My understanding is that it was created after the founder of Gentoo had some disagreements about the direction of the distro and forked. Many of the big distinctions (like git instead of rsync for updates; gentoo supports both now) have eroded over time.
I was always of the opinion that the real difference was community culture.
I used to be into Gentoo, but the community got pretty toxic around the time that Robbins left. My sense was Robbins was trying to start over with less negativity. Hence the "fun" part of "funtoo".
I also think we might accomplish more if people could find themselves to being more compromising. Not that we don’t benefit from having a bunch of distros, but perhaps there’s a bit too much segmentation.
Some of the greatest creations were made because of the creators refusal to compromise their vision.
That said, Linux is inherently a community project, and compromise is required for any large community. I think the fragmentation is the biggest thing holding back desktop Linux. Not only are talented people solving some of the same problems 30 different ways, but in doing so, ignoring other problem that need solving. This can also be viewed through the lens of user choice and allowing the best ideas to win. The larger issue (imo) is it creates a huge learning curve for new users just to get started. Windows and macOS don't have this problem, because there is a singular vision and the company choose a solution to move forward with that all the employees get behind. All that fragmentation and testing is done internally, and the public doesn't have to deal with it, for the most part.
> fragmentation is the biggest thing holding back desktop Linux
I'm not convinced.
The main thing holding back desktop Linux is buggy upstream software not working, which usuall affect all distros. LibreOffice Writer didn't have a rastered ruler for 10 years, no quality GPU driver for some AMD card, some KDE app segfaults, some Python app has a value unexpectedly being None, a kernel minor version update just completely broke the version of VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS -- those were and often still are daily problems that no amount of distro hopping or fragmentation consolidation will fix.
The "large" distributions justify their existence by differing in key aspects that cannot be consolidated:
* Corporate vs community, e.g. RedHat/SuSE/Ubuntu vs. Debian
* Fundamental concepts, e.g. NixOS/Guix vs. everything else
* Up-to-date-ness, e.g. Arch vs. Debian
There are some aspects of fragmentation that _could_ be consolidated by better software and more configurability, e.g.
* Source vs. binary, e.g. NixOS provides both
* Choice of libc, e.g. NixOS ships glibc by default but you can easily get much software with musl, and it's technically possible (but needs more community power) to provide a whole system running musl with a single line of config for the end user
* GUI vs CLI configuration
For the small distros, they are niche enough that them merging with another distro doesn't have a huge consolidation effect overall. For example, I do not see how Void Linux and Alpine Linux merging would significantly improve the life of the mass of Ubuntu users, or signficiantly advance "Linux on the desktop".
It's true that there's some amount of duplicate work occurring, but much of that is often easily re-used across distros. For example, if in NixOS something doesn't work with the newest version of musl, one would usually check if Alpine already solved that and if yes, swiftly copy the approach. The main work is for the _first_ one to figure it out, and that work is necessary even if there was only 1 distro.
Reducing distribution fragmentation isn't what makes "Linux on the desktop" happen.
Fixing broken software, making good desktop environments, creating Wine or Proton or Pipewire or cross-platform software (LibreOffice, all browsers, Electron), does.
I don't think we disagree at a fundamental level. My thought on reducing fragmentation is to reallocate those resources to fix the broken software and to make everything better and smooth. That last 10% to make the UX really good isn't something most people like doing, but it's something that macOS and Windows both spend a lot more time on that Linux.
Due to the fragmentation, I don't think most users make it far enough to run into the application or UX issues. It seems like reducing fragmentation would get more people into the door, and once they are in the door, having those developers work on making the core experience better, is what keeps people around. Once the platform has more users, that will bring in even more developers... the ones who are there as a job, not just enthusiasts, which should lead to an upward spiral for quality.
In terms of the large distributions not being able to be consolidated... I don't think the average user (read: typical Windows and macOS users) care about any of that, other than not having to go to the CLI to change a config. A user should not need to know what glibc is.
Entirely different resources though, which is why this criticism makes little sense. It is like asking management to help coding the backend -- no, you need different people for that.
That's what my first sentence was about. Being uncompromising only really works when working alone (or in a small team of like-minded people), or when there is someone a the top to control everything, be it a BDFL or someone like Steve Jobs running Apple.
In a large open community full of volunteers with no central leader with any real authority, it's going to be a bit of a mess without compromise. Various uncompromising projects might be very good, but the larger sum of all the parts won't fit together as nicely as anyone might want.
> Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things.
It's clear that his intention was to build a community around his vision and it's always sad to see when that doesn't work out.
