111–120 of 182 posts
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I was enthusiastic about Void, until I learned more about its history.
What history is that and why does it matter today?
Same problem as any other project with a single owner, or even a small team. It is at risk of disappearing one day, never to be heard from again.
There are a lot of important projects that fall into this category. It certainly isn't unique to Void.
As someone who is from the era of Ubuntu as their first distro, my natural progression towards maintainable OS made me reach Arch. As an OS for your system, it seems like the perfect abstraction layer and does just enough. The next incremental update to my system could be NixOS, Nix package manager in Arch or Nix package manager in FreeBSD. But I am always happy to see old projects like this kicking. I see many peopl…
I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum. How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?
> The package management system does not track or manage dependencies; however, when performing the recommended full install, all dependencies of the stock packages are met. For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the program. Since no official lists of dependencies for stock packages are provided, if users decide to install a custom installation or install 3rd-party software, they will need to work through any possible missing dependencies themselves. Since the package manager doesn't manage dependencies, it will install any and all packages, whether or not dependencies are met. A user may find out that dependencies are missing only when attempting to use the software.
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#Dependency_resolutio...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum. How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?
As far as I read about it, they don't! Dependency resolution is fully up to the user. > The package management system does not track or manage dependencies; however, when performing the recommended full install, all dependencies of the stock packages are met. For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs requ…
Simplicity is a virtue but sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
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it's remarkable how dumb kids are (compared to adults). most people understand intuitively when talking to a child that they are going to be dumb and we need to treat them differently (or have a different standard), but the internet's anonymity shields you quite a bit and it's easy to think you're talking to a really dumb adult when really you're being a horrible person. If that person knew you were an 8 or 9 year ol…
The other person could also have been 8 or 9. In fact, I was doing dumb things to strangers on the internet well into my teenage years.
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As far as I read about it, they don't! Dependency resolution is fully up to the user. > The package management system does not track or manage dependencies; however, when performing the recommended full install, all dependencies of the stock packages are met. For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs requ…
Oof, that sounds like a lot of work. Simplicity is a virtue but sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
While I think it is difficult to get Arcg going, the whole point of that effort is that I don't have to deal with it much after that. It is a rolling release and get the latest upstream releases which is not meddled with by distro much. Unless you are meddling with it too much, it is very stable IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What history is that and why does it matter today?
https://voidlinux.org/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html Same problem as any other project with a single owner, or even a small team. It is at risk of disappearing one day, never to be heard from again. There are a lot of important projects that fall into this category. It certainly isn't unique to Void.
For me Void seems like a very good distro, I think of it as a naked kernel with runnit init and xbps as the package manager, nothing gets in the way. It also has the nice property where the git repo is the distro in every sense.
Slackware was my first Linux too. I remember making the installation floppy disk set. And then it was my first introduction to running a computer others could remotely control. After learning how to dial up AOL from Linux then join an IRC chat room, I was immediately "pwned" by someone in that chat room who guessed my root password and rm -rf /'d my entire hard drive. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and cried.
Surprisingly I still use Slackware (current) and actually install it on our physics department computer room using packer to generate virtual golden images and then imaging the computers with clonezilla. Slackware performs well even on those 11 years old machines that we have there (combined with some new ones). Currently students access remotely using x2go and Xfce and it works pretty well. Of course there are some…
I've been thinking about Slackware a lot lately. Slackware manuals and the philosophy of the distro taught me how *nix, networking, and computers in general work. Back in the late '90s, that was a great contrast to the voodoo of RedHat, and frankly a humanitarian boon.
In my older enervated state, seeking something that "just works", I keep thinking of Slackware -- the only thing that "just worked" was understanding what was happening from a fairly close approximation to first principles and a software stack that did what it said on the tin. I can't think of a better distro to use in an institution of higher learning.
The irony of Slackware's affinity to the Church of the Subgenious didn't hurt either; Bob Dobbs wants to sell you a bill of goods, but once you see through all of that and achieve a state of Slack, true understanding has begun.