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Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#62I'm the Bedrock Linux founder and lead developer. I'm happy to answer any questions.
Hi and thanks for reaching out to the community here.
As a poweruser. What are the benefits of this best of all worlds approach, and when might I need them?
I genuinely am curious and considering trying Bedrock out. I just can't see what workloads I need it for.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#63I think those of us who don’t use Linux as a daily driver forget how completely incompatible different distros are. I made the mistake of trying to provision Amazon Linux desktops to users via Workspaces, and quickly realised I was going to need to build almost everything I wanted from source.
Yeah, as someone who theoretically would love to be using an open OS and has been waiting for Linux Desktop to become a tolerable experience for about 20 years now, application installation is by far my biggest gripe with it and it not only remains a huge problem in 2021, it remains a problem the community doesn't even seem to want to fix.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. it's really a dumb POV to have, given that systemd is FOSS (licensed LGPLv2.1+) like most of the software that red hat produces. as a sysadmin, systemd is a godsend. really, it brings uniformity and waaay better debuggability/predictability and too…
I think people's beef with it is that it's hard to understand when things go wrong, Lennart's projects don't leave the best initial impression, and it's had significant scope creep since it was initially introduced.
well in fairness systemd's task (managing the system) is fairly complex as well.
I am not surprised I had to actually sit down and go through a short course on systemd and read some of the manpages to understand it enough and profit off its presence.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#65Reminder about alternatives: For the less extreme case, when you want mostly one distro, but also a few packages from another one, there is “alien” [0] which converts between different package formats. It sometimes needs help with system integration or dependencies, but occasionally “just works” For a more extreme case, there is a schroot (or a docker container) with /home, audio and X mapped in. Works surprisingly w…
> For a more extreme case, there is a schroot (or a docker container) with /home, audio and X mapped in. Works surprisingly well for desktop apps, like those embedded IDEs which require a specific Linux distribution you don’t want to run. You do have manage desktop integration (menu items, file associations) yourself though.
Very early Bedrock Linux prototypes were exactly this; including the choice of schroot. Bedrock could be correctly described as taking this idea and running with it, trying to stomp out as many of the "you do have to"'s and "except"'s as it can.
> Those solutions are hard to set up than bedrock, but they also do not have special filesystem magic,
I think a fair description of the trade-off between Bedrock and the two alternatives you've laid out should mention the breadth of functionality Bedrock offers they do not. This includes but is not limited to:
- Shell tab completion. For example, Debian's zsh can tab-complete Arch Linux's pacman
- Init systems. For example, one could run Void Linux's runit init, install Arch Linux's systemd, and reboot into systemd.
- Kernels. One could run Arch's kernel, install Debian's, update the bootloader configuration, reboot, and select Debian's kernel.
et al.
I expect, if you think about it long enough, you could see some ways schroot with things like /home mapped in could be extended to cover those use cases. If you pursue those, you'd end up recreating Bedrock.
> so I bet they are much easier to debug.
I am doubtful any user which understands setup schroot you described, who also takes the time to familiarize himself or herself with Bedrock, would have comparative difficult debugging a Bedrock system.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#66Reminder about alternatives: For the less extreme case, when you want mostly one distro, but also a few packages from another one, there is “alien” [0] which converts between different package formats. It sometimes needs help with system integration or dependencies, but occasionally “just works” For a more extreme case, there is a schroot (or a docker container) with /home, audio and X mapped in. Works surprisingly w…
Alien just repackages files and doesn't keep important metadata like package dependencies, so it likely won't work at all in most cases.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's pretty cool that this can host other distros, but is that the only advantage over NixOS? The ability to transparently get features from other distros is Bedrock Linux's defining characteristic. It's not trying to do anything more than that. Ideally the contrast wouldn't be Bedrock _or_ NixOS, but rather NixOS alone or Bedrock with NixOS. Bedrock's goal of getting features from other distros includes distros li…
Sure. But if the choice is NixOS alone or NixOS hosted by Bedrock, then NixOS has a pile of advantages which Bedrock would nullify, chief among them being the ability to atomically upgrade and rollback the entire userland, service configuration, and kernel. These are non-trivial goals of NixOS.
It is not clear to me why you feel this way. Everyone I've spoken with who has put effort toward making Bedrock play nicely NixOS has done so with the aim of retaining that list of NixOS's strengths in the NixOS slice of the system. Let Bedrock proper fade to the background: for a user who is NixOS-oriented, such a system could be NixOS, with all of NixOS's strengths, with the ability to add or swap out (non-atomic upgrade/rollback) parts from other distros.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#68Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#69Reminder about alternatives: For the less extreme case, when you want mostly one distro, but also a few packages from another one, there is “alien” [0] which converts between different package formats. It sometimes needs help with system integration or dependencies, but occasionally “just works” For a more extreme case, there is a schroot (or a docker container) with /home, audio and X mapped in. Works surprisingly w…
> For a more extreme case, there is a schroot (or a docker container) with /home, audio and X mapped in. Works surprisingly well for desktop apps, like those embedded IDEs which require a specific Linux distribution you don’t want to run. You do have manage desktop integration (menu items, file associations) yourself though. Very early Bedrock Linux prototypes were exactly this; including the choice of schroot. Bedro…
This mix and match of assumptions seems like a security nightmare.
Re: Bedrock Linux – a meta Linux distribution
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine that the respective user wouldn't want to see the number of background processes for all the other modern OSes, in this case :-)
Alpine Linux boots with a fairly clean process table.
Of course, this is the internet... Someone is going to point out exceptions.
I was talking about Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, all mainstream Linux distros.
What you did was like seeing someone talk about family cars and interjecting: yeah, but they're slower than my motorbike. It's not the same thing, is it?