Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Linux distro opinions - Page 1

Abouy 6 months ago, I took a real liking to Manjaro (Arch based). In the past, I've also used Ubuntu, Debian and Puppy (old 486 laptop). I've never tried Mint however. Give me some opinions, recommendations, etc as to what I should maybe give a try on my new cheap box.

Specs on this free box:
Core 2 Duo e8600 (hopefully to be converted to a socket 771quad Xeon X5460 or x5470)
6gb ram (hopefully upgraded to 8gb)
Video is onboard GMA x4500 currently, but looking to probably upgrade to an old gtx260?

the whole point is a cheap, fairly decent box. So far, I've only spent $13 on current specs. I think I actually have an ati 5450 or 5470 in my parts bin I could use, which I paid $0 for.

Primary system use..... web surfing, possibly serving 20-30mbps hd video, as well as possible RAW photo editing with Darktable.

Any and all opinions are respectfully appreciated!

Thanks!
Aaron
I use debian on virtually everything. Mint is pretty decent too - it's debian based after all - but so far I've stuck with debian plus the cinnamon desktop (it's in the official repos).

I wouldn't go for Ubuntu because of its obvious unfitness out-of-the-box for slightly older hardware, but it all comes down to taste. :)
while (!asleep()) sheep++;
Talking about me, and about modern hw, x86 based:
Arch is the best trade off. It may require care.
Ubuntu is a good choice if you do not have time to care. It's ready of of the box.
Some prowling the streets, looking for sweets from their Candyman , I'm Looking for a new IP30/Octane2
My machine got the Xbow damaged, so I swapped for a second hand Rigol-DG1032Z WaveGen/DDS@30Mhz
IP30 purposes : linux (kernel development), Irix Scientific Apps { Ansys, Catia, Pro/E, FiberSIM, AutoDYNþ }
Other Projects : { Cerberus , Woody Box , 68K-board, SWI_DBG }, discontinued Console hacks { GB , PSX1 }
Wanted Equipments : { U1732C LCR meter by Keysight, alternatives are the welcome }
Alver wrote: I use debian on virtually everything. Mint is pretty decent too - it's debian based after all - but so far I've stuck with debian plus the cinnamon desktop (it's in the official repos).

I wouldn't go for Ubuntu because of its obvious unfitness out-of-the-box for slightly older hardware, but it all comes down to taste. :)


ivelegacy wrote: Talking about me, and about modern hw, x86 based:
Arch is the best trade off. It may require care.
Ubuntu is a good choice if you do not have time to care. It's ready of of the box.


I havent touched Debian in a few years. Ubuntu is a bit of a concern with slightly older hardware, and it can be a resource hog.

Although I haven't used Manjaro a lot, I haven't really had any issues with it being based off Arch. Since I haven't tried Mint yet, I may give it a go.

If you've never checked out Manjaro, I recommend it. It runs well on older hardware. Puppy is very light and specifically geared towards much older hardware. Or at least it used to be. It would probably fly on my Octane if there was a port for it.
the_only_good_penguin.png
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Juliet ! the dice were loaded from the start ...
zagnut wrote: Ubuntu is a bit of a concern with slightly older hardware, and it can be a resource hog.


With older hw you have to do a lot of hacks, while it's excellent with modern hw if you just want something ready out of the box.
I do not like ubuntu, simply sometimes I find it useful.


zagnut wrote: Octane


gentoo is my choice for these kind of purposes, in this case I am used to cook stage1-4 by myself. It makes you busy.
OE for thinks like PDAs.
Some prowling the streets, looking for sweets from their Candyman , I'm Looking for a new IP30/Octane2
My machine got the Xbow damaged, so I swapped for a second hand Rigol-DG1032Z WaveGen/DDS@30Mhz
IP30 purposes : linux (kernel development), Irix Scientific Apps { Ansys, Catia, Pro/E, FiberSIM, AutoDYNþ }
Other Projects : { Cerberus , Woody Box , 68K-board, SWI_DBG }, discontinued Console hacks { GB , PSX1 }
Wanted Equipments : { U1732C LCR meter by Keysight, alternatives are the welcome }
I've recently been impressed with Makulu Linux. Quite complete and simple.

Have used debian often and would recommend it for older, not ancient, systems.

Mint is ok, but I was not floored by it in any measure. Ubuntu w unity is not my cup of tea, but if you can change the window manager and turn off a few services, it is probably still the most polished linux desktop experience.
--
:Octane2: :O2: :O2: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Fuel: :Indy: :Indy: :Indy: :Indigo2: :Indigo2IMP:
I have been slowly migrating to FreeBSD these days. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed wasn't bad but I'm not liking the direction Linux is heading.
Thanks Legacy...I'll make a note of that for when I get ready to work in the Octane. That version is confirmed working on the IP30?

ivelegacy wrote:
zagnut wrote: The Gentoo port appears to be dead in support


About the kernel side: from my point of view (SMP, PCI, all of these things working) the last stable was 2.6.17-rc4, but there are good news for kernels v4.*
zagnut wrote: Just for noting, the other ports I have found for SGI boxes are Debian, linux-mips, linux ce-mips and Gentoo. But, I'm not sure if any of those are still being developed or compatible on the IP30 specifically. The Gentoo port appears to be dead in support. But I am not certain of that.
I'm the guy actively working on the Linux/IP30/Gentoo support, as time permits (and it hasn't permitted much, sadly). Gentoo does work mostly fine on IP30, with various caveats. Getting it installed is a tad tricky right now because building a netboot by hand is not easy, and my last attempt mostly works using the musl libc, but a key program, mdadm (for managing software RAID) page faults for no good reason. Probably just going to rebuild the netboot using bloated glibc, because I have no working uclibc alternative at the moment, and something is better than nothing. Maybe a -Os based chroot...

I just got SMP support working again in 4.1, which I haven't released yet due to time (any time lords in the house?). Side-tracked for 2-3 weeks on trying to fix DMA/memory, but have to abandon that for now. Maybe can do a final sync-up of the patches tonight and place mips-sources-4.1.2 into the portage tree, but that may not happen until next weekend now.

Generally speaking, *once* you get Gentoo installed, it runs pretty damn stable of all of the supported SGI boxen in Linux. Aside from the electrical draw (which can be reduced by removing the graphics board and inserting an XIO sled w/ four blank plates), it makes a good build machine, especially w/ the higher-end CPUs. Ironically, 2x 600MHz R14K compiles packages faster than the 4x 500MHz R14K in my Onyx2, and at half the electrical cost. Mostly because the 'configure' phase of most packages runs on one CPU only, and 600MHz is going to move along quicker than 500MHz in that regard.

zagnut wrote: However....I've never used Free/OpenBSD either. Since I am turning my Octane into a NAS/RAS RAID for my photography uses, and redundancy, I may try OpenBSD in order to familiarize myself with it due to choosing that as my Octane's OS. OpenBSD seems to have the greatest support for the IP30.
If miod is around, he can tell you all about OpenBSD/IP30, as he's the lead developer there. But generally, OpenBSD has working netboots and install media, so if you're looking for a no-frills, "git er done" approach, probably your best bet.

zagnut wrote: And I pronounce as LIN-iks :)
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/english.au
:Onyx2: 4x R14000 :Tezro: 4x R16000 :Fuel: 1x R16000 :Octane: 2x R14000 :O2+: RM7000 :O2: R10000 :O2: RM5200 :Indigo: R4400 :Indigo2IMP: R10000 :Indigo2: R8000 :O3x0: 4x R14000 :Indy: R5000

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
PS, forgot to add, the "linux-mips" port is actually the main Linux/MIPS development group. And while that got started with Linux on SGI, it's become much more than that now, with Imagination Technologies (ImgTec) buying up the old MIPS Technologies and working on putting out 32-bit/64-bit products to compete with ARM in the embedded space. The head maintainer of Linux/MIPS, though, is Ralf Baechle and he's an old-school SGI guy with extensive knowledge on Indy and Origin 2000/Onyx2 systems.

"linux-ce-mips" likely refers to the old, now dead, attempt to port Linux/MIPS to the WinCE-based devices, many of which were little-endian in nature and were quite limited in CPU and RAM.

Debian's core support is (still?) focused on IP22 (Indy/Indugo2 R4x00) and IP32 (O2) systems. Uncertain of support beyond that, but I do know some of the Debian/MIPS devs have IP28 (Indigo2 R10000) and IP30 (Octane) hardware. You'd have to ask on their mailing lists for current support status.
:Onyx2: 4x R14000 :Tezro: 4x R16000 :Fuel: 1x R16000 :Octane: 2x R14000 :O2+: RM7000 :O2: R10000 :O2: RM5200 :Indigo: R4400 :Indigo2IMP: R10000 :Indigo2: R8000 :O3x0: 4x R14000 :Indy: R5000

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
I finally put slackware on my peecee. It works in the sense that it is the first linux I haven't wanted to throw out the window. It's like the un-distro. Everything is vanilla and there is no real package manager to update some random bullshit and break everything. Perfect!

Since all I really use it for is mail (mutt), reading the news and watching gamepass (firefox), and reading e-books (using okular for now) it works really well. I had to learn how to sleep/wake (because I didn't want kde with it's power demons etc so I wrote a script that sleeps with the lid and suspends at 0% battery) and install wicd (again, kde does that for you...), but slack's instructions make it all easy. Of course if you want it out of the box to work kde is pretty good for that sort of thing :)

I use osx at least 8 hours every day at work and although nice it is also nice to play with something different for fun.

What I find most fascinating is that if you follow the instructions you will be rewarded quickly. Rather than spending a day to figure out where the instructions went wrong and/or another day to figure out what makes your particular machine/installation different than what the instructions expect. Which has been my experience with every other linux except gentoo which I haven't used in close to 7 or 8 years now, at some point emerge wrecked *everything* so I gave up on it.
Google: Don't Be Evil.
Apple: Don't Be Greedy.
Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.
guardian452 wrote: there is no real package manager ...

Yay ! "Package managers" SUCK !!!

Worthless stinking ignorant loser garbage ! If I wanted Windows I'd install it ! Whoever thought that crap up should be drawn and quartered, hanged by the gonads until dead, then defenestrated in the public square. It's trash. Trash trash trash.
Juliet ! the dice were loaded from the start ...
Linux mint left a foul taste in my mouth when I tried to switch the default search engine to bing. They really don't want you using anything other than yahoo or google and they make it obvious mint is getting paid for your searches. At least with bing I can cash in my rewards :)

Not to mention it is just ubuntu with a coat of paint. In my experience the more the OS tries to do, the more opportunity for it to screw up. Why I like OSX so much is it tends to stay out of my way. Slack is very similar in this regard. I can banish away the app store and updates on mac without fear of retribution or even a slap on the wrist, and I can do the same in slack.

Anyways, if you use DWM, you will probably want to make a script to write the root window name, here's mine:

Code: Select all

while true; do

# Get current WiFi ESSID
WIFI_STRING=$(/sbin/iwgetid -r);
if [ "$WIFI_STRING" == "" ]; then
WIFI_STRING="(Offline)";
fi;

# Power/Battery Status
BATTERY_STATUS=$"`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status`";
BATTERY_CURRENT=$((`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now` / 1000));
BATTERY_VOLTS=$((`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/voltage_now` / 1000));
BATTERY_POWER=$(((BATTERY_CURRENT * BATTERY_VOLTS) / 1000000));
BATTERY_POWER_REMAINDER=$((((BATTERY_CURRENT * BATTERY_VOLTS) / 100000) % 10));
BATTERY_SOC=$(( `cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now` * 100 / `cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full` ));
if [ "$BATTERY_STATUS" == "Charging" ]; then
BATTERY_STRING="+$BATTERY_POWER.$BATTERY_POWER_REMAINDER Watts $BATTERY_SOC%";
elif [ "$BATTERY_STATUS" == "Discharging" ]; then
BATTERY_STRING="-$BATTERY_POWER.$BATTERY_POWER_REMAINDER Watts $BATTERY_SOC%";
else
BATTERY_STRING="$BATTERY_SOC%";
fi;

# Date and Time
CLOCK_STRING=$( date '+%a %d %b %I:%M %p' );

# full string
xsetroot -name "Network: $WIFI_STRING | Battery: $BATTERY_STRING | $CLOCK_STRING";

sleep 5s;

done;

Which will give wifi network, battery power (if in use, in watts) and SOC, and of course the time. Go easy on me as I am still learning the shell-scripting and have been cobbling things together from examples, etc... ;)

The output is something like...
Network: Blaugrana | Battery: -9.6 Watts 94% | Tue 08 Sep 11:49 PM
Google: Don't Be Evil.
Apple: Don't Be Greedy.
Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.
guardian452 wrote: Linux mint left a foul taste in my mouth ...

