Thu, 16 May 2024 19:01:20 -0400 - William Peckham via Dng
<dng@???>:

> Keep in mind that Debian is not Linux. It is a single distribution that
> has a long history of proper community support and support for the
> community (although it has always had a political element internally) it
> was longer lasting and arguably better than most of the others. Certainly
> it adhered more closely to the FOSS and Unix philosophies than most. That
> Debian has died.

Indeed, unfortunately

> Counting on it is probably counterproductive, but
> ignoring it maybe just as bad. We are not the only ones using or
> maintaining Linux distributions that are free from SystemD.

Precisely in this regard I have recently done some test installations
(qemu/kvm), aiming for distributions with requirements: systemd-free, runit
(or runit+sysvinit) and wide availability of packages...

> There are other distributions that have no parent back end (Hola Void and
> Slackware friends!),

As far as I could understand from what I saw (quickly and quite
superficially), Void seemed really great to me.

The only limitation could be a quite limited number of packages, which
requires the user compiling unavailable packages (which can be a lot for
users who want a general multipurpose system). I haven't looked into it
further: I don't know if there is a way to quickly "import" "external"
packages (.deb etc.) which would be truly remarkable.


> or that have a back end in the Red Hat family, or in
> Arch. We might consider those our nearest neighbors in the community.

Artix Linux -- runit edition + LXDE (which I'm trying right now) seems very
interesting.

It is a systemd-free rolling-release distribution, based on Arch
Linux, with a large number of packages available: 7703 pkgs in the official
repository (with 172 runit scipts!), more than 80k pkgs in the AUR (PKGBUILD
mechanism) of which over 30k were updated in the last year. More, most of
available .deb packages from other distibutions (i.e. Debian) could easily
converted and installed.
It must be said that AUR must be taken with many precautions, at least by
checking the contents of the PKGBUILDs (which the user can also write
himself) and of accompanying files.


For now, I remain of the opinion that for general use Devuan still
remains the best option. And it can easily remain so in the future if there
was a direction to fully support an "alternative" init (or a "supplementary"
init) over sysvinit. The preferable option, in my opinion, would be runit, as
it is the best compromise between costs (low development costs) and benefits
(solution of sysvinit orphan deb packages).

Regards
alexus


--
The only way humans have learned to survive brings them to extinction.
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