On Tue, 24 Feb 2015 11:12:51 +0800
Robert Storey <robert.storey@???> wrote:

> Although I'm very hopeful that Devuan will be my future distro of
> choice, we're still not there yet. I thought it might be prudent for
> me to survey the other possibilities that do not depend on systemd.
> So yesterday, I decided to give FreeBSD (actually, PC-BSD) a trial
> run.
>
> I'm sorry to say that it was disappointing. In fact, pretty much a
> failure. I installed it on both my desktop and laptop. In both cases,
> the only video driver I was able to run was VESA. That basically
> kills it for doing any kind of multimedia, other than listening to
> music.

I didn't have that problem with PC-BSD, it seemed to get resolution
right. A fairly substantial test concluded that I could run my business
on PC-BSD, including videos.

As far as frequency scaling, I didn't test that.

[snip]
>
> I do have Slackware installed on both machines. It's multimedia
> performance is fine, and power management is a non-issue. However,
> it's missing many useful apps which Debian and Ubuntu have. It also
> lacks one of the drivers I would need for my current desktop USB
> wireless adaptor, though possibly that could be compiled in (or the
> adaptor replaced).

My tests of Slackware indicated I could not use it to run by business.
Neither could Arch nor *too.

> Thus, my great hope for the future remains Devuan.

What I found was that PC-BSD would do the job. OpenBSD is the best OS
I've ever seen, and I would have moved to that a year ago, except that
its VM ability is disfunctional, meaning I can't run those few apps
that don't run on OpenBSD. Also, OpenBSD's file system's performance on
file creates and deletes is abyssmal, but that's not a big deal for my
use case.

Manjaro is a great distro, available in both a systemd and a OpenRC
boot variety. The OpenRC variety is trivial to turn into runit or
Epoch. It has the pacman package manager, which I consider a little
better than apt. I've been planning to go the Manjaro route.

Until I saw what everyone's doing with Devuan. Reading this mailing
list, it looks to me like Devuan is going far beyond what Debian *ever*
did in creating a modular, Unix Philosophy distro, without sacrificing
ease of installation, installer quality, or reasonable GUI usage.

So Manjaro has fallen from my expected path forward to my backup plan,
and I'm planning on using Devuan, even though it's based on Debian.
Because, from my perspective, Devuan is addressing a lot of complaints
I had about Debian long before systemd rared its ugly head.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance