1/13/2009

Gentopia has left the building

Cardoe wrote this just before lunchtime:

The long and arduous trek that the Gentopia Project has seen has finally come to an end. From it’s inception the project faced stiff push back from Gentoo and it’s developer base. In fact, the project was originally named “Project Utopia” mirroring Robert Love’s and Joe Shaw’s vision of a Linux desktop that simply worked. But the Gentoo Top Level Managers at the time deemed it not Gentoo-y enough and the project was quickly reborn as “Gentopia”.

The project quickly grew with developers becoming involved with many of the new technologies and software products coming from the fairly unexplored upstream Freedesktop.org project. The simple interfaces and actions our machine did for us automatically that we loved so much we distrusted by many Gentoo developers who liked the control and know how over their machines. Many developers vowed to never install HAL on their systems for as long as they lived. With GNOME and KDE adopting HAL support and even requiring it, the tide slowly began to change. People expected “Project Utopia” style support from Gentoo and they had it. The project began to wane once people grew acustomed to these features appearing and the integration with their systems improved.

Recently we’ve seen a freedesktop herd rise up in Gentoo which is a collaboration between the various desktop environment herds which is a good thing for users. From the get go I have wanted this herd to take over the Gentopia herd and project and fold it into it’s wing since it includes many freedesktop.org projects, the time has finally come for this to happen. As a result, the Gentopia overlay, web page and e-mail alias are going away and being replaced by the freedesktop herd’s resources. The transition should be seamless for everyone except users of the overlay. For layman users, please run layman -d gentopia and that will remove the overlay from your system.

For the freedesktop herd members, I look forward to them picking up the banner and continuing to provide us with a solid desktop experience that just works.

* Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux
* 2 Comments

2 Responses to “Gentopia has left the building”

  1. Henrique Rodrigues Says:
    January 13th, 2009 at 1:12 pm

    Thank you, Gentopia, for making my box work for me. :-)

  2. »Q« Says:
    January 13th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

    Thanks for all the work that went into Gentopia, and good luck to the freedesktop herd going forward. :)

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