I’ve been using Arch Linux for several years now. It has a rich ecosystem of packages, a wiki for many aspects of the system (you might be using the wiki even if you came from another distribution), and AUR fills the hole for whatever packages not included in the official repo. All packages are kept up to date, so it’s great for personal usage where latest packages are preferred over stable packages.
Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
281–290 of 345 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
why the aversion to systemd?
In short, developers' attitude towards critics and initial design decisions. Now it's better, not but perfect, and a lead dev working for Microsoft doesn't inspire confidence about its long term agenda. I can post links to comments of mine if you're interested further.
Please post links, I’ve never truly understood the systemd/init conflict, unlike the emacs/vim conflict.
I’d like to learn more!
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#283- "something that will be stable and supported for the next twenty years" Then the safest bet is to choose something that was popular and stable twenty years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect ( "...the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy" ) You *probably* just want Debian. There's many reasonable options but that one's the S…
Or FreeBSD if stability is the thing.
// add: everyone says Debian. good Linux. but OP didn't say Linux, they said stable over decades, no corpos.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fedora should not be recommended anymore for personal desktop use for the simple reason that they removed hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding support. Must all run on the CPU now.
You can enable it manually, like almost every other non-beginner friendly fedora quirk https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/proprietary-video-codecs-are...
The nice thing about Windows and MacOS is that users aren't expected to jump through hoops to restore functionality.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#285i use alpine linux on my servers. it's actually quite good.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide example of what makes it easier than alternatives?
systemd is "easier" for people used to cisco/microsoft/etc. The huge list of services with not-for-human names so your job can look complicated and essential.
It may be easier for them, but as someone without Cisco experience, systemd was a lot easier for configuring service dependencies once I understood it.
It's been 10 years now? I wouldn't go back, most of the suggested alternatives are so basic that troubleshooting becomes a chore. Almost all the hate is because they don't like Lennart.
We should fork it, get someone else to head that with a different name to get them on board.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
What benefit are you seeing in putting it in the kernel?
Not OP, but the whole business of PID 1 having to reap orphan PIDs seems like something the kernel should have to do. Is there a good reason for when a process exits that not other process is waiting on, that a user-mode PID 1 process has to observe that exit?
My understanding is that reaping children is a normal thing for most processes to do, and it's only orphans that fall through to PID 1, at which point it's easier to deal with it there rather than need to do anything special in ring zero.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#288I've moved to Fedora for desktop use in the last little bit. It's been quite nice, I have to say! My server stock is a bit all over the place at the moment, as I'm experimenting with a few things. I've got:
* Ubuntu 22.04
* Debian Bullseye
* Oracle Linux 8 (This was more accidental than anything...)
* Armbian
I haven't settled on where I'll be going but I think in the end I'll mostly be moving towards Fedora for everything. Their server OS is pretty nice too!
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#289I'm liking NixOS thus far. I've got it installed on my personal laptop. It's got some rough edges, but the benefits for me outweigh the downsides. I really like affordances like "nix-shell -p foo" to just run a shell with the "foo" command in it for one-off usages, instead of slowly accumulating installed apt packages that I forgot why I installed them. Similarly, having any custom configuration inside of "configurat…
I’ve ran NixOS on my last two machines. I like it more than the alternatives, but it isn’t without flaws. At this time, you must be sold on the idea of declarative configuration and willing to learn at least the basics of how Nix the language works.
It’s cool that you can Git pull and build an OS, but management of the project can be very slow. Using a ‘pull requests’ model majorly slows down progress; if you need to revise changes for a new package or package update, you will make the correction and get approval, even as a maintainer, but no one will come back around to merge it. With a patch-based model maintainers can waste less time by just making those few modification to the patch and getting updates upstreamed faster without the back-and-forth.
That said, it’s still something I’d recommend for someone with the experience and interest. There’s never been a system I was as confident with running patches and just updating the system myself for when stuff wasn’t working. But also, Guix is out there doing similar stuff and you must admire the free software goals even if it can sometimes be impractical (I just do not like the Scheme-based syntax).
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where Debian is a reputable distribution with a clear goal, the Devuan crew is solving a non-issue by means of almost religious levels of resistance toward systemd. If you want technological merit, chose Debian. If you want to join the conservatives of Linux, you should go for Devuan.
Even during Debian's systemd adoption wars I'd never seen any argument calling into question Devuan as ''disreputable''. After all, it was a group of experienced Debian folks that made a systemd-less version of Debian that compares almost exactly with Debian's status and capabilities. I hope in your case you have not been forced to use Devuan.
> it was a group of experienced Debian folks
No, it wasn't. There was only one ex-Debian person in their team.