321–329 of 329 posts
Would you be open to trying non-Linux distros such as BSD distros? There are various flavors of BSD that have the toolsets to do what you requested. Not very sure of laptop battery management though. FreeBSD (Very stable) OpenBSD (Stability + Security focused) PCBSD (Linux like ease of setup for Desktop environments) They all have access to large/comprehensive application/system/development software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I agree Arch and rolling release is great to avoid breaks. Paradoxically, people are afraid of it for the opposite reason. > I am considering to migrate to NixOS or GuixSD (currently toying with 2 virtual machines). I find Arch to be a great imperative distro, but functional ones are simply superior. Declarative system configuration, declarative package recipes, and the ability to install multiple versions of the s…
That was my impression about Nix, however mind that things are moving very very fast . NixPkgs is one of the top GitHub projects now by number of contributors. Loads of things are packaged. I think it's getting comparable to Arch plus AUR. GuixSD is a GNU version of NixOS, running on Guix package manager. Extremely neat, as it's written in Guile Scheme. They have most basic things packaged. Also, derivations are comp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Packages which symlink or install large binary files or log files into /etc wtf? who is actually incompetent enough to do something like this?
This was something like ~8 years ago, but here's an excerpt from my notes when using Redhat: # ls -l /etc/httpd/ conf conf.d logs -> ../../var/log/httpd modules -> ../../usr/lib/httpd/modules run -> ../../var/run Reactions: * Why is 'grep -r /etc' taking so long? * Why am I seeing log entries in the output? * Why am I seeing 'permission denied' on a bunch of socket files? Debian seems to have the most respect for the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you buy your HDDs? You're sitting a couple standard deviations beyond MTBF.
I have upgraded to an SSD but just copied the OS and boot sectors to the new device.
I told him I haven't installed a new OS on my primary PC in 10 years. I just DD it from one drive to another.
DD is by far the easiest way of making bootable media on a flash drive as well. I use that method to create install media for my other computers.
I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants, so Fedora is naturally a good platform for it. I've always had more trouble compiling random things on debian-based stuff though (probably has something to do with default linker flags and poorly-written packages). RH has a big virtua…
> I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants This is due to university lock in. RedHat convinced a lot of institutions that they were better off paying for Linux. I think a lot of the establishment couldn't use free software because they had no procedure in place for doing so. Often buying a RedHat support agreement was the most palatable or even only wa…
I've recently started experimenting with NixOS on my secondary (testbed) laptop at home. (My main home laptop has Windows, while at work we use Ubuntu.) Based on that and posts on this thread, I'd say if you're willing to consider Arch, I'd seriously suggest it might be worth adding NixOS to your list too. In my experience, at some cost, it gives you one particular super -power, that I've never seen anywhere yet. Spe…
NixOS has my vote. On the first ~CON: If the "end user" is a developer that is new to nix and nix expressions, the transparency of nixpkgs and its nix expressions may turn tweaking from a problem into an opportunity. Seeing the details of builds, configs, and installs clearly laid out in a nix expression taught me more about the package that I was blindly depending on. Having the same tools (nix, nix-repl, nix-shell,…
+1. Dependency management and deployment is the biggest problem Nix solves and it is the only system that actually does so instead of putting the problem somewhere else and presenting that as a "solution." A lot of people are using Docker for this scenario, which gives the illusion of a solution for new projects because you have convenient pre-built images. The images do not come from thin air, and people will run into exactly the same problems as they did with VM images once their Docker projects age and dependencies will need to be updated. Adding virtualization layers cannot solve the problem of updating software dependencies.
The only solution is a package manager that tracks the complete dependency tree, all the linked libraries down to libc, and prevents different versions of packages from interfering with each other. Nix is the only package manager that does this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you do actually need to develop for Linux, I would suggest something with a rolling release model, otherwise it won't be long before you'll need to start compiling things from source because you need a more recent version of than your distro is packaging. It depends on your requirements. If you constantly find yourself needing the latest and greatest upstream software releases, then yes, use a rolling release. B…
> I really wish people would stop making comments like this. I didn't mean to imply that Fedora isn't a first-class distribution in its own right. In this post's context, I see why it would look that way, and I apologize for it. I don't mean to belittle the work you folks are doing, and I know that the Fedora project is more than just the distro, and that the distro itself is more than just Red Hat's testbed for new…
Part of why you see things working their way into the distribution quickly is because of the "first" foundation[1]. Fedora purposely does not wait for other distributions to do the hard work of integrating new technologies, which means they're often among the first to discover bugs in new technologies. That said, I think that these large integrations are getting smoother over time, as the community is putting a lot more effort into coordinating these large changes and instituting QA that has the teeth to block releases on bugs with flaky integration.