nrc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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

@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.

If you  check the Jira bug tracker or Discord site things are reasonably active.  I think the "roadmap" is "keep making Funtoo more current and more maintainable."  All the work that has gone into kits and now autogen packages has made a big difference in that respect.
@drobbins pondered whether a forum was still necessary and relevant the last time he revamped the site.  I felt at the time it was still important to provide that visible, easy gateway into the community for new people.  But it just doesn't seem to be the kind of center of activity for the project that forums used to be so maybe it doesn't represent the project well.
 
 

@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
 

 

Hi,
From recent activity it seems like funtoo development (except autogenerated updates mostly) is getting to mostly none, including activity even in on this forum.
Can we get an update on the current state, what is the roadmap and future of the project?
And if I'm correct and funtoo project is declining, is there any plans to provide proper solution to migrate to gentoo without the need to setup everything from scratch.

The basic 1.1.1.1 service is just about avoiding tracking through logging by your DNS provider.  They support DNS over TLS and HTTPS if you want additional privacy.  They also support DNSSEC although that really depends on the configuration of the site being checked. 
https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/what-is-1.1.1.1/

Your steam installation in Flatpak should have a bin_steam.sh in /../com.valvesoftware.Steam/current/active/files/lib/steam. Also a bootstrap.....tar.xz file.
The script unpacks the bootstrap file in a .local/share/Steam directory. The bin_steam.sh script tells you where it installs around line 95:
function install_bootstrap()
{
        STEAMDIR="$1"
        # Save the umask and set strong permissions
        omask="$(umask)"
        umask 0077
        echo $"Setting up Steam content in $STEAMDIR"
 
Towards the end of the script there is the function check_bootstrap(), which checks that the bootstrap was unpacked successfully. Basically you can manually unpack the bootstrap file in the right place:
tar -xf bootstrap.tar.xz and remove the checks in the script and it should execute and run.
 
Make sure that the partition that has the bootstrap etc ($STEAMDIR) is mounted with the exec permission in /etc/fstab !
That's it - voila, it should run now....

Since they're pulling gentoo packages I'm not sure how much difference the freshness of the ISO makes.  I assume it's a stage4/installer package and you can build from there. For comparison, Funtoo 1.4 was released Sept '19.
That's the interesting thing about this, if they have an easy installer and a more friendly package manager it could significantly extend Funtoo's reach.  They are at least in the top 100 on distrowatch.  That probably represents at least a doubling of users benefiting from Funtoo developments.
The one concern for me is that Sabayon currently ships with systemd as the default init - a definite no for me.

I tried to spin up an image (my first time using it). The error I got seemed to suggest that it was still available to users that had already accepted the terms, but no new users could use it. I mentioned it to @drobbins on discord and he had gotten the same mail you got. He indicated he was trying to track it down and sort it out with AWS.
https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-7846 is the bug number. 

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

Thanks very much it has been resolved .

Greetings during unusual times --
I wanted to let everyone know that the following ebuilds are currently being auto-updated using our new, amazing autogen framework. That means we will always have current versions:
www-client/firefox-bin www-client/google-chrome www-client/google-chrome-beta www-client/google-chrome-unstable www-client/brave-bin app-admin/pass app-admin/passwordsafe net-misc/anydesk-bin mail-client/thunderbird-bin net-im/discord-bin net-im/zoom-bin net-im/slack-bin More are on the way! For those working remotely, I recommend checking out zoom-bin (Zoom meetings) as well as anydesk-bin (AnyDesk) for fast remote desktop. They work great under Funtoo.
Enjoy, and stay safe.
-Daniel

Some more updates headed your way:
nvidia-drivers-440.44 now available. Remember that you will also need to emerge nvidia-kernel-drivers for your kernel to make the kernel modules available. steam-nvidia-launcher is now at 1.5. Fixed are annoying gtk+ dialog messages when starting up the launcher, and also FL-6907 (thanks @nrc) the pulseaudio config hard-coded for UID 1000.

You and I are on the cusp of a political discussion here ? but I would argue that even "reputable" sites these days are spewing propaganda, so there is no substitute for critical thinking. We do not live in an ethical age. Whether intentional or the result of our modern echo chamber, there is misleading information EVERYWHERE online and I couldn't really tell you ANY trustworthy source of information that I would tell you that you could trust implicitly. Even Associated Press and Reuters seem horribly compromised and full of spin! Every journalist seems to want to write an atomic bomb of a news story and go though such extreme lengths to try to inject bias while remaining 'factual' -- it would be comical if it weren't so sad. Assuming a posture of skepticism and "it's probably not as bad as it sounds" is highly recommended when looking at sources of information online. Politics is the art of getting a ton of people pissed off and then leveraging that energy -- and doing this online is known to be extremely effective. So you just have to be wary. Don't be a pawn.
Now, as for the other issues you raised, I guess I can read and think about those now that I've vented ?

