I have been planning to move to Funtoo Linux, a derivative of Gentoo Linux, for over a month now. The install is basically the same as a Gentoo installation. The only difference is that instead of using Gentoo’s Portage, you can choose to just use Daniel Robbin’s Funtoo git-based Portage located at Github. Funtoo does give you the option to use the vanilla Portage maintained by Gentoo. I am not sure that you can use the Paludis package system though.
My primary reason to move to Funtoo is just for fun. I miss the days back in 2004 where I stayed up all night getting my new Gentoo system to run. I learned a lot about Linux in those days. I feel it is time for me to brush up on my skills. Also, Funtoo makes it easier for users to create and update their own Funtoo Portage system. A must if a Gentoo-based system ever wants to become bleeding edge again.
Daniel also created Metro that allows users to create their Linux distribution based on Gentoo. I find this exciting. Fedora Core, openSUSE and Ubuntu have their own distro creating packages but I would like to create one based on Gentoo. Just for fun of course.
I expect to make the move to Funtoo sometime this weekend.
Hopefully you don’t need to reinstall to switch to Funtoo from Gentoo. That would be absurd.
No, I will be doing a fresh install. Anyway, somebody already posted a howto on how to switch from Gentoo to Funtoo. Whether absurd or not, Linux and open source gives us the freedom to make our own choices here 🙂