Lainon looking to distrohop

Hi Lainons, I've been a Debian user for a while, but I've started semi-recently to get more active with developing which has brought to the fore some of Debian's limitations. Mainly that self-packaging is an absolute mess of a chore and packages aren't particularly up-to-date. I've been messing around with Arch and Guix/Nix, but I'm somewhat wondering about other options less prone to breakage. Haven't gotten unlucky so far, but the worry I might eventually is an annoyance. Is Gentoo more stable? Is FreeBSD good-enough? I haven't been paying much attention to the BSD side of things as I haven't heard of much work regarding VMs being done on it so far. I could be wrong. So unless that's no longer an issue, I'm probably mostly interested in Linux. Thanks Lainons.

I'm pretty sure that Arch being breakable is mostly a meme nowdays so you should be fine as you are. If there an update that require something to change manually it is posted on the official site

I'm using FreeBSD mostly because of the good ZFS support. ZFS is the best filesystem currently available and I can't live without it anymore. It's the one reason I'm not on OpenBSD. I definitely recommend trying it even if you decide to stay on Linux. >I haven't heard of much work regarding VMs being done on it so far I don't use any VMs, but bhyve on FreeBSD is well regarded and OpenBSD is working hard on their own vmm right now. >but I'm somewhat wondering about other options less prone to breakage Give Void Linux a try.

I'm on freeBSD, I have stayed so long on it that is hard to me to distrohop as I do not possess another HDD for migration besides but there is this new freeBSD desktop-centric distro that looks fine, https://project-trident.org/ it is like a well done PC-BSD that improves on TrueOS and uses LibreSSL and other enhancements from OpenBSD while also having ZFS, jails, bhyve, PEFS and all the other FreeBSD goodies. Also worth mentioning that portage was inspired by FreeBSD ports. If you like linux you might aswrll stay on linux, there is definitively a different way of doing things and you should check if there are proper drivers for your hardware.

>>15557 I'll be taking that under advisement. >>15558 I should keep an eye on vmm & take a look at bhyve. I'll check Void Linux out. >>15559 Ah, right. Drivers may very well be a problem for some of my machines. I'll project-trident a look anyway, thanks.

>>15560 srl give void a shot, absence of some pkg might be paint in the ass but you'll get used to it

>>15555 I recently switched from Debian to Arch. I've used Debian (and Debian-derived) distributions most of my life and felt pretty comfortable with it, but as my needs have evolved I found that packages I needed weren't available in Debian and I found myself creating a lot of packages myself. I didn't really know had to do that and taught myself through trial and error. Mostly error. In my experience, switching to Arch actually reduced breakage and time spent maintaining my machine. Since I'm able to get so many more packages straight from the official repository, I don't need to maintain my own packages, which I found to be a headache to so with apt . What I can't get from the official repository I can almost always find in the AUR, which has proved surprisingly stable and reliable so far. Only once have I needed to create my own package, and I found it pretty intuitive and painless to do with pacman . >>15557 >Arch being breakable is mostly a meme nowdays Can confirm. I tried Arch a few years ago and got this impression, but now it feels rock solid. Seems like between how popular Arch has gotten combined with the rise of Manjaro have lead to a lot momentum and energy behind the project and it really shows. I've got a lot of experience with the user space realm of *nix and Arch has proved stable and intuitive for me. The biggest hurdle is still the installation and initial configuration, and this is far easier to do today than it was even a few years ago. Also, I just want to stress this is just my individual experience and use-case. I'm not trying to say any distro is better or worse or more virtuous than any other. If you're stoked about diving into FreeBSD or Gentoo then go for it! But I'd encourage you to give Arch a fair shake if you're looking for something that's (IMO) a good blend of stability and flexibility.

>>15570 My exact experience. Debian is nice but old packages and difficult rolling your own or mixing channels. Arch has been a lot simpler and more reliable than Debian unstable. >>15555 Wouldn't Nix / Guix be the least prone to breakages, since it is simple to rollback any updates and mix dependencies? Not that I have any experience with them, just curious since it has been on my list to try.

>>15574 >OP Yeah, that's why I've been messing with those in the first place. Even if you mess up, just rollback or in the absolute worst case reinstall.

If you're looking for a rock, take a look at Slackware.