Hey Everyone,
I recently upgraded to a newer Thinkpad Laptop (P1) and decided this was a good time to upgrade Funtoo's graphics stack to sort of finish the work that TemptorSent had started. You'll recall that if you tested 1.4, media-libs/mesa could be quite picky with USE vars/VIDEO_CARDS settings. This should now be fixed.
One thing that bugged me when I installed Funtoo on my P1 was that video acceleration wasn't working well. So I've tried very hard to address this so that "out of the box" with minimal/no configuration, you will have good video acceleration support in Funtoo.
New documentation on this system that is now in 1.4 can be found here: https://www.funtoo.org/Make.conf/VIDEO_CARDS
In particular, see here: https://www.funtoo.org/Make.conf/VIDEO_CARDS/Mix-ins (This table is also included in the main page linked above.)
You'll also see extensive documentation on the new VIDEO_CARDS settings that are available and all map directly to a particular graphics driver now (eliminating confusion between gallium and DRI drivers that existed.)
The workstation and desktop flavors will now auto-enable Open Source Intel integrated graphics (DRI) and Radeon Gallium graphics (Gallium) -- enabling Vulkan for both. I did not enable nvidia or nouveau by default as I leave this choice of proprietary vs. open source to the user (for Intel and Radeon, the best choices are obvious so safe to enable these.)
This should be a big step towards getting everyone optimal video performance in Funtoo without significant work! Be sure to give https://www.funtoo.org/Make.conf/VIDEO_CARDS/Mix-ins and the parent page a good read. And if you use firefox, play around with the h264ify plugin to optimize YouTube video playback and see if it helps reduce your CPU usage.
Enjoy!

Cuda is not supported by legacy nvidia-driver-340.107
Don't set gfxcard-nvidia mix-ins with legacy driver as it adds cuda use flag to make.defaults
Cuda use flag is enabled on multiple packages on your system pulling in nvidia-cuda-toolkit which pulls in nvidia-driver-410.93
rj@funtoo ~ $ equery g nvidia-cuda-toolkit-9.2.88 * dependency graph for dev-util/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-9.2.88 `-- dev-util/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-9.2.88 NVIDIA-CUDA license(s) `-- sys-devel/gcc-7.4.1-r6 (<sys-devel/gcc-8) unknown [cxx] `-- x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-410.93 (>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-396.24) M[package.mask] [X uvm] `-- sys-libs/libtermcap-compat-2.0.8-r4 (sys-libs/libtermcap-compat) ~amd64 `-- sys-libs/ncurses-5.9-r101 (sys-libs/ncurses) amd64 [tinfo] `-- virtual/jre-1.8.0-r1 (>=virtual/jre-1.6) amd64 [ dev-util/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-9.2.88 stats: packages (6), max depth (1) ] Disable cuda use flag from every package on your system.
Use this command to find the packages with cuda enabled:
USE="cuda"; for PKG in $(equery -q hasuse $USE); do echo $PKG: $(equery -q uses $PKG |grep $USE); done At the minimum these 2 packages have cuda enabled:
# required by dev-cpp/eigen-3.3.5-r1::dev-kit[cuda]
[ebuild   R    ] media-libs/opencv-3.4.1-r4  USE="cuda* opencl*"
I run nvidia-8400GS with nvidia-driver-340.107  with >x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-340.107 in package.mask
No issue with portage wanting to install nvidia-cuda-toolkit and upgrade nvidia-driver.
All packages with cuda use option on my system have it disabled "-cuda"
rj@funtoo ~ $ USE="cuda"; for PKG in $(equery -q hasuse $USE); do echo $PKG: $(equery -q uses $PKG |grep $USE); done dev-cpp/eigen-3.3.5-r1: -cuda media-libs/opencv-3.4.1-r4: -cuda media-video/mpv-0.27.2: -cuda Check and avoid user override configs made in /etc/portage/make.conf , /etc/portage/packages.{use,mask,unmask}.   
The Block on your system is caused by having apulse installed with pulseaudio use enabled.
[blocks B      ] media-plugins/alsa-plugins[pulseaudio] ("media-plugins/alsa-plugins[pulseaudio]" is hard blocking media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4) Remove apulse and install pulseaudio.
If you configure pulseaudio as minimal unintrusive dumb pipe to alsa you don't need alsa-plugins or the pulseaudio use flag enabled.
Pulse auto-spawns when needed by pre-compiled firefox-bin or any other program with a pulseaudio driver.
Programs with alsa drivers work as well.