Funtoo Linux is being discontinued

[Posted July 30, 2024 by jzb]

Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux distribution and its spinoff Funtoo Linux, has announced that he has decided to end the Funtoo project:

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. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else. You can expect the project to wind down through August. If you have a Funtoo container, it will continue to be online through the end of August so you have time to find another hosting solution if you need one.

:(

Posted Jul 30, 2024 17:26 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't fully understand what happened with Daniel and Gentoo. (Was there LWN coverage?) It seems somewhat tragic that the founder of such a interesting and far-reaching project was unable to work within the project he helped create and fostered. Much of the foundational design patterns he and the first contributors laid down of Gentoo and its package manager Portage remain to this day.

I tried out Funtoo, but I had no pragmatic reason to switch my Gentoo systems over to it. I was also a bit apprehensive to leave a larger community behind. But, I was happy to see Daniel active in the community and innovating again. Thanks for your toil and dedicated passion for Linux source-based distros, Daniel!

:(

Posted Jul 30, 2024 17:33 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

Looks like we wrote about this in 2004, at least. And there appear to be a few comment threads as well.

:(

Posted Jul 30, 2024 17:47 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Thanks for pointing us to the coverage! :)

:(

Posted Jul 30, 2024 18:24 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

It's sad to see a project die. But if it was created by Daniel for his own fun, and it's no longer providing that ...

What unfortunately put me off though, was his personality shone through it rather too strongly. If he didn't agree with something, he didn't want it in Funtoo. At the end of the day, it's his project, his choices, etc etc. But they clashed with mine, so I never tried it.

It'll be missed though, I'm sure.

Cheers,
Wol

It is a shame

Posted Jul 30, 2024 18:55 UTC (Tue) by julian67 (guest, #99845) [Link]

It is a shame he stopped enjoying it. I tried Funtoo a couple of times and while it wasn't the right fit for me I did enjoy trying it and using it for a while. In the end Debian continued to make more sense and require less time - that's a comment on binary vs meta/source distros, not a comment about the quality of Funtoo. I could tell it was a tiny project as when submitting suggestions for clarifications or improvements in the docs it was drobbins who replied and chatted! He was very personable and friendly each time.

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 30, 2024 19:32 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (10 responses)

Exhibit A: a comparison of systemd with a turd of poop in https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy.

Sorry, but no. I'm not interested in projects where I get to risk being on the wrong side of that kind of abuse if/when they happen to disagree with my contribution.

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 30, 2024 19:54 UTC (Tue) by marcusb (guest, #16598) [Link]

Your link is broken for me. This appears to work: Wolf Pack Philosophy

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 30, 2024 23:54 UTC (Tue) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (8 responses)

The full stop merged with the URL. Why don't browsers strip obvious stuff like that? When we have silliness like .html to act as file metadata decorations, why not do some obvious tests with .html. ... . ... ? (I popped in a couple of ellipses for a laugh)

Now, Funtoo. I've checked quite a lot of the history (it's Mediawiki) on that wolf pack page and I can't find any poop, crap, shit, shite ... or even a coprolite.

@smurf: As you say: pick your fights carefully! Also pick your evidence carefully and present it as such 8)

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 1:00 UTC (Wed) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]

> Is Selective
> Sometimes another Open Source project will drop some turd in our wilderness, and it might be so big that it’s really hard not to step in.
> When this happens, we will be very careful not to step in it, and we will certainly not eat this poop and make it part of Funtoo!
> The most obvious example is systemd. We won’t eat a dead carcass just because some upstream project threw some tempting rotten flesh in our path.

Wasn't too difficult to find "turd" and "poop".

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 9:09 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Fixing the link is not the browser's job, but the website's, which semi-helpfully converted my ASCII text to HTML.

But yeah I should have added a space in front of that period. Probably.

NB next time actually read a website before concluding that something is not in it?

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 9:41 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, it's exactly that Wolfpack page that put me off Funtoo. My reaction was EXACTLY the same as Smurf I was just too polite to call it out in public.