Although a bulk of my career has been in the IT space, I've been a developer for a lot longer. I can tell you, anytime you build software as a means to a "community" it never works out. You don't build software to get a "community", you build software and a "community" will eventually evolve around it organically. A developer should never focus on anything beyond the software itself. When you lose focus of the software you are building, the project will suffer.
yeah - given his comments about hosting containers and what-not, it sounded like he has some community. I'm guessing after 20 years of doing distro's he's just looking for a new itch to scratch. Looking forward to seeing what it is..
I worked with Drobbins way back in like '00 on Stampede Linux. He's been doing cool distro stuff for like 20+ years now. I'm a bit sad its not fun for him anymore, but I look forward to hearing about what he tries next :-)
For what I understood, Funtoo is a bit less "in your hands" than Gentoo. Like if they were programming languages, Gentoo would be like C and Funtoo would be like Python (I know it's not a fair comparison, I'm just trying to be understood by a silly example).
Gentoo lets you customize just about everything, but it seems like with Funtoo they take a bit of that control ability out of your hands so you can have a functional system without needing to think so much about the minutia of installation and the like as you do with Gentoo.
The angsty (to put it charitably) bit is the "us vs them" "alpha" mentality:
- Sometimes another Open Source project will drop some turd in our wilderness
- Wolves that don’t hunt are domesticated pets.
- We will claim new territory only as our pack grows, all the while ensuring that the territory we currently hold is kept secure.
- what some bunny did in some random hole last Thursday
The high school bit is the author not having the maturity to see that they are forcing their ego over and around the project.
And then the loner bit is just an assumption, based on the idea that people who have been hurt by social rejection overcompensate in the other direction.
I see what you're saying but I didn't really read the wolf stuff in terms of alphas and hierarchies so much. It seemed to stress social cohesion much more to me than status/dominance stuff.
Like:
> We will claim new territory only as our pack grows, all the while ensuring that the territory we currently hold is kept secure.
Is this not just about maintenance burden vs. contributor base?
I've never used funtoo but I like their tool keychain.
> Keychain helps you to manage SSH and GPG keys in a convenient and secure manner. It acts as a frontend to ssh-agent and ssh-add, but allows you to easily have one long running ssh-agent process per system, rather than the norm of one ssh-agent per login session.
> This dramatically reduces the number of times you need to enter your passphrase. With keychain, you only need to enter a passphrase once every time your local machine is rebooted.
I used funtoo a bit back in the day, and have seen a few of the development videos that drobbins posted. While some funtoo features have been backported to portage and gentoo (git support in portage, distribution kernels), I wish more would be. Funtoo had some higher-level ebuild generation utilities and similar nice things that I wish would eventually be made more generally available.
Out of the nice utilities that funtoo has, keychain is the only one I've seen become available across all distributions, and I use this on every single machine.
It's less of a necessity now that systemd can handle gpg-agent and ssh-agent unlocking on login, but I've never been able to figure out how to set that up, keychain is very set-and-forget. It just works.
It's sad to see Funtoo go, especially with so little of an explanation. I used it for a while, it was quite interesting! Without knowing too much about Gentoo it clearly had influence from there, you compiled your software locally almost always, safe some binary packages for the browser (optional, but they'd take too long). A good system to apply patches, fitting for the suckless terminal for example. And a powerful set of tools to manage the system.
It then worked as a very configurable, but stable distribution. Mostly current packages, just despite the rolling release model not necessarily bleeding edge, which is a good compromise. And Funtoo kept out systemd, which was great. Even if you like systemd you might respect the thought that monocultures are not a good thing, alternative efforts always need to exist and should be fostered. Like Funtoo.
Flaws for me were the slowness of the package manager when calculating dependencies and that compiling everything is in the end just an unreasonable effort, especially on aging hardware.
Drobbins founded both gentoo and funtoo - so they're bound to be very similar. He basically fell in love with BSD 'ports' back around 2000, and decided to build (two!) distro's based around the idea in it...
Was an early Gentoo user, before moving to other distros. Learned so so much from Robbins' incredible build system work and then just tremendous documentation. With all respect to those who continued the project, I see that as his legacy. He started and drove an incredible piece of work.
Without opinionating on the latter Gentoo dispute- which I didn't follow but superficially from what I saw was sympathetic to Robbins- my sense was that Funtoo was literally just a rebound project. Surprised it lasted this long...but maybe it took this long for all of the spirit that drove Gentoo to reach its natural conclusion. Just factless psychological speculation, but things like that happen when project breaks occur.
This sort of situation is why I've been hesitant to try smaller Linux distros in the past, especially for daily drivers or any sort of long term use. The allure of innovative features and modernity tends to be weighed against the long-term prospects and likelihood of longevity.
