Subj : Re: one hand
To   : apam
From : esc
Date : Sat Oct 08 2022 02:03:16

 ap> It is when he's sleeping :) He can get rather grumpy at times.. but yeah
 ap> it's a happy life :)

Awesome :)

 ap> Yeah, both. I'm not sure if I can really put my finger on what I
 ap> particularly like about it. Linux is ok, I suppose there's just the
 ap> little things about distros that turn me off. It seems that they're
 ap> either too bleeding edge - eg arch or tumbleweed, or too out of date, eg
 ap> debian. I really don't like snap packages due to the way it uses loopback
 ap> devices, so that puts ubuntu out, I like LXQT, which puts mint out (I
 ap> also like KDE) openSUSE leap comes close, but again, a bit out of date.
 ap> AlmaLinux doesn't have certain packages I need - I could probably find
 ap> them in some other repo, but it's also a bit out of date. Void Linux
 ap> comes very close, but it's default kernel doesn't include the minix file
 ap> system, fedora and opensuse use a grub 2 package instead of plain grub.

Yeah, the sheer amount of variations in linux distros does create a lot of fragmentation. There still doesn't seem to be a one-package-manager solution that everyone can agree on. I find Arch's AUR to be a mostly good solution but agree the bleeding edge nature of the distro is tricky at times.

Void is interesting. It's the most modern distro I can get working on my powerpc macs in the basement hehe.

One thing I am interested in exploring more is deterministic operating systems. I.e., the system boots the same every time, and user configuration is only applied after. Seems like a very rock solid way to run an OS.

 ap> Yeah a lot of those things are a bit picky, minix filesystem and grub
 ap> package are particular for my OS I like to work on from time to time, and
 ap> I haven't got that sorted out on freebsd yet.

Gotcha. There was recently an issue with Grub that was preventing people from booting ... this was hairy. I use systemd-boot so for me it wasn't an issue but things like that are fairly scary if you need your computer every day lol.

 ap> Perhaps I'm more forgiving of freebsd as I also just like the idea of it
 ap> - ZFS, I really like, no systemd is cool, I don't feel like I'm forced to
 ap> adopt wayland (though, perhaps that will happen eventually) I like that
 ap> it's not crazy about licenses and pure free software etc - of course they
 ap> respect them, but it's not like GNU firmware blobs are evil kind of
 ap> thing.

I still use ext4. ZFS is excellent, though. It needs better first class support in the linux kernel. 

I messed with BTRFS recently and wasn't really into it. Maybe I need to give it more time and try harder to understand its benefits. I get the value of snapshots, for some reason I just wasn't into it.

I also have no use for Wayland at this point. Lol. I'm sure they'll figure out how to make it perfect one day. Until then, xorg!

 ap> Perhaps also it's less things work on FreeBSD.. I don't have steam, so I
 ap> am not wasting money on games I'll never end up playing.

Man this hits close to home.

 ap> I guess I am just very picky about what I want, and short of making my
 ap> own linux distribution (which I have done, but it's way too much work
 ap> practically) they all seem to be just off.

Understood. And honestly configuring an OS from scratch once in a while is cathartic.

 ap> Systemd is one of those things, it seems to work fine for most things, I
 ap> got a little turned off when there was talk about them managing home
 ap> directories. As far as an init system it works, but I don't think it's a
 ap> silver bullet or anything, other init systems work too. I do like how
 ap> units are easy to write, it's much easier than manifests on solaris
 ap> that's for sure.

Yeah, I have systemd-homed/homectl on my personal laptop but just out of curiosity. From an administrative perspective, I actually think it's brilliant - true roaming accounts in a business or school when using linux workstations. But for most people it's unnecessary.

One nice thing is my home directory is encrypted, though. So there is that. homectl is not /completely/ without innate value :)

 ap> Artix I liked not having to mess about with installing it (I have
 ap> installed arch, it's not hard, just a little tedious) and it had an LXQT
 ap> image i think that was set up nicely.

Actually if you get bored some time, spin up a vm with a new arch install iso and try the 'archinstall' script. It seems to do a lot of things well, other than an issue I ran into with the fstab.

Cheers!

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