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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 do

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.

massysett 2y ago
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.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  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.
  - quilnux 2y ago
    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.
    - gunapologist99 2y ago
      FYI, this is the guy who literally built the Gentoo community from scratch in the early 2000s.
      - mech422 2y ago
        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..
- mech422 2y ago
  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 :-)
Gualdrapo 2y ago
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.
al_borland 2y ago
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.
- nh2 2y ago
  > 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.

massysett 2y ago

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.

jjmarr 2y ago
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.
- quilnux 2y ago
  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.
  - gunapologist99 2y ago
    FYI, this is the guy who literally built the Gentoo community from scratch in the early 2000s.
    - mech422 2y ago
      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..
mech422 2y ago
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 :-)

Gualdrapo 2y ago

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.

al_borland 2y ago

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.

nh2 2y ago
> 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.