That being said, I did think funtoo would be around longer. I totally get the motivation; if a volunteer hobby isn't doing it for you, you ought to be free to let it go. I'm sure that the remaining dev/user base is perfectly free to fork off and rename to maintain the spirit of the distro too.
One of my all-time favorite Linux distros is a long-defunct Gentoo derivative called Sabayon which I daily drove for years. I don't regret it in the slightest! It was a great distro.
I'd much rather see what a unique or otherwise outstanding distro has to teach me by relying on it thoroughly for a while, even if it's small, and even if it doesn't last a decade. The most established distros are pretty much all the same as each other anyway so it's not like you'll miss much.
> One of my all-time favorite Linux distros is a long-defunct Gentoo derivative called Sabayon which I daily drove for years. I don't regret it in the slightest! It was a great distro.
Interestingly, both projects actually have a bit of shared history[0].
Funtoo joined Sabayon to become MocaccinoOS[1], before the alliance seemingly fell apart[2] and the two projects went their separate ways.
Yep. That's why I (admittedly lazily) asked about MocaccinoOS earlier. This Funtoo business brought the fate of Sabayon to mind for me, because it was an old favorite.
Sabayon shipped with all kinds of over-the-top compositor effects back when those things were new to Linux (and Windows, for that matter). It was also highly styled out-of-the-box, in a somewhat extreme way, a bit like Garuda Linux today. That stuff was a lot of fun and very appealing for me as a young teenager!
At the same time it had a binary package manager whose command line and configuration interfaces were very similar to those of Portage, supporting the same notions of 'masking'. It had very pretty colorized terminal output, and it was extremely fast. It was also compatible with Portage, though in a clunky way because it kept its own package database in a different format— you had to issue a special command to sync the databases of the two package managers so they could both know what all was installed on your system in an accurate way. Later on in the distro's life, using Portage became 'unsupported' in that developers didn't want to help users troubleshoot related issues. But I never stopped using both package managers together, and that never stopped working.
Depending on how far you wanted to go, Sabayon could work nicely as basically a stable, graphical installer for Gentoo (just abandon the binary packages after install and start customizing everything), or you could stick mainly to the binary packages and use the Gentoo repositories (and overlays) much like Arch users use the AUR. (Having run both for years, I'd say using Sabayon this way was definitively better than using Arch and the AUR.)
At the time, the Portage-like masking features made Entropy the most flexible binary package manager I'd ever used when it came to pinning and selecting packages. The combination of binary packaging (which is fast) and source-based packaging (which makes software easy to customize and patch) in Sabayon was amazing despite the clumsiness of using two package managers and convincing them to interoperate. Later (later for me, at least), Nix's transparent binary caching system would blow all that out of the water, of course. But Sabayon was awesome at the time. And it was the gateway to my first stage3 Gentoo install, which was a really productive and memorable experience for me, itself!
Anyway: RIP, Sabayon. RIP, Funtoo. Niche distros like these can be innovative, stylish, and fun. And often their small communities are outstandingly expert, which is a massive, massive plus for newbies who can figure out how to be thoughtful and polite when asking for help.
There are much more long-lived distros still around as well... But really, I meant more the danger of having the distro die without any clear plan for transition. In Funtoo's case it was less a matter of how long it would be around as much as what the plan would be if the BDFL decided they're done.
> In Funtoo's case it was less a matter of how long it would be around as much as what the plan would be if the BDFL decided they're done.
Good point; it's less a matter of time per se and more of structure and governance; a project with a single person point of failure is likely to have weaker long-term prospects than a project with a higher bus factor even if the latter is younger.
It would be unfortunate to find out your distro of choice will stop existing within a month. I used to run Gentoo but haven't heard of this until today -- do many people use it?
Yes I used it, but then switched back to Gentoo and now Void and Devuan.
It's a great distro but suffered from a slow and difficult on-boarding process and the docs seemed often out of date with the actual distro, sometimes years so.
I'd used Gentoo for a long time but struggled with Funtoo to get everything working.
I have switched to Gentoo as my main Linux distribution for desktops and laptops around 2003. Gentoo still has reasonably good documentation today, but in the beginning its documentation was really outstanding and I have learned a lot from it.
Then, some time more than 10 years ago, perhaps around 2010 or 2011, the Gentoo package system began to have some annoying problems and I have discovered Funtoo at the same time. At that time Funtoo was clearly better, so I have switched to it.
I have used Funtoo for about a decade on a large variety of computers with great success. Then, a few years ago, the package system began to have maintenance problems, like packages that were not updated for long periods, becoming obsolete.
At that time I have switched back to Gentoo, which I am still using.
Due to their great similarity, switching between Gentoo and Funtoo is very easy. Therefore anyone who still uses Funtoo can easily go back to Gentoo with minimal effort.
In any case, I am extremely grateful to Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gentoo and Funtoo, for his work. Like also the work of other great contributors to open-source software, it has saved many years of my life that would have been required to duplicate the results of such work.
Unfortunate for sure, but it should hardly be surprising if you choose a distro with a small userbase and limited set of maintainers. If it's a significant inconvenience for someone, they should re-evaluate their decision making process around their infrastructure / tool use.
But excluding systemd it wouldn't have been for me. While I am not a fan of all aspects of the project, it's technically superior to the older/simpler systems.
FWIW, OpenRC has a new developer who's interested in adding features that Gentoo and Alpine Linux would like it to have. They were in the Alpine Linux devel IRC channel a few days ago talking about adding support for user services, socket activation, readiness notifications, INI-like declarative syntax for services, etc.
While it sounds great that it's finally getting some much-needed love, I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of "we need to have everything systemd has". It's good to be opinionated and come up with solutions of your own. Systems work fine without systemd's entire featureset, and it's not openrc's job to be compatible.
Out of those you listed, I only think readiness notifications are necessary for the existing OpenRC featureset to work more reliably. I'd rather enshrine a different method of doing user services (for example[1]) instead of having openrc require elogind to take over user session tracking, and I'm not a huge fan of socket activation bloating up the amount of running processes the longer the machine runs, outside of the user's control.
That is debatable, so for many people the fact that a distribution like Gentoo offers the choice between using systemd and not using systemd is a strong argument in favor of using such a Linux distribution.
I used Gentoo on the Desktop from 2002-2007. It was very popular back then. Daniel Robbins created the project, and later left for personal reasons (IIRC). He tried to return to the project, but some of the leadership was not welcoming, so he forked and created the Funtoo project. I think most people who never used Gentoo would not know about Funtoo.
Afaik he was hired by Microsoft and didn't have the time to do Gentoo with the new job, so the Gentoo Foundation was setup. When he left Microsoft year or two later he asked to come back but there were disagreements in direction with the Foundation so he created Funtoo instead.
Have a look at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo_Profiles. Funtoo had a very different way to configure your version of the distribution, especially if you are used to something like Ubuntu. It was a spin on Gentoo, I think later diverging a bit more. And it opted against shipping systemd (ever) and wayland (until tested, say the docs), which is a minus for some and a plus for others, but certainly rare.
he founded gentoo to scratch his own itch, ran it for good long while, and handed it off. he founded funtoo based on gentoo to scratch his own itch. So he's been through the search handoff process before.
my guess is that funtoo is not popular enough to have a community from which to recruit a bdfl.
gentoo is not for everybody, but it was a major achievement, and he did it. funtoo was a little sideproject more tailored to his personal interests. there is simply no reason for so many people here to be criticizing him. sheesh.
I think the reason the critisism comes is because the tone of the post on the forums kinda reads like (to me) ‘fuck you guys, I’m off’. He’s completely within his rights to do so, but it still leaves me feeling offended, and I never even heard of the distro.
Ah, that gives some perspective that he is actually the founder of the much more widely known Gentoo. I don't think that had been mentioned elsewhere at the time.
Nah, the idea is that if anyone wants to continue it, they can fork it and create their own infrastructure and management, instead of trying to preserve the existing way things are ran.
For those that don't understand the differences between Funtoo and Gentoo, this is a good summary:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy
My understanding is that it was created after the founder of Gentoo had some disagreements about the direction of the distro and forked. Many of the big distinctions (like git instead of rsync for updates; gentoo supports both now) have eroded over time.
I was always of the opinion that the real difference was community culture.
I used to be into Gentoo, but the community got pretty toxic around the time that Robbins left. My sense was Robbins was trying to start over with less negativity. Hence the "fun" part of "funtoo".
I've never had that when using Gentoo but I started in 2016 or so. The IRC was helpful in getting me started and I learned a lot in menuconfig.
I've revisited Gentoo since then and it's gotten much better. I think they eventually got back on their feet.
I believe ChromeOS was based on Gentoo initially. So by that time the community was nice enough for a big tech company to make a financial bet on it.
I’m honestly not sure I understand any better.
I also think we might accomplish more if people could find themselves to being more compromising. Not that we don’t benefit from having a bunch of distros, but perhaps there’s a bit too much segmentation.
Some of the greatest creations were made because of the creators refusal to compromise their vision.
