Why I feel like I'm forced to leave funtoo

[aitikin]

I'm posting this because, maybe I'm mistaken, but I can't see how I am.

I come from a timeframe where being able to search forums and newsletters would allow me to often solve issues without having to wait and sift through hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of unrelated posts to find what the solution to said issues.  It seems this community has moved further, and further, and further away from traditional support roles to the fad of (pardon my terminology, but it's accurate) bullshit discord as support or only YouTube.

I'm running into a shit ton of emerge errors after an ego sync after the server was down for months and I cannot easily find what I need to know.  It's probably a stupid simple solution, probably to a problem that was documented in the discord a dozen times, but I can't for the life of me find it.  I don't know if I should be looking in, "install-help," which implies that it should be focused on the base install by its namesake.  I can't tell if I should hunt through, "general," for it, though, of the options, that's the most sensible, I feel like it'd be the least useful.  Maybe it should be, "development," but that seems like I, an end user, should never really be in that one...

This has forced even worse misunderstanding.  For me, it's forced freaking outrage to the point that I've yelled at the computer because I cannot figure out what the F*** I need to do and cannot find it in the forums and cannot find it in discord no matter how I go about searching.

Genuinely, I appreciated ego and epro and the other funtoo tools I can't get in Gentoo proper.  But the absolute F****** lack of responsible documentation and the fact that it feels like I'm meant to feel grateful for that, makes me want to not use funtoo anymore.

Please, show me where my statements are completely inaccurate and how I can stay here.  But, frankly, if you send me ANY ONE SINGLE YouTube as a solution, I'm gone.  YouTube is not how I should be taught how to fix a bloody commandline issue.  I shouldn't have to sift through a video that's even 4 minutes long to find a 20 second answer.

I genuinely feel like funtoo is dying as a result of these decisions to make access to the knowledge contingent on using shit like discord and YouTube.

[drobbins]

 

[drobbins]

Did that video help?

[coffnix]

Hi @aitikin I understand the frustrations you're facing, and we're here to offer our support. If you could reach out to us on Discord in the #general channel, I'll be there to assist you personally – my username is Coffnix. I'm eager to hear your ideas about how we could improve the way you find solutions to your problems. Also, feel free to utilize this forum for any queries you might have. Just send over your questions, and we'll work together to find a resolution. Remember, at Funtoo, we're more than just a community of users – we're a network of friends ready to help each other out.

[drobbins]

@aitikin I gave you a sarcastic answer as a response to your threat of: "But, frankly, if you send me ANY ONE SINGLE YouTube as a solution, I'm gone." I'm calling out your threat.

Do you think that maybe your inability to find support could be related to your immature and ranting behavior, rather than any deficiency in our project and documentation?

 

 

[uudruid74]

On 11/29/2023 at 8:36 PM, aitikin said:

This has forced even worse misunderstanding.  For me, it's forced freaking outrage to the point that I've yelled at the computer because I cannot figure out what the F*** I need to do and cannot find it in the forums and cannot find it in discord no matter how I go about searching.

I'm right there with ya man!   I used to be the guy that wanted everything done my way, and funtoo was awesome at that!.  The decision to not deal with systemd was one I was behind 100%.  No bloat, no bullshit, use the tools YOU want and not what the distribution says you should.  Screw Redhat and anyone else that wants to dictate what I run! 

Now, I'm old.  I'm tired of fiddling with stupid computer issues.  I don't care how it's set up anymore!  As long as everything works and doesn't have known security holes in it, it's perfect!

It's no fault of BDFL or anyone else that is keeping this project afloat.  I totally get that they are busy as hell trying to keep everything going and aren't being compensated for the time they spend doing so.  But, the knowledge of how all this is put together is really isolated to too few people and as the internals are "improved", there seems to be very little notice about the changes.  The knowledge of how this all works needs to be more universal, and the state of the documentation is honestly generally pretty bad and outdated. 

I remember Gentoo used to have a news thing where it told you of upcoming changes, security vulnerabilities, and all sorts of stuff.  That was probably 25 years ago?  I don't know if they still do that, but I think something similar would be a good first start at getting this information pushed out to people.  Every emerge or ego or whatever could be pulling in unread notifications, distributed right with the ebuilds.  By the time someone comes to the website to search the forums, it's probably too late.

The last update I tried to do broke everything.  I couldn't figure out why something that was working fine before is suddenly spewing all over my screen.  I came to the forums and find a big red announcement about how Funtoo 1.4 is no longer supported.  That must be it!  I look around for a version number and find a file in /etc that says I'm on release funtoo 1.4.  Shit!  I thought did the whole server rebuild thing a year ago!  I have to do it again??  Come to find out, early versions of funtoo-next apparently had the old 1.4 version number in that file.  So, false alarm!  The correct way to get the version is some other tool and I have already forgotten the name.  I would love to see some sort of single integrated tool that would allow you to configure all this stuff without having to remember all these different commands and file locations, maybe curses based or something.  My brain is too close to capacity to keep this stuff in cache anymore!

They say "Ebuild is broken, report it in Jira".  OK, Jira has a license issue!  Now what?  Exclude it and wait.  What about SSH?  Gentoo has an ebuild.  How do I use it?  Link to overlay guide.  OK, tried that and it didn't see the new ebuild.  Now what?  How do I debug it?  You might have to change the EAPI.  No idea what that is!  Change it to what?  Why?  How do I know if I need to or not?   Silence. What to do about the python errors?  Silence.

I find that the error messages are completely uninformative and much has changed since the documentation was written.  But I need to keep this server up right now.  I'm not in a position where I can just erase it and start over with a different OS.  I had no idea of the mess I was walking into with a simple update.  Funtoo makes me scared to update my system because I have no idea how many hours or days I'll spend trying to figure out WHY its broken and so I leave it the hell alone and don't do updates.  This isn't good practice and I think it would advantageous to find some way of getting things a bit more stable.  I think that is a real issue.  People shouldn't be afraid to run an update!

Plus, the server is hosted by funtoo, so if I screw it up (like messing up SSH by breaking the ebuild) then I might be locked out of my server until I can find someone to fix it.  I'm scared as crap!  My laptop has a current version of openssh and I can't remember the last time I needed to ssh into my laptop. 

But, here is the issue.  I had to download, install, and configure openssh myself. I used to be the "NEVER EVER  bypass the package manager!" kinda guy, but I can wget/configure/make  and have a working and up-to-date package in a few minutes compared to spending days trying to figure out how to manipulate ebuilds and overlays and getting nowhere at all.  How is the ebuild system helping me and not hindering me?   It's become a big black box between what I need done and actually getting it done.

There needs to be some sort of user-friendly way to manage this stuff better or figure out what is going on in the system.   It feels like a black box and the only way in is to read the source which could take weeks.  It's a cool build system for developers, but I'm beginning to think it's just a bad idea.  It seems to take more expertise than what is available. 

At least JIRA is back up!

 

 

Edited March 1 by uudruid74
typo

[drobbins]

@uudruid74 we actually do have a newsletter. If you had read it, you would have known about the deprecation of 1.4-release.

OpenSSH has been updated in next-release so it is now available for use, thanks to our volunteer contributors.

[drobbins]

@uudruid74 on the "inform users of new changes" front, I have been working on a solution -- @invakid404 has helped with a prototype. Like any new technology, it takes free time to work on. I agree that something better is needed for this, because if no one knows about an improvement or new ebuild, often it doesn't actually benefit anyone since they don't know about it.