>>15570 >Also, I just want to stress this is just my individual experience and use-case. I'm not trying to say any distro is better or worse or more virtuous than any other. If you're stoked about diving into FreeBSD or Gentoo then go for it! But I'd encourage you to give Arch a fair shake if you're looking for something that's (IMO) a good blend of stability and flexibility. I'll do it for you: Arch Linux is better than most distros, including Debian, unless you have a very specific use-case where something else "just works" better. FreeBSD is not a good idea for anything but servers. Haven't used Nix/Guix (so I can't make a judgement on it), but >>15574 misses the point: >Wouldn't Nix / Guix be the least prone to breakages, since it is simple to rollback any updates and mix dependencies? No, just theoretically easier to fix breakages. Even though Arch already has rollbacks, and rarely breaks anyway Arch Linux: Myth and Reality: https://pastebin.com/fpbFULRr

>>15698 I'm sorry but you sound like the typical Arch fanboy, using the usual clichés and misconceptions against "other distros" and FreeBSD. Anyway Arch is a very vanilla distro offering a nice wiki, rolling release, a "minimal installation" and nothing more. I can see that some people are using it to "learn linux" and that's nice but there is a larger OS world to explore with nice convenient concepts and tools in with what Arch has is really nothing. And for the love of god do not use AUR, build your own pkgs.

>>15555 what kind of development are you doing?

Check out Void Linux, lain. It's got a binary package manager and a BSD style source ports thing. Also it uses runit for init scripts and even has an option for musl instead of glibc. The only hangup about it is the lead developer went AWOL so the future is kind of uncertain. I think updates have been getting more sparse. I used to run it but switched to Arch for the AUR

>>15706 Arch also has ports, it is called the Arch Build System and the AUR is based on it, you do not have to trust the AUR.

>>15704 >And for the love of god do not use AUR, build your own pkgs. Why do you say this? Not trying to be bait, I've just heard this line before and never had it explained.

>>15712 >Why do you say this? Would you trust if I shared you binaries of your software?.

>>15716 AUR packages aren't binaries...

just inspect the git tree for the package (AUR or otherwise) you wish to install. it's all there out in the open. PKGBUILDs are very easy to read and write. I suspect this is the same with Void. more often than not you may not need to write your own because the Arch repos and AUR have mountains of packages.

>>15712 I'm guessing arch/aur run all build scripts as root, which would be a bad idea without making sure the scripts are legit first. Same issue you have with portage and any other ports or ports-like system. Distros like CRUX document and promote fakeroot for building packages, which might be better overall, since the Pkgfile cannot make changes to your entire system. Pre/post-install scripts still run as root tho. More of a trust issue I think. I'd trust ports from the CRUX core team, but anything from user repositories, I would read through before building.

>>15721 >>15704 As I understand things, PKGBUILDs are just shell scripts run by the makepkg utility. Doing this as root is incorrect and will probably break your system. Makepkg calls pacman which asks for credentials, but you would need to do this anyway if you were compiling your own package and managing dependencies with pacman. The AUR is nothing but a system to download and update pre-populated PKGBUILD scripts. These are quite easy to ready and usually no more than a few dozen lines. It's pretty simple to skim and make sure nothing fishy is going on. Now this of course dones't mean that the code that you're downloading and compiling isn't malicious, but you would need to review to code yourself if that's a concern. But--and this is what I don't understand about the "AUR is insecure" argument--you would need to review that code in the exact same way if you cloned the repo and compiled it yourself. I understand the warnings against compiling a stranger's program on your machine without reviewing it, but whether the user does that manually or uses a helper script downloaded from the AUR seems irrelevant to me.

>> 15705 Amongst other things I've been messing with Schemes and Lisp. I'm not a huge fan of quicklisp's utter lack of verification and safety so I tend to avoid its use as much as possible. That's the parts I'm willing to disclose here at the moment regarding my personal stuff. On a professional point of view (no details, lol), Debian libraries are just plain too stale for what we're doing. Which is why I'm using Arch there.

>>15555 >Mainly that self-packaging is an absolute mess of a chore and packages aren't particularly up-to-date. I'd encourage you to take a look at https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest for data on how up to date repositories are. >I've been messing around with Arch and Guix/Nix, but I'm somewhat wondering about other options less prone to breakage. You shouldn't be having issues with stability on Guix/Nix. >Is Gentoo more stable? Cross post on Gentoo because we have like 4 distro threads now: >After some research "Gentoo is as stable as you make it." seems to reflect reality, it can be stable but only if you do what it takes. Maintenance is regular (monthly at minimum) and quite demanding often requiring you to do several manual steps to verify the safety for every one of your updatable packages before performing them. It also requires searching through a mailing list to avoid any problems with updating before they happen. >Haven't gotten unlucky so far, but the worry I might eventually is an annoyance. You might also want to look into Alpine Linux (rolling release, upto date, but designed to be run in production), or even something like Mint or Fedora if you want a Debian expereince but with more updated packages. >>15583 >If you're looking for a rock, take a look at Slackware. Slackware isn't much ahead of Debian as far as being up to date goes unless you run -current in which case it's less stable than most distributions.

>>15698 >No, just theoretically easier to fix breakages. Even though Arch already has rollbacks, and rarely breaks anyway This is incorrect what Nix & Guix do in addition to making it easy to roll back changes is ship the specific versions of the dependencies used to compile the binaries they ship, meaning if there are no bugs on the maintainers machine there won't be bugs on the consumers machine. Also because of this you never have any problems with dependency hell.

