drobbins

Also, frankly, I think that distros are now treated as commodities where somehow it is expected that we are supposed to 'prove to users' that they should use us instead of some other distro. Really, this is the attitude these days. And I don't really like this attitude. Asking for a roadmap is a perfect example of this attitude -- it asks very much of Funtoo, while offering very little -- nothing, really -- of personal opinion of what the individual is actually wanting. Like we should just wave our hands and promise random impressive things because we are trying to win your loyalty. If you look at our bug tracker, and our wiki, you will understand that this distro is run by users. We don't have a formal development team. Issues are opened by users. Any feature can be asked for, as long as justification is provided which can even be as minimal as that you are personally interested in this feature. (and this is explained on our bug tracker if you go to open a bug) So I have worked hard to create a model that empowers users -- but also gives users responsibility -- to move improvements forward by getting involved. I feel like expecting a roadmap is the inverse. It implies a model of development that is the opposite of this. We are not here to serve you, but to create a fun, collaborative environment that you can participate in, if you choose. Having a roadmap means you are not involved, and you are just being served. And this is a model for pure commercial software where you are paying money to have something delivered to you. That is not what we are doing here. It is a total shift in thinking --  from a "what can you do for me mentality" to a "you are part of a dynamic community" mindset.
There is a lot to unpack here, even beyond this specific annoyance, regarding how Open Source works in 2021 as compared to a decade or even 20 years ago. A lot of open source is happening under a corporate umbrella. Pure community projects simply have a smaller pool of true volunteer contributors. This isn't an issue with Funtoo but an issue with how for-profit startups and tech companies are pulling talent into their web of for-profit activities. Some of these companies have questionable value to society, even though they are making money. But if you ask the typical person, they are busy. Too busy. And we can unpack this more and look at how in the US and other countries, we have less leisure time and it is more expensive to provide for a family. Which means we are driven to work more, not less. It's all a recipe to steal personal time that used to be used for contributing to your favorite community project in your spare time. And I think that's sad.
So I actually have strong opinions on these things that align with @zogg in many ways, but these problems are bigger than Funtoo. Funtoo is doing quite well considering. I am very focused on these modern challenges, but they are non-trivial to solve. But we are making good progress.
And this goes back to my point about prioritizing working on solutions to the bigger problems.

I try to do a little every day. For example, the new 'next' release, which has been in planning for over a year, is now live and ready for contributions... This will be of interest to @zogg and others who want to be part of updating Funtoo without breaking stuff for 1.4-release users. See: 
 

@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
 

 

@dutch-master I totally agree. Ironically, I started Enoch (which became Gentoo) when I got frustrated by dpkg in Debian 1.3. Portage has since 'evolved' into something that has a lot of problems that dpkg originally had -- of being very good at telling you why it can't do something but not very good at resolving the problem it's complaining about, or providing a coherent error message when there is a problem.
Software tends to evolve this way -- it becomes more rigid over time. The cause is that most engineers will try to make the software more 'correct' and eliminate problems, but they often do this without advancing the architecture and just adding more internal checks. This actually can significantly reduce the usability of the software. This approach becomes much worse when the error messages displayed are not comprehensible by mortals.
Despite Portage's strengths, it does suffer from this way more than I'd like. We do have some technical work in progress that should offer some relief for this to some degree.

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Thank you @drobbins. It's really great to be back to my roots and working with you again! I'm having a really fun time and looking forward to getting to know everyone in the Funtoo user community.

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

New next-release stage3 and GNOME images are now available at https://build.funtoo.org/next. These images have several updated things but are intended for active development only and not for production/stable systems.
Please install them and help us test out GNOME and get other desktop environments supported!
Builds are only currently available for amd64-zen2 and intel64-skylake.
Please note that next-release is inherently unstable and thus can break at any time. The current status of next-release is that basic stage3's and GNOME stage3 should work fine, and we are expanding out from here to find issues and address them via the bug tracker.

Thanks, @seemant. Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
While Zogg started this thread with (in my opinion) overly trolling and negative opinions about Funtoo -- which me and some others found triggering -- there was some useful critical feedback mixed in, which I definitely reflected on and it would frankly be a mistake to ignore. I have tried to address much of the basic conceptual issues he raised (like differences from Gentoo) via the Wolf Pack Philosophy and Support Matrix (linked from main page of www.funtoo.org). But clearly there is still more work to do.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

@dutch-master I totally agree. Ironically, I started Enoch (which became Gentoo) when I got frustrated by dpkg in Debian 1.3. Portage has since 'evolved' into something that has a lot of problems that dpkg originally had -- of being very good at telling you why it can't do something but not very good at resolving the problem it's complaining about, or providing a coherent error message when there is a problem.
Software tends to evolve this way -- it becomes more rigid over time. The cause is that most engineers will try to make the software more 'correct' and eliminate problems, but they often do this without advancing the architecture and just adding more internal checks. This actually can significantly reduce the usability of the software. This approach becomes much worse when the error messages displayed are not comprehensible by mortals.
Despite Portage's strengths, it does suffer from this way more than I'd like. We do have some technical work in progress that should offer some relief for this to some degree.

Thanks, @seemant. Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
While Zogg started this thread with (in my opinion) overly trolling and negative opinions about Funtoo -- which me and some others found triggering -- there was some useful critical feedback mixed in, which I definitely reflected on and it would frankly be a mistake to ignore. I have tried to address much of the basic conceptual issues he raised (like differences from Gentoo) via the Wolf Pack Philosophy and Support Matrix (linked from main page of www.funtoo.org). But clearly there is still more work to do.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Hi All,
I'm seemant.  I worked with Daniel on Gentoo a long long time ago, and recently I've using Funtoo and participating in its development a little bit as well.  The roadmap discussion is interesting and this thread has evolved a lot.
One of the things that I'm, in fact, looking to do within the next couple of months is to create a sort of roadmap for Funtoo.
Please consider this a request for comments and input:  in which areas would you like to see Funtoo improve and evolve? How can we make Funtoo better for everyone?
 
 

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Due to https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy -- it would seem that a wolf is getting some traction as a mascot!

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

I'm happy to announce that Funtoo now has a Support Matrix, which you can view here: https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix
The Support Matrix is intended to provide new and experienced users of Funtoo with insight into what we are officially supporting, what we are not supporting, and what we might like to support in the future.
On the page, you'll also see probably the most clear explanations for why we use Debian kernels as our official kernels, and why we don't support SystemD.
This is going to be a living resource for the Funtoo community so you should expect this page to be kept up-to-date to reflect the current realities of the Funtoo project.
I hope you enjoy it! 🙂
Best,
Daniel

I'm happy to announce that Funtoo now has a Support Matrix, which you can view here: https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix
The Support Matrix is intended to provide new and experienced users of Funtoo with insight into what we are officially supporting, what we are not supporting, and what we might like to support in the future.
On the page, you'll also see probably the most clear explanations for why we use Debian kernels as our official kernels, and why we don't support SystemD.
This is going to be a living resource for the Funtoo community so you should expect this page to be kept up-to-date to reflect the current realities of the Funtoo project.
I hope you enjoy it! 🙂
Best,
Daniel

As we have more people coming to Funtoo from Gentoo -- and not *quite* understanding the difference -- I realized I was doing a very bad job of communicating what makes Funtoo different. So to help address this, I documented the Wolf Pack Philosophy, which I feel is a great way to explain nearly all of our technical distinctives for the Funtoo project, so you have a better understanding of what Funtoo is all about. I hope you find it informative and enjoyable.
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy