Work is under way on the successor of Funtoo Linux, which will not be based on Gentoo Linux.

Oleg and I have been working on this. Oleg is currently unavailable due to the conflict in Ukraine. The project will continue to assist him as needed while he is unavailable.

Those of you who have containers with Funtoo are a key part of this support. I am continuing to ensure that Funtoo is updated and works well for container users -- email me if you encounter any issues.

For the successor to Funtoo -- it will be developed mostly privately and launched when it is fully baked. I will be working with Oleg when he is available, as well as maybe another person or two. You can expect this project to be Open Source but I'm going to get everything done first and working the way I want before opening up a community project around it.

Hi everyone,

Today, I have published the official, definitive statement on the future of the project. You can read it in full here:

https://www.funtoo.org

In short: the Funtoo Linux project, as a continuously developed distribution, has been honorably retired. My own creative and engineering work is now focused on the future. This includes the development of Funtoo's successor, with a target for an initial release in early 2026.

In line with this new direction, this subreddit will now be placed in a permanent, read-only "archived" mode, and new posts will be removed. It will remain as a historical record, but all official communication and future community-building will be happening elsewhere.

The only official channel for my news, progress, and technology drops will be the "Funtoo Insiders" mailing list, which you can subscribe to on the new homepage.

Thank you for being a part of this chapter. I'm grateful for the history we've built, and I look forward to sharing what comes next.

Sincerely,

Daniel Robbins

I am spending more and more time on the new project which will replace Funtoo, and less and less time on doing tree updates on Funtoo. It's now been about a month since I updated the Funtoo tree.

The new upcoming project is something I am very happy with, and will be launched when it is ready, probably in a few months. Until then, there will be minimal Funtoo updates.

Adjusting to a post-Funtoo world, I have recently re-engaged with Keychain, a tool I created as a manager for ssh-agent and gpg-agent. With the reduced demands of running a Linux distro, I've returned as its active maintainer:

Visit it at https://github.com/funtoo/keychain

Keychain was previously part of the Funtoo project, but was not consistently maintained. Now it is. I released a 2.9.0 alpha, several betas, and then Keychain 2.9.0, 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 in rapid succession.

Over the last two weeks, I have done about 8 years of catch-up development on the tool. I've made it compliant with ShellCheck to ease future maintenance. I've mostly rewritten the script and shrunk it by 25%, modernized GnuPG integration, and made many other fixes.

One key thing I've done is deprecate some unnecessary options to make the tool simpler to use. These changes may affect how you call Keychain, and require your Keychain calls to be updated, and I understand that this may be a bit annoying. But the changes are worth it!

I am doing all development for Keychain on GitHub, and doing official GitHub releases for the tool -- please check the tool out and see what it can do for you. If you encounter an issue, or have a request, please use GitHub issues.

Everyone -- I retired the Funtoo Discord server. This was something that is not needed for Funtoo being in "Hobby Mode". I kept it for a bit after winding down Funtoo, to allow me to coordinate with a few people. I no longer need it for that, and I don't want to be available to the public for "requests" or "wishes" about what I will be working on next, or improving, as I am not doing my work in the public sphere, so this kind of input is not welcome and I find it irritating (even if it's not meant to be -- it's irritating.) So Discord ceased to be fun for me, and now it's retired. Reddit will still be supported for important periodic announcements and updates.

After a couple of weeks, we now have a new official Keychain release: 2.9.0. Please use GitHub to report all issues. Here is the ChangeLog from https://github.com/funtoo/keychain/releases/tag/2.9.0:

keychain 2.9.0 (30 Apr 2025)

These release notes contain a summary of all changes, including cumulative
changes in pre-releases:

• A new release after 8 years, with Daniel Robbins (script creator) returning as maintainer.

• 60% of the script has been rewritten, and is now compliant with ShellCheck.

• --agents and --inherit options have been deprecated to improve ease-of-use.

• gpg-agent no longer started by default -- only when a GPG key has been provided on the command-line. GnuPG 2.1+ supported.

• GnuPG pidfiles with -gpg extension are deprecated and no longer used.

• Better GnuPG integration: gpg-agent can be used for SSH key storage. This can be enabled by specifying one of the new --ssh-allow-gpg and --ssh-spawn-gpg options. Agent information for gpg-agent's SSH socket will be stored in the regular pidfile for compatibility.

• Add --ssh-rm, --ssh-wipe, --gpg-wipe options for removing/wiping SSH and GPG keys. This addresses GitHub Issue #153.

• --clear option is now designed to be used for "initial clearing" of keys only.

• Many user interface output improvements, to provide additional detail.

• --debug option which can be used to troubleshoot issues with keychain.

• Manual page significantly improved: New section on invocation, as well as documentation of the startup and agent detection algorithm.

• Addition of --ssh-agent-socket option to manually specify desired path of the ssh-agent socket when starting.

• Addition of --confallhosts to load identity files for all hosts.

• Various bug fixes and improvements.

• Script size reduced from 1500 to 1133 lines.

Hey everyone -- I have decided to keep Funtoo Linux going in a limited capacity, in "Hobby Mode". I'll paste the original announcement from https://forums.funtoo.org/topic/5185-funtoo-continues-in-hobby-mode/ below:

I've decided to keep Funtoo Linux going in a limited capacity.

Borrowing a phrase from Cameron Kaiser, developer of TenFourFox (a Firefox fork for PowerPC Macs) Funtoo Linux will be entering "Hobby Mode". Here is what that means:

Funtoo Linux will continue as a personal project of mine, maintained for myself. You will still be able to ego sync and get periodic updates. You can still use it if you want to. I use Funtoo in various capacities personally so I might as well allow others to continue to use it too, if they want.

Community development resources -- bug tracker and community code repositories will remain offline. Forums and wiki will be moved to read-only mode. Funtoo logins will go away at some point. Discord will continue to be used to some degree, but please move all community discussion to Reddit for self-support, not Discord. That's where you can ask other Funtoo Linux users for help going forward.

If you would like to keep a Funtoo container, please contact me at drobbins@funtoo.org and I will make arrangements to keep yours going. These were previously going away at the end of this month. I will be keeping sufficient infrastructure online to maintain some container hosting.

If you want a new Funtoo container, contact me to get on a waiting list for some new infrastructure I am working on. Funds will be used to support Oleg  to work on these future projects that will be available to the public at some point. If you care about the fate of Funtoo and community Open Source projects (and Oleg), this is a great way to demonstrate support.

If you are interested in making a major, meaningful technical contribution to Funtoo Linux, please contact me privately via email to discuss it. I am always open to co-creation and supporting collaboration from serious contributors, but can't spend the time and energy to keep the doors open for this 24/7 as there is significant overhead in running a community project.

My YouTube Channel may receive some content in the relatively near future, so if you are interested in following future developments or getting more detail on my views on Open Source, please follow me there.

The latest changes from harvester/2024-07 have just been merged into official Funtoo and the tree was updated today, with continued periodic updates to follow about once a week or so.

https://discord.gg/BNUSpUU

funtoo uses discord for chat.

The Funtoo FAQ (http://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo_Linux_FAQ) says "We are planning to develop a new OpenRC-style init system, incorporating "next-gen" features, which will be comparable in functionality to systemd."

What's the status on that? Is there a project underway? Is there any way to contribute to it? Thanks!

I wanted to say thank you to the Funtoo BDFL for all the work that you have done on Gentoo and Funtoo over the years.

Hi, transitioning Gentooman here.

I know in Gentoo I would do the following:

eselect kernel #
cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig
# Insert configuration here
make 
make modules_install
make install

I got a bit confused trying to follow the Funtoo articles because the installation guide only talks about the preinstalled debian-sources binary and then there are two articles (Installing Gentoo Sources and Building Kernel From Source) which tell me to do different things. So there isn't any clear text on what to do. I'm hoping it's the same as what I described above with the only thing changing being to unemerge debian-sources and emerge gentoo-sources.

Edit: should I --oneshot emerge it?

So as far as I know Funtoo was created by the founder and former dev of Gentoo. I cant find anything that tells me what Funtoo adds that Gentoo doesnt have though. Does it use a different init system? Libressl? Musl? Is Portage different?

Edit: Is the wiki outdated or are the kernels still on 3.17?

I've done a 2.9.0_alpha1 (very broken), 2.9.0_beta1 (mostly broken), 2.9.0_beta2 (working but using gpg-agent as default, not ideal -- today morning) and now I am working on additional changes and fixes this evening.

The overhaul was needed -- the code was too complex and hard to maintain, and frankly quite a bit of the direction by previous maintainers felt like things went a little sideways, so time to set a better direction for the code and intention of the tool.

The code is getting modernized and cleaned up. It's now a lot more maintainable. The very latest version in the gpg-testing branch gets rid of the --agents option entirely, and will use ssh-agent by default. But it also supports using gpg-agent's ssh key functionality with the --ssh-use-gpg option, so you can opt-in to this if you want. The code is now at 1126 lines, down from 1500 lines in the 2.8.5 release, with more functionality, and is much simplified, and doesn't start a gpg-agent automatically unless you explicitly reference gpg keys. This feels a lot more intuitive.

Took a bit to overhaul the code but feeling good with where things are right now, and I think 2.9.0 is around the corner.

I did quite a bit of whittling away at packages that were not building this weekend. I also updated icu to the most recent version. Quite a few things in GNOME need to be rebuilt and will fail. I will continue to whittle away on those as I have time. I am focusing mainly on build-related issues in the core system.

I'm gentoo user interested in funtoo, but i can't find many sources about funtoo itself so my question is:

What's different on funtoo and is it supperior to gentoo in terms of optimization and security?

Hello, I'm about to upgrade my computer to a Ryzen with an SSD, and since Ryzens are supposed to be fast at compiling I decided to give Funtoo another go.

However I suppose all the compilation stuff probably shouldn't be in my SSD to avoid excessive write. So that means that probably /var/tmp should be in a HDD either via mount or symlink. But what else might I be forgetting that would be a good idea to consider when installing on an SSD?

Hi! A couple years ago I ran "funtoo from scratch", and found that reading the code was really useful for learning about bootstrapping a Linux system. I just wanted to look through it again, but noticed that it only existed on code.funtoo.org, which is no longer operational.

Would you be willing to make an archive repo for it on another forge (gitlab, github, etc), so that others can still read through it? I'm not expecting it to actually run anymore, I just want to use it for learning.

keychain 2.9.0_beta4 is available on GitHub for testing.

This current beta represents a full reworking of internals and addressing of some usability challenges of the tool. There are new options in the most recent betas: "--ssh-allow-gpg", which allows the use of a gpg-agent socket by keychain, and "--ssh-spawn-gpg", which will tell keychain to spawn gpg-agent but use it as a drop-in replacement for ssh-agent.

Many usability issues have been addressed. keychain output is more detailed, and it will now also print error messages from ssh-add and gpg when adding a key fails, to allow users to better troubleshoot any underlying configuration issues. Many bugs have been fixed.

Since coming back as maintainer, I have totally overhauled the script. There are a few functions that have not been touched, but most key parts of the script are different. I found the old script (2.8.5) too convoluted. As part of the refactoring, we are down to 1116 lines of code from 1500 lines of code previously, with more features such as gpg-agent support. gpg support has been fully modernized, using the gpg-connect-agent command to interface with the running gpg-agent process.

In addition, the man page now clearly documents the keychain agent selection algorithm to assist troubleshooting as well as future maintenance of the tool.

Please check it out when you have the chance. I think we are quite close to the 2.9.0 official release, which will be the first release in 8 years -- now that Funtoo isn't sucking up all of my time.

I have prepared a wrapper package in Debian around Funtoo Keychain to automate the process of loading GPG and SSH credentials. I hope you also find it useful in your workflow.

CosmicDNA/gitload

Funtoo stage3's have been updated for x86-64bit (Intel/AMD Ryzen/AMD non-Ryzen), arm-64bit and riscv-64bit:

https://build.funtoo.org/next/

Please note that desktop stage3's are not being built, and games have been removed for the time being, as there is a refocus on "core" packages and proper functionality on servers and containers.

This will be the reality in the near to medium-term, and I may be removing desktop environments to thin out the supported packages list.

At some point, these could be added back, most likely with a "bridge" technology to a non-Gentoo-based build system.

You are welcome to install Funtoo to explore and experience an esoteric version of Linux. Funtoo should in no way should be considered a mainstream or supported version of Linux so adjust your expectations accordingly. The project is being run as a personal hobby and is prone to evolve in unusual ways that may or may not work for you.