Do you suppose there are enough people in the kermyooonity to create a "distro" <spit> that's quality-centric ? It would be a lot of work but there's really nothing out there like what Linux used to be, or Irix, or BeOS or even classic Macintosh. It's all such avaricious shit now :(

Or is personal computing well and truly dead ?
Juliet ! the dice were loaded from the start ...
hamei wrote:
guardian452 wrote: Linux mint left a foul taste in my mouth ...

Do you suppose there are enough people in the kermyooonity to create a "distro" <spit> that's quality-centric ? It would be a lot of work but there's really nothing out there like what Linux used to be, or Irix, or BeOS or even classic Macintosh. It's all such avaricious shit now :(

Or is personal computing well and truly dead ?

Gentoo lets you build your system however you want. Sure, it's not for the faint of heart, and even I've had my days of tearing my hair out over strange depsolver oddities where Perl wants to marry its own mother. But in the end, Gentoo gives any user more switches, knobs, dials, levers, and even some booby traps, that lets them tailor the systems however they want, given time. You can maintain your own custom ebuilds in an overlay, set CFLAGS however insane you want (just don't blame compile-time failures on us unless you have proof), turn off various features in packages via USE flags, and so on.

We're still one of the better distros as far as SELinux support goes, we've got a full hardened profile that uses grsecurity+PaX, we support different libc's, like glibc, uclibc, and just recently, musl. There's even, as ghastly as it sounds, Gentoo/FreeBSD, which uses Portage as the package manager instead of Ports (but retains the BSD Userland, so no, it's not like Debian's kFreeBSD). Oddly enough, I actually like our FreeBSD port better than original FreeBSD. Multiple architectures (the ia64 team would love some help, if anyone wants to put their Prisms and Altixes to use), multiple ABI's (MIPS o32 and MIPS n32 are well tested, need some n64 love), etc.

We've even got an active s390 port, just in case anyone has one of those sitting in their kitchen/garage. Could use some help on a VAX port, though...

So, no, personal computing is far from dead. The definition of "personal computing" might have changed from the desktop to the laptop to the tablet, but who wants to live their lives defined by someone else's definition? Redefine "personal computing" to whatever you want and go with that.
:Onyx2: 4x R14000 :Tezro: 4x R16000 :Fuel: 1x R16000 :Octane: 2x R14000 :O2+: RM7000 :O2: R10000 :O2: RM5200 :Indigo: R4400 :Indigo2IMP: R10000 :Indigo2: R8000 :O3x0: 4x R14000 :Indy: R5000

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
Kumba wrote: ... the package manager ...

There. Right there, you put your finger on it, and this is probably why there will never again be a Linux I can stand.

"Package manager." FUCK PACKAGE MANAGERS !!!

Sounds like Gentoo might be nifty.

Then what ?

Yeah. A huge shitpile of applications designed and built by chimpanzees poured over the top.

What if I don't want atk anywhere near my computer ? thanks much but I am not crippled or blind.

Unicode ! Internationalization ! hooray ! I can fill my drives up with Tibetan error messages and 500 pages of html docs that are usually wrong instead of 64 kb of man pages. Cool !

What if I can't stand CUPS ?

Why the hell should I want Truetype when Type1 is what real printers use ? When Type1 is better ? When X supports Type1 without six more layers of shit ?

How about a browser that doesn't redirect me to google and facebook and tweeter and every other craphole worthless cave full of vampire bats hidden from the sun ? A browser that you basically can't make do what you want ? "Free and Open Source" RIGHT ! Sure it is ! "Pitch in like the OS/2 guys ..." RIGHT again, liars ! As if the Mozilla creeps never heard of Mike Kaply, an IBM EMPLOYEE who worked at full pay on Mozilla for TWO YEARS to get it to run under OS/2. Free and Open Source, super.

I could continue for a week :P

The point, to me, is that the operating system itself can be mucho nifty (this seems to be where all the Loonies with taste hide out), but if the applications are trash, what's the point ?

The Desktop, in LoonixLand, has become nothing but a mass of Windows wannabe apps, except with no quality control.

