[reanimus]

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.

[pxc]

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.

[DaSHacka]

> 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-...

[pxc]

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.

[DaSHacka]

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 :)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> 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.

[reanimus]

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.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> 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.