That said, Linux is inherently a community project, and compromise is required for any large community. I think the fragmentation is the biggest thing holding back desktop Linux. Not only are talented people solving some of the same problems 30 different ways, but in doing so, ignoring other problem that need solving. This can also be viewed through the lens of user choice and allowing the best ideas to win. The larger issue (imo) is it creates a huge learning curve for new users just to get started. Windows and macOS don't have this problem, because there is a singular vision and the company choose a solution to move forward with that all the employees get behind. All that fragmentation and testing is done internally, and the public doesn't have to deal with it, for the most part.
> fragmentation is the biggest thing holding back desktop Linux
I'm not convinced.
The main thing holding back desktop Linux is buggy upstream software not working, which usuall affect all distros. LibreOffice Writer didn't have a rastered ruler for 10 years, no quality GPU driver for some AMD card, some KDE app segfaults, some Python app has a value unexpectedly being None, a kernel minor version update just completely broke the version of VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS -- those were and often still are daily problems that no amount of distro hopping or fragmentation consolidation will fix.
The "large" distributions justify their existence by differing in key aspects that cannot be consolidated:
* Corporate vs community, e.g. RedHat/SuSE/Ubuntu vs. Debian
* Fundamental concepts, e.g. NixOS/Guix vs. everything else
* Up-to-date-ness, e.g. Arch vs. Debian
There are some aspects of fragmentation that _could_ be consolidated by better software and more configurability, e.g.
* Source vs. binary, e.g. NixOS provides both
* Choice of libc, e.g. NixOS ships glibc by default but you can easily get much software with musl, and it's technically possible (but needs more community power) to provide a whole system running musl with a single line of config for the end user
* GUI vs CLI configuration
For the small distros, they are niche enough that them merging with another distro doesn't have a huge consolidation effect overall. For example, I do not see how Void Linux and Alpine Linux merging would significantly improve the life of the mass of Ubuntu users, or signficiantly advance "Linux on the desktop".
It's true that there's some amount of duplicate work occurring, but much of that is often easily re-used across distros. For example, if in NixOS something doesn't work with the newest version of musl, one would usually check if Alpine already solved that and if yes, swiftly copy the approach. The main work is for the _first_ one to figure it out, and that work is necessary even if there was only 1 distro.
Reducing distribution fragmentation isn't what makes "Linux on the desktop" happen.
Fixing broken software, making good desktop environments, creating Wine or Proton or Pipewire or cross-platform software (LibreOffice, all browsers, Electron), does.
I don't think we disagree at a fundamental level. My thought on reducing fragmentation is to reallocate those resources to fix the broken software and to make everything better and smooth. That last 10% to make the UX really good isn't something most people like doing, but it's something that macOS and Windows both spend a lot more time on that Linux.
Due to the fragmentation, I don't think most users make it far enough to run into the application or UX issues. It seems like reducing fragmentation would get more people into the door, and once they are in the door, having those developers work on making the core experience better, is what keeps people around. Once the platform has more users, that will bring in even more developers... the ones who are there as a job, not just enthusiasts, which should lead to an upward spiral for quality.
In terms of the large distributions not being able to be consolidated... I don't think the average user (read: typical Windows and macOS users) care about any of that, other than not having to go to the CLI to change a config. A user should not need to know what glibc is.
Entirely different resources though, which is why this criticism makes little sense. It is like asking management to help coding the backend -- no, you need different people for that.
Compromise is never required. It can be beneficial but success can sometimes be a matter of being entirely uncompromising.
That's what my first sentence was about. Being uncompromising only really works when working alone (or in a small team of like-minded people), or when there is someone a the top to control everything, be it a BDFL or someone like Steve Jobs running Apple.
In a large open community full of volunteers with no central leader with any real authority, it's going to be a bit of a mess without compromise. Various uncompromising projects might be very good, but the larger sum of all the parts won't fit together as nicely as anyone might want.
These folks are volunteers giving me stuff for free, so I’m not fit to say what they should be doing with their free time.
It's on-topic when the author said:
> Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things.
It's clear that his intention was to build a community around his vision and it's always sad to see when that doesn't work out.
Although a bulk of my career has been in the IT space, I've been a developer for a lot longer. I can tell you, anytime you build software as a means to a "community" it never works out. You don't build software to get a "community", you build software and a "community" will eventually evolve around it organically. A developer should never focus on anything beyond the software itself. When you lose focus of the software you are building, the project will suffer.
That's been my experience. YMMV.
FYI, this is the guy who literally built the Gentoo community from scratch in the early 2000s.
yeah - given his comments about hosting containers and what-not, it sounded like he has some community. I'm guessing after 20 years of doing distro's he's just looking for a new itch to scratch. Looking forward to seeing what it is..
