morphmex

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.
 

I found Zogg's post disrespectful.  Daniel Robbins is the creator of Gentoo and now of Funtoo.  He is definitely an out of class person an Elon Musk of Open Source.  We need more respect for people who use their free time, which today is increasingly scarce for projects open to all.  I found this post offensive, specious and useless.  Open source and GNU Linux offers many operating systems that can offer what everyone is looking for.  You can use the derivatives debian arch, gentoo, fedora or Rocky linux etc .... I have been following Daniel for a long time because I think he has brilliant ideas but he must respect his times.  For my part, I would like to thank Daniel for what he does, for his altruism and his desire to share his culture, intelligence and genius with those who deserve it.  Thanks Daniel and best wishes for a Happy New Year to you and your family.

@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.

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
 

 

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.

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 🙂

Hey everyone,
I have updated our Development Guide to contain information on the "Funtoo Way". The "Funtoo Way" is a really important philosophy about how we do things at Funtoo and I strongly encourage everyone to read it, even if you don't consider yourself a "developer". It helps to explain how our community works and how we can work together.
https://www.funtoo.org/Development_Guide
Best,
Daniel

Hey everyone,
I'm pleased to announce that Funtoo Linux and Sabayon (https://www.sabayon.org) are joining forces!
Now to explain what this means and how it came about.
Sabayon is one of the great Open Source projects and has an amazing reputation for delivering an easy-to-use Linux desktop that is built using Gentoo. For quite a while, Funtoo has been supporting the Sabayon effort because we believe in what they do.
Over the past several months, in chatting with the Sabayon team, it became really clear that we had a shared vision for creating a friendly and innovative community. We also were working on several next-generation technologies that were a good complement to one another. We decided it would be more powerful -- and fun -- to combine our efforts into one larger effort. So that is what we are doing.
What this means is that while each project will maintain its own personality, projects and management, we will be logically combining into a larger effort and there will be a tremendous amount of cross-project collaboration. This collaboration immediately multiplies our capabilities for delivering some next generation technologies that we have been working on and are excited to share with you.
The most immediate result of this collaboration is that moving forward, Sabayon OS efforts will be built on Funtoo. This, however, is just the first step. What I can say is that there will be much sharing of technology which will benefit both projects, and many new things.
For existing users of Sabayon and Funtoo, the communities you know and love will have new strength, support and ability to tackle a new phase of Linux Open Source innovation. I am really excited about this collaboration.
Welcome, Sabayon team!
Best,
Daniel Robbins

GNOME 3.34.1 is ready for use and will become the default version of GNOME in 1.4-release in a few days. If you would like to use it now, you can add the following to /etc/ego.conf:
[kits] gnome-kit = 3.34-prime Then ego sync, emerge -auDN @world, emerge @preserved-rebuild, and restart xdm and you should be in business.
If you would like to avoid upgrading to GNOME 3.34, now is the time to insert the following code into /etc/ego.conf:
[kits] gnome-kit = 3.32-prime Then, in a few days when 3.34-prime becomes active, you will stick with 3.32-prime and not get the updates until you want them.

Fixed masking compat32.

Since 1.3 was released I've been using this Gentoo overlay (using the local repository method) to install flatpak and Steam in it: https://github.com/fosero/flatpak-overlay
It works well even after upgrading to 1.4

For those who may not understand the embracing of next-gen communication clients... it's really not about the technology here.
We have people who use Discord and Telegram already, and do not like IRC.
I, personally, am really enjoying the newer communities over freenode. I feel like there's too much rumors/OSS politics on freenode these days. I spend my time on freenode dealing with this crap rather than having fun and moving Funtoo forward.
I see too much weird community dynamics -- too much drama, and we're sitting right next to the Gentoo channels and there is often unpleasant "overspray" I need to deal with -- things like "hey drobbins, did you see that person X is saying thing Y about Funtoo and/or you in channel Z?" Then I feel obligated to personally deal with it.
If you are someone who loves freenode and the freenode community, you should be there. I have been using freenode since before it was called freenode. I remember when lilo (now deceased, and relentlessly attacked by his detractors) ran the show. Freenode, despite its reputation for being the place on the Internet for OSS-related chat, has always been a rough place socially to some degree.
The truth is that there are a lot of options for Funtoo users to find a community that works for them, and I'm really happy to be not just on Discord but on Telegram too:
https://t.me/funtoolinux
The important thing is to find a community that is a positive environment for you, that gives you energy rather than takes it away, so for these reasons I am very glad for Discord and now Telegram and think everyone should be too ?
The newer technology is also nice -- like being able to edit posts, post actual screenshots into the channel for support purposes, funny gifs, voice support, *amazing mobile clients*, etc etc etc.
-Daniel
 

Everyone,
GNOME stages are now officially part of Funtoo.
These beefy stages (that was a Larry the Cow pun) weigh in at about 1.4GB and include the following goodies:
GNOME 3.32 Mozilla Firefox Popular graphics drivers already enabled metalog, vim, linux-firmware Same debian-sources-lts kernel that is in our regular stage3 multicast DNS/avahi enabled by default The install docs have been updated to include references to these new GNOME stages. You can find them for download on the Subarch pages or on https://build.funtoo.org.
Also note that we should now have LXD images for every subarch which will allow you to set up optimized Funtoo-in-Funtoo environments using LXD.
Of course, these are fully optimized stages and we plan to continue to offer these moving forward.

Hey Everyone,
We're now supporting Discord as an official Funtoo online community. Join via this link: https://discord.gg/BNUSpUU
Forums discussion thread for this announcement here:
 
Best,
Daniel

My compliments for the new funtoo, it works perfectly.

Note to all -- this kernel has been unmasked and is ready for general use.

You are very kind, thank you for the support.

Hello Everyone --
I want to highlight some improvements that have been made to the wiki besides our new FAQ (https://www.funtoo.org/FAQ)
We now have a new Subarches page that is a lot easier to navigate: https://www.funtoo.org/Subarches
And the look of various things like notes, tips, warnings, etc. have been improved for a cleaner, more consistent look. This is a good sample page to browse the new look. Note that you may need to "hard reload" the page to get the new CSS: https://www.funtoo.org/Upgrade_Instructions
Enjoy!
-Daniel
 

I feel that the future is already here... ;-)

It's a good idea.

Something like this will be offered relatively soon.