siris

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about:
First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.
Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.
Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...
Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.
Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.
Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!
Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.
New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).
Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂
Best,
Daniel

Hello all and happy 2022!
So, I've been around for about 60 days now, and I wanted to share some of what I've been doing and some thoughts from Daniel and the development team.
I've been slowly getting to know the Funtoo ecosystem more and more each day.  From exploring the Funtoo system from a predominantly Gentoo context to combing through JIRA to having voice chats on Discord with some of y'all.
During our time in Gentoo, Daniel and I interacted with users via:
IRC, bugzilla, and mailing lists (and btw, the website was generated xml that Daniel had written and designed).  Later on, the forums came along and blogs came along between when Daniel left and when I left.  Since that time, the world has changed a little bit.  IRC has been replaced by Discord and Telegram, bugzilla replaced by JIRA, and not a lot happening on the mailing lists, and Twitter is a new addition (and now the website is another avenue for direct interaction for the Funtoo community.
Last week I invited everyone in the #general Discord channel to ping me if you'd like to schedule a 1 hour chat with me.  We can talk about anything you like. And now I’m opening that invite up to all of you as well. If you can see this and want to chat, please let me know so that we can schedule some together.   Although..based on the conversations I've already been having, I reckon we'll talk mostly about Gentoo and Funtoo things 🙂.
Thank you for your patience with all the JIRA emails lately, that's because I was going through each open ticket one by one, to bring everything up to date, and jump start some that had languished. I took a second pass through the tickets to tag them.  Within a day, community members were using the new tags/labels. Thank y'all for noticing and adopting 🙂
The goal is for us to start creating a plan for Funtoo development. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll start to communicate about where we’ll be focusing our efforts.  Most importantly, we’ll be focusing extensively on improving the experience for those of you who want to learn how to write ebuilds and autogens and want to share your ebuilds and autogens with the rest of the community.
 
I’ll provide another update next month,  near the 90-day mark.  Meanwhile, I’d love to chat with y’all..
 
Please feel free to book a time on my calendar, or get in touch with me via DM on Discord, Telegram or the forums. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 930PM PDT (530AM UTC +1 day) please join us in the Voice channel in Discord, where @sirisis leading an educational series via screenshare. Come learn about making ebuilds, autogen'ing ebuilds, and more.
 
Looking forward to get to know ayou.
 
Cheers,
Seemant

 

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 🙂

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 🙂