jefebromden

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.

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

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

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

@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
 

 

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

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

Hi everyone !!!!
I've made a Funtoo Quick Installation Checklist... I'm sorry is in spanish!!!, maybe with some unforced installation errors.... you can check here: https://www.funtoo.org/User:Vargux/Install
It's similar to: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_Installation_Checklist
 
If anybody can say me if something is not correct, I'll change it...
This is for add more support to Funtoo installation process.
 
--- VA R G U X --- 

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The latest version of the official Funtoo LiveCD supports Apple computers using intel processor, just boot using a USB device. I've only tested it with balenaEtcher, but it should work with other tools to create bootable USB, like Ventoy.
I recommend testing, here on the macbook air everything worked, including wi-fi.
Enjoy! 
Download Link: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD/Releases
 
 

 

Hi fellows,
Some time ago I was forced to abandon Funtoo to Gentoo as the KDE tree fell hopelessly behind. I did not have the time nor the funto-mirroring-know-how to get involved in the matter. I did try to use the ebuilds from Gentoo by that became a dependency nightmare. Quite a lot have changed in Funtoo since then.  Recently there has been a general upgrade of the kde-plasma/plasma-meta and KDE was up to date for a while, but are no longer. 
Question is, will the status of KDE depend on once in a while heroic efforts or are Funtoo aiming to mirror either Gentoo or KDE trees so that one can depend on the kde-plasma/plasma-meta being reasonable up to date? And if not, are there a strategy or and work going on to get there? Are there any ambitions?
I am not asking for KDE stage 4, but I depend on KDE for my every day work over time.
 
Cheers,
Erik
 

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.

Hello everybody! We know that the Gentoo project has recently removed the zoneminder ebuild due to lack of maintainers, and also some overlays have given up on maintaining it. We at Funtoo decided to keep the zoneminder active and up to date, and we released a new release on yesterday's date, and it works on 1.4 and Next release.
ZoneMinder is open source software used to capture, analyse, record, and monitor cameras.

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