I worked with Drobbins way back in like '00 on Stampede Linux. He's been doing cool distro stuff for like 20+ years now. I'm a bit sad its not fun for him anymore, but I look forward to hearing about what he tries next :-)
For what I understood, Funtoo is a bit less "in your hands" than Gentoo. Like if they were programming languages, Gentoo would be like C and Funtoo would be like Python (I know it's not a fair comparison, I'm just trying to be understood by a silly example).
Gentoo lets you customize just about everything, but it seems like with Funtoo they take a bit of that control ability out of your hands so you can have a functional system without needing to think so much about the minutia of installation and the like as you do with Gentoo.
[flagged]
I don't understand. What makes you say that?
The angsty (to put it charitably) bit is the "us vs them" "alpha" mentality:
- Sometimes another Open Source project will drop some turd in our wilderness
- Wolves that don’t hunt are domesticated pets.
- We will claim new territory only as our pack grows, all the while ensuring that the territory we currently hold is kept secure.
- what some bunny did in some random hole last Thursday
The high school bit is the author not having the maturity to see that they are forcing their ego over and around the project.
And then the loner bit is just an assumption, based on the idea that people who have been hurt by social rejection overcompensate in the other direction.
I see what you're saying but I didn't really read the wolf stuff in terms of alphas and hierarchies so much. It seemed to stress social cohesion much more to me than status/dominance stuff.
Like:
> We will claim new territory only as our pack grows, all the while ensuring that the territory we currently hold is kept secure.
Is this not just about maintenance burden vs. contributor base?
I've never used funtoo but I like their tool keychain.
> Keychain helps you to manage SSH and GPG keys in a convenient and secure manner. It acts as a frontend to ssh-agent and ssh-add, but allows you to easily have one long running ssh-agent process per system, rather than the norm of one ssh-agent per login session.
> This dramatically reduces the number of times you need to enter your passphrase. With keychain, you only need to enter a passphrase once every time your local machine is rebooted.
https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Keychain
I used funtoo a bit back in the day, and have seen a few of the development videos that drobbins posted. While some funtoo features have been backported to portage and gentoo (git support in portage, distribution kernels), I wish more would be. Funtoo had some higher-level ebuild generation utilities and similar nice things that I wish would eventually be made more generally available.
Out of the nice utilities that funtoo has, keychain is the only one I've seen become available across all distributions, and I use this on every single machine. It's less of a necessity now that systemd can handle gpg-agent and ssh-agent unlocking on login, but I've never been able to figure out how to set that up, keychain is very set-and-forget. It just works.
Isn't this basically what gnome keyring does?
I disabled the ssh and gpg functionality of it, and use gnome keyring only for programs that need it to store login information.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Keyring#SSH_keys
It's sad to see Funtoo go, especially with so little of an explanation. I used it for a while, it was quite interesting! Without knowing too much about Gentoo it clearly had influence from there, you compiled your software locally almost always, safe some binary packages for the browser (optional, but they'd take too long). A good system to apply patches, fitting for the suckless terminal for example. And a powerful set of tools to manage the system.
It then worked as a very configurable, but stable distribution. Mostly current packages, just despite the rolling release model not necessarily bleeding edge, which is a good compromise. And Funtoo kept out systemd, which was great. Even if you like systemd you might respect the thought that monocultures are not a good thing, alternative efforts always need to exist and should be fostered. Like Funtoo.
Flaws for me were the slowness of the package manager when calculating dependencies and that compiling everything is in the end just an unreasonable effort, especially on aging hardware.
Drobbins founded both gentoo and funtoo - so they're bound to be very similar. He basically fell in love with BSD 'ports' back around 2000, and decided to build (two!) distro's based around the idea in it...
Was an early Gentoo user, before moving to other distros. Learned so so much from Robbins' incredible build system work and then just tremendous documentation. With all respect to those who continued the project, I see that as his legacy. He started and drove an incredible piece of work.
Without opinionating on the latter Gentoo dispute- which I didn't follow but superficially from what I saw was sympathetic to Robbins- my sense was that Funtoo was literally just a rebound project. Surprised it lasted this long...but maybe it took this long for all of the spirit that drove Gentoo to reach its natural conclusion. Just factless psychological speculation, but things like that happen when project breaks occur.
This sort of situation is why I've been hesitant to try smaller Linux distros in the past, especially for daily drivers or any sort of long term use. The allure of innovative features and modernity tends to be weighed against the long-term prospects and likelihood of longevity.
That being said, I did think funtoo would be around longer. I totally get the motivation; if a volunteer hobby isn't doing it for you, you ought to be free to let it go. I'm sure that the remaining dev/user base is perfectly free to fork off and rename to maintain the spirit of the distro too.
