Thank You!

[ooza]

Hello All,

I want to leave a thank you note here for the developers/maintainers of Funtoo. I wrote a brief summary of my experience with Linux to put my thanks in context. Moderators, if this post is inappropriate for General Funtoo Discussion, please delete it. Systemd fans, if you want to sing it's praises and tell me what an idiot I am, please take it to another thread. This thread is for expressing gratitude.

I am really impressed with Funtoo! I bounced around between a lot of distros back when I started using linux. Around 2004 I found Gentoo and it was a revelation. No more dependency hell! I had a lot of free time on my hands so I didn't really mind the occasional breakage. The forums were super friendly and helpful, but a year or two after Daniel Robbins retired from the project, the atmosphere changed. The forums became dramatically less friendly and helpful, mostly due to half a dozen or so users, but not only that, even the documentation and package installation notes started to get snarky and unprofessional. Then I heard about Arch.

With pacman I could install software quickly on my old hardware. Things rarely broke and if they did, the forums were civil and the documentation was superb. In my opinion Arch's wiki is still the best of any distro's. But Arch always wants to be on the bleeding edge and I think that's what led them to implement systemd before the implications were fully appreciated. Yeah, Arch's init management sucked compared to OpenRC. It was probably what I missed most from Gentoo. Systemd made simple administration tasks very easy. It had so many features built in. Unix groups became virtually irrelevant. Systemd handled everything. It was great until something broke. Systemd is completely opaque. The unit files have almost no information. Systemd takes the unit file and then does some black magic to start the specified service. I had a problem with the rfkill service. I tried as many ways as I could think of the explicitly unblock my wifi card. I even blacklisted any service I could find that might have anything to do with networking or rkill, but still every time I booted something would block my wifi card. I never did figure it out.
 
On a later Arch install I learned that some users had OpenRC working on Arch and the switch was relatively painless. Alright! This was linux as I remembered it. I had control over what was actually running on my system. Now to uninstall systemd and everything related to it. Wait a minute, cups builds with systemd? Arch had naturally enabled systemd for every package that had a build flag for it. It seemed virtually everything in userspace either depended on systemd or depended on polkit/consolekit or something else that was dependant on systemd. It was time to look for a new distro.

But even Debian decided to go along with Redhat's agenda. It was everywhere! Gentoo seemed like my only option if I wanted rolling releases of relatively recent software, until I read a reddit comment where someone mentioned Funtoo. I tried it out and yes, this was Gentoo without the rough edges I remembered. Important stuff has yet to break for me (knock on wood). It also seems to be Gentoo without the jerks. From what I've read on the forums and experienced on the bug tracker, people are helpful and friendly (though the maintainers seem way overworked :).

I now have a Funtoo box completely devoid of systemd, polkit, consolekit, pulseaudio, avahi, udisks, or any of the other software that seems to be turning Linux into a windows/android-esque "standard base" for easy installation of software through Redhat's appstore. Thank you Funtoo developers and maintainers! Your work is one of the few bright spots in an increasingly grim, increasingly homogeneous distro scene.

 

[666threesixes666]

our wiki's setup a bit better than arches.  they certainly do have the content part down, but some pages look like wreckage with the excessive warning/dispute templates.  on the main site Go > how to 'wiki' is a really easy way to learn how to wiki stuff @ funtoo.

 

http://www.funtoo.org/Help:Funtoo_Editing_Guidelines

 

vs

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Contributing

[ooza]

our wiki's setup a bit better than arches.  they certainly do have the content part down, but some pages look like wreckage with the excessive warning/dispute templates.  on the main site Go > how to 'wiki' is a really easy way to learn how to wiki stuff @ funtoo.

 

http://www.funtoo.org/Help:Funtoo_Editing_Guidelines

 

vs

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Contributing

 

You make a good point. Arch has so many people contributing to their wiki it can get pretty chaotic. Also when Arch moved to systemd tons of articles had to be updated. Since systemd does so much more than just init, a lot of valuable, general linux system administration info was lost.