Thoughts about Funtoo

[foid]

Hi all,

I would like to share my thoughts about Funtoo, and sorry if it's not the right place, I didn't find any other relevant.

First of all, please, don't take all of this as a criticism or a complaint. I would like to share in order to improve a distribution that used to be my main gear about 10 years ago.

I re-installed Funtoo a few month ago, as I always like the many things brought by D.Robbins, to ease life compared to Gentoo (that I used before I discovered Funtoo; yes, I am quite old !).

I wanted to recall the pleasure I had when it was my main linux workstation, with Xfce as desktop. Everything was working fine, and up-to-date in most case.

The first thing I was attracted by was the new Wolf Pack Philosophy, which is very interesting, and I agree with all of it.

Install then went fine (I would say, as always). But, with it came frustration that was not there in the past (or maybe less I should say).

Localization (yes, I know I have done a post already) as I am French (nobody's perfect !) is what I would call a disaster. I tried initially the Gnome (grade A) where keyboards

was Qwerty (easy to change), but applications and menu were in English. All the tips, how-to and help didn't change anything. The French language does not apply.

I also tried with Mate, Xfce and Cinnamon. For some reason, Cinnamon seems to have a better translation than the other desktop. Why ? Mystery !

Nevertheless, plenty of applications are in English. Certainly not a big deal, but thats not very comfortable.

But, where I am very disappointed it's with the desktops : Gnome 3.36, Xfce 4.16, Cinnamon 4... etc ... All these desktops are out dated for month if not years. Yet, still usable.

I know the different branchs (1.4, Next, and harvester or Musl), but I would like to understand the point of keeping these desktops to quite outdated versions, even with the

philosophy "If it's not broken, don't touch it". Don't misunderstand me, I am not complaining as I know devs are doing hard work to keep everything up-to-date, but I am wondering who

would like to use outdated desktop right now.

A very good point, in my opinion, is the monthly letter started by Daniel Robbins to keep people aware of what's going on. I think communication is paramount (the actual sinking Solus story

shows how communication is primordial). Needless to say that I am expecting news (not ETA) for the future of Funtoo (desktop update to say one ...).

Another very good point is the availability and responsiveness of the dev when a problem occurs. That's really a must for me.

I would like to finish with some details : the website is full of good information but has sometimes outdated pages or partially translated pages (by the way, if you are interested,

I can translate pages in French; just let me know, I'll be pleased to help). And, although I understand that Funtoo cannot have thousands of desktop, I was wondering if Budgie could

be a desktop that would fit with Funtoo (as it's based, for the moment, on Gnome). 

Once again, this was not a criticism of Funtoo, as I really enjoy using it and could become (back) my main gear; just thoughts that you can take for what it is : thoughts !

Thanks to the team for what you are doing.