTALL of Funtoo. You may be able to in-place upgrade from 1.4-release to next-release but THIS IS NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED so if you can't get it to work, you can ask on Discord for help unofficially but if you can't work through the various quirks you WILL need to reinstall.
Really, a reinstall should be done unless you have a very specific reason why you can't.
The Funtoo community is around to help with issues you may have with an upgrade, but just be aware of the possibility of hitting something that may warrant reinstall.
For new installs of next-release, the Funtoo community as well as myself are available to assist you with issues you may encounter. Reach out on Discord in the #install-help channel.

I bet you are using 1.4-release, which has not been receiving updates recently and will no longer be maintained after the end of the year.
If you install next-release, you will getting (almost) daily updates.
Relevant links:
 

@aitikin I gave you a sarcastic answer as a response to your threat of: "But, frankly, if you send me ANY ONE SINGLE YouTube as a solution, I'm gone." I'm calling out your threat.
Do you think that maybe your inability to find support could be related to your immature and ranting behavior, rather than any deficiency in our project and documentation?
 
 

Did that video help?

Did that video help?

I'm posting this because, maybe I'm mistaken, but I can't see how I am.
I come from a timeframe where being able to search forums and newsletters would allow me to often solve issues without having to wait and sift through hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of unrelated posts to find what the solution to said issues.  It seems this community has moved further, and further, and further away from traditional support roles to the fad of (pardon my terminology, but it's accurate) bullshit discord as support or only YouTube.
I'm running into a shit ton of emerge errors after an ego sync after the server was down for months and I cannot easily find what I need to know.  It's probably a stupid simple solution, probably to a problem that was documented in the discord a dozen times, but I can't for the life of me find it.  I don't know if I should be looking in, "install-help," which implies that it should be focused on the base install by its namesake.  I can't tell if I should hunt through, "general," for it, though, of the options, that's the most sensible, I feel like it'd be the least useful.  Maybe it should be, "development," but that seems like I, an end user, should never really be in that one...
This has forced even worse misunderstanding.  For me, it's forced freaking outrage to the point that I've yelled at the computer because I cannot figure out what the F*** I need to do and cannot find it in the forums and cannot find it in discord no matter how I go about searching.
Genuinely, I appreciated ego and epro and the other funtoo tools I can't get in Gentoo proper.  But the absolute F****** lack of responsible documentation and the fact that it feels like I'm meant to feel grateful for that, makes me want to not use funtoo anymore.
Please, show me where my statements are completely inaccurate and how I can stay here.  But, frankly, if you send me ANY ONE SINGLE YouTube as a solution, I'm gone.  YouTube is not how I should be taught how to fix a bloody commandline issue.  I shouldn't have to sift through a video that's even 4 minutes long to find a 20 second answer.
I genuinely feel like funtoo is dying as a result of these decisions to make access to the knowledge contingent on using shit like discord and YouTube.

UPDATE: containers are back online -- see below for details on what happened.
Everyone,
Our datacenter in Taos, New Mexico experienced a very severe "fiber cut" in close proximity to the datacenter which severed its fiber links. This major fiber cut also has disrupted multiple ISPs and mobile carriers such as Verizon in Taos, NM.
This has resulted in a number of community containers going offline. This has not impacted Funtoo core infrastructure. The fiber cut is very severe and we expect at least 24 hours of downtime.
More info here: https://www.taosnews.com/news/severed-fiber-optic-line-causes-cell-phone-internet-outages-in-taos/article_cc7f41e6-03f7-11ee-9df2-fb4957e977a7.html
UPDATE from our datacenter:
What happened? At approximately 3:25 pm MT (GMT-6) yesterday a road construction crew caused a large fiber cut which knocked much of Taos, New Mexico's telecommunication infrastructure offline. This outage impacted both of our upstream networks in addition to local cell phone and phone service, as well as many local ISPs, including our sister company, TaosNet.  Lumen fiber technicians worked through the night to repair the broken fiber and are still at work on it.
Why did this happen?  Know that we're as shocked and devastated as you are by this extended outage and again, apologize profusely.  We were led to believe - by our upstream network providers - that our upstream network redundancy was complete, when in fact it was clearly not.  We have had fiber cuts to one of these fiber connections or the other over the last few years, and each time our traffic failed-over perfectly.  However, what this fiber cut revealed is that there is approximately a one mile stretch - of many hundreds of miles of fiber that our networks traverse - where both networks are in the same conduit. This is where the cut was.
The good news is that after detailed analysis we believe a network routing change can get us back to fully geographically redundant fiber paths.  We'll be working on implementing this in the coming weeks.
How did Brownrice get back online? Since the fiber outage was still not fixed, early this morning the CEO of a local ISP, Kit Carson Internet, reached out to us offering network connectivity.  Our network engineers, our TaosNet wireless team, and the team at Kit Carson Internet then formulated and executed a plan to build a high-speed wireless link between our two facilities and route traffic through Kit Carson Internet to our data center.  This brought all of our networking services back online. The amount of skill and know-how to pull this together within a single day was truly staggering.  And we can't thank Kit Carson Internet enough.
What are you doing to ensure this never happens again?  Now we have an active and tested, fiber-cut-proof backup connection in place and working.  It's not yet as fast as we'd like, and is currently experiencing some packet loss, but our higher speed fiber connections should come back online later tonight.  And once we are back to full strength we'll get the backup connection speed and packet loss sorted out.  And know that we will leave this backup connection in place forever, so this never happens again.
 

@cardinal please do not post patches here. The solution is not to give some Funtoo user a patch so they can "hack around" the problem.
@fredmyra this is a bug -- please report it to bugs.funtoo.org and we'll look into it.

@cardinal I don't think your original bug report for this issue was optimal (https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-11069)
I think it identifies the wrong problem.
The real problem here is not that there was a blacklist installed -- the real problem is that by default, the nvidia-drivers are not supporting a legacy card. This is not optimal and if the nouveau drivers are more compatible with all generations of NVIDIA cards, it makes a more reasonable default for our DE stage3's.
Therefore, I am thinking the bug should be "default nvidia-drivers on stage3 lacks support for legacy NVIDIA cards". And we would explore nouveau by default as a solution. Then we would incorporate the nouveau blacklist into nvidia-drivers so it installs only if you opt-in to the official NVIDIA drivers.

I'm really happy to announce our second official monthly newsletter! 
We have a much meatier newsletter this month, with recent technical updates, great news about Oleg aka angry_vincent, a profile of Kery, a new user – and his install challenges, and some really useful and detailed info about our bug tracker and how to use it well. Let’s start by covering the latest updates:
 

Everyone -- some major news today.
Metro, our official stage3 build tool, now has a brand-new setup tool which should make initial setup of Metro quite easy. Please check out our high-quality initial setup docs, written by @adbosco.
That's not all.
You may have heard of our Evolved Bootstrap project, which is also called Funtoo from Scratch. The goal of this project has been to build Funtoo completely from scratch, in a fully automated way. In other words, it's possible to build Funtoo without starting from a Funtoo or Gentoo system, just from a base gcc compiler.
We have been building a stage1 using Funtoo from Scratch for several months in beta form, but today we have successfully had this stage1 be accepted by Metro, and used to build a stage2 and stage3. This opens a new world of possibilities for bootstrapping Funtoo, and also opens up new possibilities for development. Just as for Metro, we have full documentation on how to tie FFS and Metro together, on our wiki.
Best,
Daniel

Everyone -- some major news today.
Metro, our official stage3 build tool, now has a brand-new setup tool which should make initial setup of Metro quite easy. Please check out our high-quality initial setup docs, written by @adbosco.
That's not all.
You may have heard of our Evolved Bootstrap project, which is also called Funtoo from Scratch. The goal of this project has been to build Funtoo completely from scratch, in a fully automated way. In other words, it's possible to build Funtoo without starting from a Funtoo or Gentoo system, just from a base gcc compiler.
We have been building a stage1 using Funtoo from Scratch for several months in beta form, but today we have successfully had this stage1 be accepted by Metro, and used to build a stage2 and stage3. This opens a new world of possibilities for bootstrapping Funtoo, and also opens up new possibilities for development. Just as for Metro, we have full documentation on how to tie FFS and Metro together, on our wiki.
Best,
Daniel