>>15721 >>15725 makepkg won't run as root.

After years of distrohopping and using Debian for a while as my last distro I landed back on xubuntu since I'm used to using apt but wanted the availability of more software. I would recommend trying it even if you used it before years ago like me, it actually only has about 10-15 more packages installed right now than what I had on Debian stable so it's lightweight enough for my needs.

>>15749 XFCE is an absolute pleasure to use no matter what distro you use it with. I think most users would get a lot more milage out of DE hopping rather then distro hopping. My daily experience running Arch with XFCE is probably more simiar to yours running Xubuntu than to that of another arch user running BSPWN or DWM or some rice-a-roni setup. The major difference is package management, which is less than 20% of what I do with my machine.

>>>15712 >I'm guessing arch/aur run all build scripts as root Absolutely does not.

Distros are a social construct They are really just groups of packages preconfigured to work well together. I like Arch because it's the least distro-like distro because it comes with basically nothing.

>>15790 >Distros are a social construct I mean I guess but so what? Isn't any categorization a social construct? Unless you're actually into Platonic Ideals then yeah distributions are arbitrary concepts but so are chairs, cars, or any other thing. But I agree with your sentiment. I don't really like that distributions tend to dictate every element of the UX. I like a distribution that allows me to chose from among several DEs, networking applications, etc. and still Just Works™.

Install openSUSE Tumbleweed, and build any missing programs from open build service (OBS). There are several options for DE - Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, MATE ...

>>15555 >Is Gentoo more stable? Yes, Gentoo is one of the most stable distros. I would recommend using either Arch Linux, Gentoo, Alpine, or Debian sid. If you choose to use Arch Linux, you should update your system at least once a week (Remember to also read the news section in Arch Linux's homepage!) >>15717 Actually it depends on the package in question (you can write a PKGBUILD that fetches a binary and installs it) >>15790 The competence of the people behind a distro is very important. It's also very important that you can trust them. It's important that the distro has been around long enough so you can be sure that it won't just disappear overnight and to make sure that the developers are competent and that the distro isn't a botnet. And while most distros are very similar, a few (Alpine, Slackware, Gentoo, NixOS, etc.) do something very differently from the rest of distributions of GNU/Linux. For these reasons it's important to know about the distro you are about to install and the people behind it. >I like Arch because it's the least distro-like distro because it comes with basically nothing. It depends on the point of view. Alpine Linux, Gentoo, Debian netinst (if you don't install anything) are way more minimal than Arch Linux. Arch Linux's default installation contains two text editors, utilities for working with JFS (who still uses this??) and LVM. And the packages in Arch Linux's repositories have most of features enabled (if you install Gentoo, you can choose which features you want to have available).

Hey guys, I'm a longtime windows user on my desktop, while using Fedora on my laptop. I'm considering switching my desktops operating system to a Linux distro, mainly because its kind of a pile of soykaf. Now that playing games through steam has started to get much better with Proton, I feel like I could get away with using something like Debian with an offline installation of windows on an external ssd for specific software that I need it for (video-editing, raw photo processing). What would be a good distro to use? I know the whole "it doesn't matter" thing and that ID valid, but I'm not worried about things being difficult and I haven't enjoyed basic distros like Mint much. I want complete control of my pc from the ground up. So something like Arch isn't out of the question. I'm kind of bouncing between doing Debian or Arch. >>15557 If this is really the case and Arch truly is stable, I'd use it.

>>15560 dont use void, its soykaf

devuan is pretty comfy. you get nearly the entire vast debian package repository, minus systemd.

How much better is ZFS juxtaposed to Ext4? To me, it does not sound like a deal breaker,

>>16041 depends on what you're doing. for mass storage and databases, it's everything a filesystem should be if you use it correctly. for a personal machine, extremely simple snapshots is probably the most appealing feature aside from better error checking and correction. on the downside, it's not great on ram and certain older cpus if you are resource-constrained (it's great with lots of ram and >=haswell though). last time i looked at zfs a couple of years ago encryption wasn't very easy to do, but i think that has improved somewhat by now. licensing is in a somewhat better position freedom-wise if you're using the zfs on linux implementation. i'm trying to keep it brief in this post but these are the things you'd want to look into to get a better answer.

>>16042 i'm sameposting to mention that zfs volume management is my favorite thing about zfs. you really have to try it out in a test environment to understand because it's a completely different way of doing things; adding, removing, mounting, and targeting for backup are all really simple and accommodate scripting very well.

>>16041 If you're having reliability issues with your ext4 partitions you can use the data=journal, and journal_async_commit mount flags to make things a bit better and the program rsnapshot to emulate snapshots. If you're running on a SSD discard would also be a good one to have to increase the life expectancy of your SSD by using TRIM. That being said ZFS is in every way other than integration, TRIM, memory useage, and cross platform support better than ext4.