There have been several important changes to the Funtoo Linux release process, builds and packages that we will cover below.

The kits in meta-repo are based on a 13 November 2018 snapshot of Gentoo Linux. Unlike Funtoo Linux 1.2, all kits are frozen and 1.3 will serve as a “long term stable” (LTS) release of Funtoo Linux. This differs from the 1.2. release of Funtoo Linux where some kits were frozen, and others were not. We moved to a fully-snapshotted kit model to prevent unpredictable dependency breakage due to upstream changes that would apply to some kits but not others, which was an ongoing problem with the 1.2 release.

Behind the scenes, there have been very significant improvements to our kits technology which will make it possible to accelerate our release cycle.

Deprecation of multilib Support

Multilib support — the ability for 64-bit versions of Funtoo Linux to run legacy 32-bit applications — has been deprecated, so that Funtoo Linux for 64-bit CPUs is now 64-bit only — what we used to offer as a separate “pure64” build. This was done because 32-bit support was originally created as a stop-gap measure 15 years ago to allow for a seamless transition to 64-bit computing, and we believe the time has come to shed this ongoing maintenance burden and focus efforts that have historically been spent on 32-bit compatibility to other areas.

We realize that this may create inconvenience for some users. There are some workarounds that will work for most situations. One is to create a 32-bit chroot environment for the odd 32-bit application that you may still need to run.

So, these were some of the important new features added to the latest version of Funtoo Linux. You can check out the official Release Notes here