One of my all-time favorite Linux distros is a long-defunct Gentoo derivative called Sabayon which I daily drove for years. I don't regret it in the slightest! It was a great distro.
I'd much rather see what a unique or otherwise outstanding distro has to teach me by relying on it thoroughly for a while, even if it's small, and even if it doesn't last a decade. The most established distros are pretty much all the same as each other anyway so it's not like you'll miss much.
> One of my all-time favorite Linux distros is a long-defunct Gentoo derivative called Sabayon which I daily drove for years. I don't regret it in the slightest! It was a great distro.
Interestingly, both projects actually have a bit of shared history[0].
Funtoo joined Sabayon to become MocaccinoOS[1], before the alliance seemingly fell apart[2] and the two projects went their separate ways.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33204970
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220619205105/https://www.sabay...
[2] https://www.mocaccino.org/blog/2021/12/06/updates-on-funtoo-...
Yep. That's why I (admittedly lazily) asked about MocaccinoOS earlier. This Funtoo business brought the fate of Sabayon to mind for me, because it was an old favorite.
Sabayon shipped with all kinds of over-the-top compositor effects back when those things were new to Linux (and Windows, for that matter). It was also highly styled out-of-the-box, in a somewhat extreme way, a bit like Garuda Linux today. That stuff was a lot of fun and very appealing for me as a young teenager!
At the same time it had a binary package manager whose command line and configuration interfaces were very similar to those of Portage, supporting the same notions of 'masking'. It had very pretty colorized terminal output, and it was extremely fast. It was also compatible with Portage, though in a clunky way because it kept its own package database in a different format— you had to issue a special command to sync the databases of the two package managers so they could both know what all was installed on your system in an accurate way. Later on in the distro's life, using Portage became 'unsupported' in that developers didn't want to help users troubleshoot related issues. But I never stopped using both package managers together, and that never stopped working.
Depending on how far you wanted to go, Sabayon could work nicely as basically a stable, graphical installer for Gentoo (just abandon the binary packages after install and start customizing everything), or you could stick mainly to the binary packages and use the Gentoo repositories (and overlays) much like Arch users use the AUR. (Having run both for years, I'd say using Sabayon this way was definitively better than using Arch and the AUR.)
At the time, the Portage-like masking features made Entropy the most flexible binary package manager I'd ever used when it came to pinning and selecting packages. The combination of binary packaging (which is fast) and source-based packaging (which makes software easy to customize and patch) in Sabayon was amazing despite the clumsiness of using two package managers and convincing them to interoperate. Later (later for me, at least), Nix's transparent binary caching system would blow all that out of the water, of course. But Sabayon was awesome at the time. And it was the gateway to my first stage3 Gentoo install, which was a really productive and memorable experience for me, itself!
Anyway: RIP, Sabayon. RIP, Funtoo. Niche distros like these can be innovative, stylish, and fun. And often their small communities are outstandingly expert, which is a massive, massive plus for newbies who can figure out how to be thoughtful and polite when asking for help.
I see, that does seem pretty cool
Always appreciate getting a glimpse into the mentality of the users/maintainers of the more niche Linux distributions out there
Thanks for sharing :)
> The allure of innovative features and modernity tends to be weighed against the long-term prospects and likelihood of longevity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gentoo_Li... says it's 16 years old; I think it did just fine.
There are much more long-lived distros still around as well... But really, I meant more the danger of having the distro die without any clear plan for transition. In Funtoo's case it was less a matter of how long it would be around as much as what the plan would be if the BDFL decided they're done.
> In Funtoo's case it was less a matter of how long it would be around as much as what the plan would be if the BDFL decided they're done.
Good point; it's less a matter of time per se and more of structure and governance; a project with a single person point of failure is likely to have weaker long-term prospects than a project with a higher bus factor even if the latter is younger.
End of an era. I remember installing funtoo before I went through the handbook to install Gentoo itself
It would be unfortunate to find out your distro of choice will stop existing within a month. I used to run Gentoo but haven't heard of this until today -- do many people use it?
Yes I used it, but then switched back to Gentoo and now Void and Devuan.
It's a great distro but suffered from a slow and difficult on-boarding process and the docs seemed often out of date with the actual distro, sometimes years so.
I'd used Gentoo for a long time but struggled with Funtoo to get everything working.
I have switched to Gentoo as my main Linux distribution for desktops and laptops around 2003. Gentoo still has reasonably good documentation today, but in the beginning its documentation was really outstanding and I have learned a lot from it.