Let's be blunt - that Wolfpack page is a biased, non-technical "I hate systemd" tirade. And it makes it extremely clear that systemd was a package that would not be allowed in Funtoo.

Let's leave it at that, please! As I said, Funtoo was drobbins personal fun project. What he wanted in it is his business. And if you can't be polite about his preferences - DON'T SAY ANYTHING.

Cheers,
Wol

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 18:28 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

The frustrating part is, they already have a more level-headed (IMHO still not entirely fair, but let's not relitigate that debate here) summary of the init situation at <https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix#Init_System>, and there was really no need for them to call it out so crudely on that philosophy page. They could've just said something like "Funtoo is an opinionated distro, and intentionally does not support all possible userspaces. In particular, we do not support or use systemd. Click here [link to support matrix] to learn more."

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 19:03 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

The web page consistently uses the spelling SystemD, with a capital D at the end. I have often wondered why it is so common to spell the name of systemd like this. Is it out of spite, since the old freedesktop.org site explicitly says the correct spelling is "systemd", not "SystemD"? Or have people disliking systemd not even put the faintest amount of effort in studying it?

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 19:08 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Well, maybe it doesn't actually matter?

No fun IMHO

Posted Aug 1, 2024 2:04 UTC (Thu) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

I do find all of the mentions of "innovation" very amusing considering that the only real innovation in openrc and the others over the last decade has been in adding more and more systemd polyfills. But it is good to see a more well reasoned argument there, especially one I hadn't heard in that form yet.

No fun IMHO

Posted Jul 31, 2024 14:10 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

You couldn't find "poop" on that page? Really? It's right there, verbatim, as is "systemd" & "turd". Here, I'll quote it for you:

> Is Selective
>
> Sometimes another Open Source project will drop some turd in our wilderness, and it might be so big that it’s really hard not to step in. When this happens, we will be very careful not to step in it, and we will certainly not eat this poop and make it part of Funtoo! The most obvious example is systemd. We won’t eat a dead carcass just because some upstream project threw some tempting rotten flesh in our path. It may sustain us for a while, but it’s not optimal for us. Let’s find the optimal solution. We would rather hunt...

You finished with:

> @smurf: As you say: pick your fights carefully! Also pick your evidence carefully and present it as such 8)

Maybe you should take a good look at your own behavior before throwing shade.

Exherbo

Posted Jul 31, 2024 2:34 UTC (Wed) by alip (subscriber, #170176) [Link] (1 responses)

I, hereby, welcome all Funtoo users to Exherbo. We're not dead yet. We came pretty close though. I can feel for Funtoo.

Exherbo isn't fun like macaronios

Posted Aug 1, 2024 18:15 UTC (Thu) by paul.noecker6 (guest, #172724) [Link]

many of the core developers are migrating to macaronios.org macaroni allows systemd or openrc. I've been with funtoo for 10 years, and helped gentoo setup much of the systemd ecosystem regarding wiki documentation. drobbins is staunch about not collecting donations and i think it was financial pressures that ultimately lead to him moving away from tech work to physical work. i have his paypal email, anyone wishing to give him a shout out for gentoo funtoo portage or whatever else zany stuff ie keychain paypal drobbins@funtoo.org donations. the thing about exherbo and redcore and gentoo is that it's based off the 2000-2005 stuff and is just reiteration of it. in the last 2 years drobbins did evolved bootstrap which is de-obfuscation of CLFS to a funtoo portage system. many of the funtoo developers are acquainted with clfs from it. that effort can be forked to new from source meta distributions. the major problem with gentoo is ultimately that it was a package management system that was generated from people that have never done the LFS ecosystem prior, so the entire specification was piece meal of portage. i highly suspect exherbo is suffering from the same problems gentoo is. i think evolved bootstrap really put the writing on the wall that there are shortcomings regarding circular dependencies, and architecture specific cruft in ebuilds instead of doing generic behavior and having arch specific patches that are executed on specific arch.