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Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

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Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#101

Post by keypress »

andrewvijay wrote: post #86
keypress wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn't sound impressive to me at all, then I checked my memory use on Debian with Gnome Desktop, and was a bit shocked. It's hard to gauge memory use, but considering I used to play with OSs that would load to 64MB of RAM it's hard to see what I'm really getting here in terms of perks. Network manager and some mounting help is about all that's useful from Gnome Shell for me.

Let's say they built it for an average user. And it's kinda impressive. So how much was your Debian taking up?

Debian 8, about 560MB of 4GB with no apps (but for system monitor), and about 760MB of 4GB with Chromium open, with one tab (new tab).

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#102

Post by keypress »

andrewvijay wrote: post #86
keypress wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn't sound impressive to me at all, then I checked my memory use on Debian with Gnome Desktop, and was a bit shocked. It's hard to gauge memory use, but considering I used to play with OSs that would load to 64MB of RAM it's hard to see what I'm really getting here in terms of perks. Network manager and some mounting help is about all that's useful from Gnome Shell for me.

Let's say they built it for an average user. And it's kinda impressive. So how much was your Debian taking up?

What's impressive about it?

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#103

Post by Kadin »

stegosaurus wrote: post #81
apatters wrote: post #75

I've had a lot of fun playing around with Arch, and it's taught me a lot about Linux, but it seems to me like the "rolling release, mostly unmodified sources from many third parties" update model is a no-go for anyone other than a very seasoned Linux user or someone with a lot of time on their hands. Things just break or otherwise don't work far too often. So, kudos to the guy who put this distro together but without…

Interestingly I've had far, far less issues in Arch over a year or so of using it, than I did trying to use Debian stable ~10 years ago. It could be that I'm just more of a unix beast now and so do it automatically without thinking. I remember having to edit Xorg configuration files, having tons of unsupported hardware, etc. Arch has basically just worked for me on all my machines with the exception of some esoteric…

I think the key difference is "10 years ago"; Debian Stable today is a much more pleasant experience than Debian Stable a decade ago. I haven't used Arch so I can't comment there, but there's been a lot of improvement in hardware compatibility over the years.

Being any sort of early-adopter on the hardware front will, as always, get you punished with configuration file editing, though.

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#104

Post by Kadin »

crawrey wrote: post #19

Ugh, can we please stop using "beautiful" to describe user interfaces? lyk dis if u cringe evrytiem Seriously though, it's such a cop out and it cheapens whatever you're trying to sell.

It's also subjective to the point of being a useless descriptor. One person's "beautiful" is another person's "terrible waste of precious screen real estate". It's fine if "beautiful" is a shorthand design goal among a group of people on a project team, where everyone shares the same design philosophy and assumptions, but it's not a great way to describe a project to the public.

It's up there with "nice" and "interesting" in terms of non-value words, IMO.

Much more useful would be to describe some of the goals that you, if you're the developer, consider beautiful. What, specifically, are you going for? If I'm looking at a project that's what I want to know. Most people don't set out to make ugly projects (well, mostly [1]) so that's the key differentiator: what subjective definition of "beautiful" is operative in the project's design, and what tradeoffs are being made to pursue it?

[1]: Maybe not if you're really into "New Jersey Style" / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#105

Post by meddlepal »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
meddlepal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always Fedora which has gotten better and better the last couple releases. But I like Arch too. I just switched away from it because I got tired of things breaking if I wasn't religiously upgrading.

I wonder how people feel about nix. Broken updates are by design a minor issue since it's transactional/rollbackable.

How is NixOS as a workstation/desktop/laptop OS? Does it have any major issues with hardware I'd run into?

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#106

Post by Ericson2314 »

roblabla wrote: post #53
gosub wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

packages are namespaced in a directory for each package/version, like this: /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/ if a package is "installed" in an environment (it could be global, user local or temporary), its files are sym-linked in the "original" position (e.g. /usr/bin/firefox etc etc)

Small nitpick, they aren't symlinked to their original position, but instead to a "profile" (global for instance is in /run/current-system/sw, your local profile is $HOME/.nix-profile). This has several consequences. It means binaries distributed with the expectation of libraries being in their original position (e.g. /usr/lib/libc.so) don't work as is. It also means scripts depending on the presence of /usr/bin/bash…

Yeah but we're very good at patching shebangs, rpaths, etc.

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#107

Post by Ericson2314 »

Svenstaro wrote: post #61
gosub wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

packages are namespaced in a directory for each package/version, like this: /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/ if a package is "installed" in an environment (it could be global, user local or temporary), its files are sym-linked in the "original" position (e.g. /usr/bin/firefox etc etc)

So basically, one could make this compatible with current Arch packages by making packages install into /nix/store/ instead?

Yeah we package a lot of stuff these days---more than our market share would lead one to guess. So yes feel free to file a PR for anything missing, but there's no need to port Arch packages en masse.

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#108

Post by grinich »

creshal wrote: post #35
grinich wrote: post #23

Pretty cool to see Nylas N1 featured! (Check the console text)

Do they have actual terms of service by now? When I tried it, I was signed up to their newsletter by simply entering a mail address into the account setup dialog, without any indication that I was opting in to have my personal data harvested and abused.

There was a (really bad) bug in one of our releases that did this. You must have connected then-- sorry. We're a small team moving fast and occasionally we screw up like this.

FWIW, it now correctly asks you in the setup flow and you can add/remove yourself in the preferences: https://i7.createsend1.com/ei/d/A1/835/432/153754/csfinal/pr...

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#109

Post by IMcD23 »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #38
striking wrote: post #14

An Arch system with defaults is not an Arch system. The beauty of Arch is that you set it up from head to toe, so you only have the things you need most. And if something breaks, you're more likely to be able to fix it. Accept no substitute. Vanilla Arch forever. (I accept that some people don't care about how the sausages are made. In that case, use Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu, in order of similarity to Arch.)

I like Arch. I would love to have it installed on my laptop, but then I don't want to spend the time actually installing and configuring it. I got fed up with that stuff using linux 15 years ago. I remember the days when you had to write your own device drivers. I don't long for them. In fact, I still cry a bit when I think about that day my RedHat 6 install configured eth0 for me. Imagine: Plugging a network cable i…

This week I purchased a new Dell XPS 13 9350 and installed Arch. The process of installing and getting a working OS with WiFi, screen brightness adjustment, media keys, Gnome 3, touch screen, and trackpad gestures took around 3 hours. It was as simple as repartitioning, pacstrapping, installing Xorg/Gnome and following the steps on the wiki.

Re: Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

#110

Post by PuercoPop »

sevensor wrote: post #88
burkaman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this quote mean? And what does it have to do with someone's package manager configuration?

It's from Atlas Shrugged , and I think it's trying to draw some kind of parallel between using Arch and struggling against oppressive forces of mental tyranny. As represented by Apricity perhaps? Arch is for heroic individualists? Arch is great and all. I love using it, but I get pretty impatient with people who think they're smarter than everyone else because they can follow the detailed instructions in a well-writt…

Same with Gentoo. Some people pretended like doing a stage 1 install taught you more about the system. Besides chroot I don't remember anything I learned from it. Loved Gentoo though. Especially how configurable it was.
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