Hi all --
I'm happy to announce our most recent new technology, called "Harvester"! You  can learn more at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester (including FAQ and Developer FAQ) with a summary below:
The harvester project is focused on providing a meta-repo that can be used for active development by Funtoo Linux contributors. This allows evaluation of experimental and potentially disruptive changes in a completely separate tree without impacting regular Funtoo Linux installs.
The Harvester Concept
Harvester exists as a branch of kit-fixups, which is listed at the top of this page. harvester.funtoo.org uses it to generate a full meta-repo, containing experimental changes. These changes are made available via git from harvester.funtoo.org directly, and can be consumed via ego sync.
Harvester Benefits
With harvester, we aim to:
Make community testing easier By providing a system that can be used to do full community-based integration testing without having to locally generate your own meta-repo. Accelerate development By providing a 'judgement-free' space to evaluate aggressive and potentially breaking changes, and to learn how these changes impact Funtoo, for better or worse, without causing problems on live systems. Make things more fun We all have limited time. Sometimes we make a 'best effort' to test our PR, but it still breaks something. This is definitely "not fun" for the contributor, for Funtoo staff, or for users. We want to avoid these situations, and avoid having to frantically rush to clean up breakages that impact users, or get upset at people for braking the tree. Harvester allows us as a community to roll out mature, tested changes to users. This keeps Funtoo development "fun" and a positive experience for all! We don't want the 'stressful way' of dealing with problems to be our default way. It should only be the rare exception. Our process should produce successful results rather than demand individual perfection. Harvester supports a process that keeps things "fun" by reducing the risk and thus stress related to changes to Funtoo.

I'm happy to announce the release of Funtoo Boxer, the official tool for creating Funtoo Linux containers and VM images.
The official "home" of Funtoo Boxer is on GitHub, with documentation viewable there:
https://github.com/funtoo/boxer
The purpose of Boxer is to have an officially-maintained tool for creating container and VM images for Funtoo, so that our users don't need to search the internet for scripts to build containers and VM images, and so we can easily maintain and document these processes so they always work optimally.
In the 1.0.3 release, we currently support the creation of Docker and Singularity container images, with more container and VM formats to be added in future releases.
To install boxer, you can "emerge boxer" on Funtoo systems. On non-Funtoo systems, a "pip install funtoo-boxer" should install it. Additionally, it is possible to run Funtoo Boxer directly from a cloned git repository -- please see the README.rst for more details on this.
Enjoy Boxer -- and we welcome GitHub pull requests for this new and exciting tool!
Best,
Daniel Robbins

I'm happy to announce the release of Funtoo Boxer, the official tool for creating Funtoo Linux containers and VM images.
The official "home" of Funtoo Boxer is on GitHub, with documentation viewable there:
https://github.com/funtoo/boxer
The purpose of Boxer is to have an officially-maintained tool for creating container and VM images for Funtoo, so that our users don't need to search the internet for scripts to build containers and VM images, and so we can easily maintain and document these processes so they always work optimally.
In the 1.0.3 release, we currently support the creation of Docker and Singularity container images, with more container and VM formats to be added in future releases.
To install boxer, you can "emerge boxer" on Funtoo systems. On non-Funtoo systems, a "pip install funtoo-boxer" should install it. Additionally, it is possible to run Funtoo Boxer directly from a cloned git repository -- please see the README.rst for more details on this.
Enjoy Boxer -- and we welcome GitHub pull requests for this new and exciting tool!
Best,
Daniel Robbins

Hi All,
Have you ever thought about officially joining the Funtoo project and helping us move Funtoo forward? I've added a new Staff (General) role to our Open Roles page on the wiki! This job description now defines what we officially expect from all Staff for the Funtoo Linux project -- basically the baseline for our team. It's where everyone should start if they are wanting to get officially involved with being part of our team.
Why have this job description formally posted? In the past, joining our staff has been an informal process of being involved to some degree on Discord and engaging with us. While this has been low-key and flexible, we have a variety of people who have a variety of time commitments and expectations have not always been clear. As the project is growing, we are defining more focused goals for the project and a more straightforward, open and consistent application process is needed.
If you are already contributing actively to Funtoo, consider applying for a Staff position and joining us by sending an email to jobs@funtoo.org 🙂 If you are currently Staff or have previously been Staff for Funtoo, consider this a way of getting more insight into how we are trying to more clearly define our culture and work community, and take a look at our direction. This is going to help us to build the kind of community that we can be truly proud of.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
Creator, Gentoo Linux
BDFL - Funtoo Linux
 

@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.

