Wolf Pack Philosophy

The philosophy of the Funtoo community can best be described using the analogy of a wolf pack.

As a wolf, a member of the Funtoo user community is:

Authentic

Since Funtoo is a source-based meta-distribution and packages are built with Portage, we exist in the living wilderness, among raw creative energy of the wild free software ecosystem. Like a wolf, our connection to the vibrant and sustaining open source wilderness is tangible and real. We avoid the over-developed, sanitized, isolated and boring pre-packaged world where disconnected users simply ‘consume’ what was pre-made for them, preferring the more authentic and connected life where we are in control of our destiny.

Mindful of the Pack

The pack are our fellow users. We support one another and look out for each other by roaming together. As we find challenges, we tackle them as a community. We understand that helping the pack helps us all. We are always actively trying to find common paths that we share, and cultivate these paths together. This is why at every attempt we will use community profile settings and keep our /etc/make.conf free of local customizations. By roaming together, we make the experience better for all.

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 even eat a dead carcass just because some upstream project threw some rotted meat in our path. It may sustain us for a while, but it’s not optimal. Let’s find the optimal solution. We would rather hunt...

Hungry

We are truly satiated only by those solutions that truly reflect our deeply-held values -- we want good technology, and if we can’t find any, we will hunt for it ourselves.. Our hunger is tangible and deep. We’ll automate everything, so we can spend more time in the hunt, developing innovative technology. We hunt to live, and live to hunt. We’ll put in the work to get the good stuff, even if it gets messy and requires investing our time and raw creative energy. If we don’t have time to hunt, we will find a way to make time. Wolves that don’t hunt are domesticated pets.

Territorial

We welcome all, but we are keenly aware of the scope of the territory we patrol. We take ownership of our territory, but we don’t bite off more than we can chew. We know what parts of the Libre forest are fully in our grasp, and what parts we do not have the wolf-power to properly manage. We will claim new territory only as our pack grows, all the while ensuring that the territory we currently hold is kept secure. Continuous improvement -- building our territory thoughtfully without losing ground -- is what we’re all about.

We Howl

We encourage each wolf in our pack to howl and express their personal desires and needs, especially on our bug tracker. Your experience is what we care about, not what some bunny did in some random hole last Thursday. It’s all about sharing your own journey with the pack, so that we can learn from and support each other better.

So remember -- as part of the Funtoo, exhibit these qualities to maximize your experience, and the experience of the pack!

   Note

If you read this far, please notice that the wolf illustration has five legs. Behold, the mighty five-legged wolf!

Now, let's cover some distinct aspects of Funtoo, and as an exercise, see if you can map these technical decisions back to pillars of the Wolf Pack Philosophy:

Easier Install

In general, while the install is still 'by hand' rather than via installer, effort has gone into making the install easier. (Why? To make the common paths easier for the rest of the pack.)

Pre-Built Kernel

Funtoo stage3 images come with a pre-built debian-sources kernel and initramfs that supports all modern hardware. This is done to make installation easier and give all users a common reference kernel to use to start out. You don't have to build your own kernel to install Funtoo. (This is a common area where people get stuck.)

Desktops Ready To Use

We build stage3's that include desktop environments, such as a GNOME stage3, Cinnamon stage3, and others. They have 'official' profile settings that we want you to use and help improve. We strongly encourage you to use our official profile settings for your desktop environment, so we can all work together to make a specific desktop setup work really, really well and benefit from each other's improvements and bug fixes.

No Need for Make.conf Hackery

We strongly encourage users to have an empty /etc/make.conf file! You will use ego profile to set your subarch, optimization settings, and USE settings. If you find a problem with our official settings, file a bug. (Why? You still have freedom to tweak things, but we should have some easy-to-use defaults that work 99.999% of the time to make well-maintained paths for our pack.)

Scope

Funtoo has some things that are officially supported, and some things that are not, when compared to Gentoo. We are a smaller project. As the community grows, you can help us to support more things! (We don't bite off more than we can handle.)

Automation

We have a special technology called metatools that we use to automate the creation of ebuilds and keep them up-to-date. (Why? Not only is it cool but it helps us to free up time to work on more useful things, like new technologies.)

Once you understand the Wolf Pack Philosophy, the rationale for the technical decisions becomes clear, because the technical direction flows from the pillars of the philosophy. If you internalize this philosophy, you will begin to align with our technical direction and be able to join us in our journey!