Re: Potpourri off topic? (my share)

[onf]

Hi,

On Sun Nov 24, 2024 at 2:26 PM CET, Marc Chantreux wrote:
> > > From my own experience, though, sometimes the grass really IS greener
> > > on the other side. For instance, I have had great experience switching
> > > away from systemd, apt, and PulseAudio.
>
> apt is a terrible interface to a very useful and mature packaging system.
> which leads me to write my own tool which uses:
>
> * original apt-tools to manage packages
> * aptitude to query the state of a system or the available packages and repo.
>
> however I realize most of newcomers only know apt which is a terrible
> thing because (to me at least) the packaging system is one of the best
> point of debian promotion.

Personally, as a newcomer, I tried using synaptic first before using apt
and found it even harder to use. I especially found the various sections
the packages are classified into confusing. So I'm not sure how much of
it is caused by apt itself, although its interface always seemed somewhat
clunky to me.

> > Lennart Poettering seems to have a talent for
> > developing 66% of a solution to a problem (based on whatever Apple did
> > with macOS
>
> Another point is "both fedora and ubuntu are the distro where all bad
> ideas happens first" so debian is for now the safer place for average
> linux users.
>
> [...]
>
> I use debian with no task selected,  iproute2 and nftables (no ifupdown
> nor networkmanager), slim and dwm. I tried to replace systemd with sinit
> but it failed. I have to investigate.

My opinion about systemd and the distros that use it (Ubuntu and its
variants in particular) is that it's great for the average Joe user,
because it manages almost everything for him (just like Windows, which
it seems to want to replace). It's terrible for anyone else, though,
because it's such a mess internally.

> > I'm curious to see where approaches like Nix and GNU Mes[4] take us.
> > (One decades-old tradition GNU keeps vigorously alive: mediocre-to-bad
> > project names.)
>
> Guix enters slowly in my setup as a "Vagrant + Chef + Docker made right"
> wanabe. I'll leave my debian desktop whenever I can leave linux to
> OpenBSD.

You might like Void Linux; it's somewhat like a BSD-flavored Linux.[1]
I've been using it as my daily driver for the last 3 years and it's
just so straightforward to manage.

It uses runit as its init, with all of its 'services' being just a
bunch of shell scripts. This might sound too simple, but when you
use an equivalently simple setup, it works quite well.

Void has its own package manager, XBPS, which is relatively simple
to use, especially compared to apt.

~ onf

[1] Its original developer apparently worked on NetBSD before
    creating it.