Then, some time more than 10 years ago, perhaps around 2010 or 2011, the Gentoo package system began to have some annoying problems and I have discovered Funtoo at the same time. At that time Funtoo was clearly better, so I have switched to it.
I have used Funtoo for about a decade on a large variety of computers with great success. Then, a few years ago, the package system began to have maintenance problems, like packages that were not updated for long periods, becoming obsolete.
At that time I have switched back to Gentoo, which I am still using.
Due to their great similarity, switching between Gentoo and Funtoo is very easy. Therefore anyone who still uses Funtoo can easily go back to Gentoo with minimal effort.
In any case, I am extremely grateful to Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gentoo and Funtoo, for his work. Like also the work of other great contributors to open-source software, it has saved many years of my life that would have been required to duplicate the results of such work.
Unfortunate for sure, but it should hardly be surprising if you choose a distro with a small userbase and limited set of maintainers. If it's a significant inconvenience for someone, they should re-evaluate their decision making process around their infrastructure / tool use.
There seems to be rather good documentation, e.g.
https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix
But excluding systemd it wouldn't have been for me. While I am not a fan of all aspects of the project, it's technically superior to the older/simpler systems.
FWIW, OpenRC has a new developer who's interested in adding features that Gentoo and Alpine Linux would like it to have. They were in the Alpine Linux devel IRC channel a few days ago talking about adding support for user services, socket activation, readiness notifications, INI-like declarative syntax for services, etc.
https://github.com/navi-desu/openrc/
While it sounds great that it's finally getting some much-needed love, I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of "we need to have everything systemd has". It's good to be opinionated and come up with solutions of your own. Systems work fine without systemd's entire featureset, and it's not openrc's job to be compatible.
Out of those you listed, I only think readiness notifications are necessary for the existing OpenRC featureset to work more reliably. I'd rather enshrine a different method of doing user services (for example[1]) instead of having openrc require elogind to take over user session tracking, and I'm not a huge fan of socket activation bloating up the amount of running processes the longer the machine runs, outside of the user's control.
[1]: https://github.com/raforg/daemon/
That is debatable, so for many people the fact that a distribution like Gentoo offers the choice between using systemd and not using systemd is a strong argument in favor of using such a Linux distribution.
Been using Linux since 2003, distro hopped like the best of them, and I’ve never heard of this distribution.
I used Gentoo on the Desktop from 2002-2007. It was very popular back then. Daniel Robbins created the project, and later left for personal reasons (IIRC). He tried to return to the project, but some of the leadership was not welcoming, so he forked and created the Funtoo project. I think most people who never used Gentoo would not know about Funtoo.
> left for personal reasons
Afaik he was hired by Microsoft and didn't have the time to do Gentoo with the new job, so the Gentoo Foundation was setup. When he left Microsoft year or two later he asked to come back but there were disagreements in direction with the Foundation so he created Funtoo instead.
I haven't heard of this distro before. What made it unique?
Have a look at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo_Profiles. Funtoo had a very different way to configure your version of the distribution, especially if you are used to something like Ubuntu. It was a spin on Gentoo, I think later diverging a bit more. And it opted against shipping systemd (ever) and wayland (until tested, say the docs), which is a minus for some and a plus for others, but certainly rare.
Did MocaccinoOS ever become anything complete and usable? Is that project still related to Funtoo?
Looks like it's been abandoned. The website hasn't updated since 2022 it seems.
The git repos on the other hand, have latest commits days, or even, hours ago, so I wouldn't call it exactly abandoned.
Never heard of it. The tone in the announcement makes me guess that I did not miss anything
> nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else.
Of course if it's all open source anyone can take over the code base. But why saying "not interested to hand it off"?
he founded gentoo to scratch his own itch, ran it for good long while, and handed it off. he founded funtoo based on gentoo to scratch his own itch. So he's been through the search handoff process before.
my guess is that funtoo is not popular enough to have a community from which to recruit a bdfl.
gentoo is not for everybody, but it was a major achievement, and he did it. funtoo was a little sideproject more tailored to his personal interests. there is simply no reason for so many people here to be criticizing him. sheesh.
I think the reason the critisism comes is because the tone of the post on the forums kinda reads like (to me) ‘fuck you guys, I’m off’. He’s completely within his rights to do so, but it still leaves me feeling offended, and I never even heard of the distro.
Ah, that gives some perspective that he is actually the founder of the much more widely known Gentoo. I don't think that had been mentioned elsewhere at the time.
You have replied to the only remotely critical comment in this entire thread and it just asked a few reasonable questions. Did a lot get deleted?
Nah, the idea is that if anyone wants to continue it, they can fork it and create their own infrastructure and management, instead of trying to preserve the existing way things are ran.
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