@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
 

 

I want to announce a new Funtoo project that we're calling "Evolved Bootstrap".
Here's the idea. Imagine you have access to a computer. It's not running Funtoo or even Gentoo, and it may even not truly be a Linux system. But there's a C compiler on the system. Now, imagine there was an easy way to build Funtoo entirely from source code -- even for a completely different CPU architecture (ARM, PowerPC) that you are currently running. No need to download a stage3 -- everything is fully bootstrapped, entirely from source code. The Funtoo system literally emerges from nothing before your eyes, rather than relying on any pre-built download from Funtoo.
This is what is meant by evolved bootstrap, and it is also notable in that we are doing this as a community effort from the start, so we are going to be building this together.
As a start, we are going to get familiar with "CLFS", or "Cross Linux From Scratch". Linux From Scratch and the LFS ecosystem is a fantastic community project that documents how to build a complete Linux system "from scratch", as evolved bootstrap will do. It is a series of manual steps, whereas evolved bootstrap will be automated. However, I do not want to lose the positive qualities that the LFS community has established in their projects -- providing excellent living documentation on what steps are needed, and why.
We welcome you to join this effort as we get started. Please see https://www.funtoo.org/Evolved_Bootstrap for more information and join us in the #bootstrap channel in Funtoo Discord.

Hi All,
Have you ever thought about officially joining the Funtoo project and helping us move Funtoo forward? I've added a new Staff (General) role to our Open Roles page on the wiki! This job description now defines what we officially expect from all Staff for the Funtoo Linux project -- basically the baseline for our team. It's where everyone should start if they are wanting to get officially involved with being part of our team.
Why have this job description formally posted? In the past, joining our staff has been an informal process of being involved to some degree on Discord and engaging with us. While this has been low-key and flexible, we have a variety of people who have a variety of time commitments and expectations have not always been clear. As the project is growing, we are defining more focused goals for the project and a more straightforward, open and consistent application process is needed.
If you are already contributing actively to Funtoo, consider applying for a Staff position and joining us by sending an email to jobs@funtoo.org 🙂 If you are currently Staff or have previously been Staff for Funtoo, consider this a way of getting more insight into how we are trying to more clearly define our culture and work community, and take a look at our direction. This is going to help us to build the kind of community that we can be truly proud of.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
Creator, Gentoo Linux
BDFL - Funtoo Linux
 

Hi All,
At this time, I have made next-release the recommended release of Funtoo Linux for most people, as it has a very recent release of gcc and has more modern support for applications. 1.4-release is still available but unless you are specifically looking for a stable release, most users will want to install next-release at this time.
If you go to the https://www.funtoo.org/Download link, you will see that next-release stages are now available for all x86-64bit builds of Funtoo Linux including amd64-zen3, as well as riscv-64bit and raspi4-64bit. Soon, I will be updating install documentation to reflect this fact.
If you would like a build of 1.4-release, you can always grab it from https://build.funtoo.org directly, and I wlll be looking into making wiki improvements so that the Download page will inform users when this option is available.

Hi All,
At this time, I have made next-release the recommended release of Funtoo Linux for most people, as it has a very recent release of gcc and has more modern support for applications. 1.4-release is still available but unless you are specifically looking for a stable release, most users will want to install next-release at this time.
If you go to the https://www.funtoo.org/Download link, you will see that next-release stages are now available for all x86-64bit builds of Funtoo Linux including amd64-zen3, as well as riscv-64bit and raspi4-64bit. Soon, I will be updating install documentation to reflect this fact.
If you would like a build of 1.4-release, you can always grab it from https://build.funtoo.org directly, and I wlll be looking into making wiki improvements so that the Download page will inform users when this option is available.