They need to get away from package managers entirely and instead put the work into making the build system robust, reliable, flexible, and functional. Kinda like autoconf already was, before the twits adopted shithub and autoreconfig -i regurgitate ... Make it so we can build the software the way WE want it, not how some acne-riddled teenager living in his mom's basement thinks is l33t.

And we need a penalty box for anyone who says, "Works in gcc !" -- a line from each ankle to the stern of Arneson's speedboat, fifteen minutes on the Bay. There's nothing like a 50 mph power enema to teach people to keep their stupid trap shut :D

I don't see Loonix returning to any kind of usefulness On the Desktop any time soon :P
Juliet ! the dice were loaded from the start ...
hamei wrote:
Kumba wrote: ... the package manager ...

There. Right there, you put your finger on it, and this is probably why there will never again be a Linux I can stand.

"Package manager." FUCK PACKAGE MANAGERS !!!

The "tree" (/usr/portage right now, though that may change) is just a collection of build instructions. I.e., if you want to compile software A, odds are likely you'll need to have software B, C, and W already built. So really, all Portage is, is a glorified dependency solver with extra bits like tracking what files were installed and where, so it can remove them later on if needed. Not everyone likes Portage (the name for the primary package manager in Gentoo, not the tree of ebuilds; yes it's a touch confusing), so one guy went off and wrote his own, called Paludis. So Gentoo even gives users choice there, too.

That said, there's nothing wrong with the general concept of a package manager. Ultimately, all it's doing is following instructions. Source-based distros like Gentoo just allow a lot more functionality because you are giving the user control of what to compile. Binary distros are more limited because of just simple combinatorial insanity -- choices have to be made somewhere, and sometimes, those choices don't go over well with the users (like Debian switching to systemd for Jessie). How a distro handles the making of those choices is often where the conflict lies (again, Debian's method for handling the systemd thing pissed off a *lot* of people).

But the package manager itself? It's actually innocent. Surprisingly.


hamei wrote: Sounds like Gentoo might be nifty.

Then what ?

Yeah. A huge shitpile of applications designed and built by chimpanzees poured over the top.

What if I don't want atk anywhere near my computer ? thanks much but I am not crippled.

What if I can't stand CUPS ?

Why the hell should I want Truetype when Type1 is what real printers use ? When Type1 is better ? When X supports Type1 without six more layers of shit ?

I could continue for a week :P

Then don't build atk and its related dependencies. Or CUPS, or truetype fonts, or X entirely, etc. That's the awesomeness behind USE flags:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:X86/Working/USE

Downside is, there's almost 10,000 USE flags, so for the person who really wants to control things, they'll spend a lot of time reading over both global flags (those which affect multiple packages in the tree) and local flags (those which are specific to a small handful of packages, or individual packages only). This is where binary distros win out, as most people just don't want to invest the time into completely tailoring an OS to their liking. They're more apt to accept the defaults and just "get used to it", they figure, like everyone else.

I personally don't use CUPS, nor atk. I pretty much eliminate all sound-related packages entirely from my main Linux system. But, you have to watch what you merge, as sometimes, a package update adds a new dependency on something you don't want. So a lot of users always test an update by passing the '-p' flag to emerge to see what actions emerge would take for the parameters given to it. Others pass the '-a' flag, which causes emerge to prompt the user for every package merge.


hamei wrote: The point, to me, is that the operating system itself can be mucho nifty (this seems to be where all the Loonies with taste hide out), but if the applications are trash, what's the point ?

The Desktop, in LoonixLand, has become nothing but a mass of Windows wannabe apps, except with no quality control.

There's really no good answer for "Linux on the Desktop". Humans love to copy what works, and give Microsoft credit, Windows does work, and works very well. The NT Kernel especially is a piece of work. Side-effect of Windows being successful is people copy it. Some do it poorly, while others do it well. The nice thing, though, is users have the choice to choose what interface they want to run. The downside is, unlike most other Linux/UNIX/BSD packages, Getting X to work is often an exercise in futility and voodoo sacrifices. And then, you go to try and figure out how sound works, and next thing you know, Windows is getting reinstalled.

Also, a lot of free software is coded by one or two people. Sometimes, it's just a project that they started for themselves and later decided to dump it out to the rest of the world (ironically, this is how Linux got started). Other times, they want to really make a polished product for some kind of motivation. That means further lack of consistency between projects.


hamei wrote: They need to get away from package managers entirely, instead put the work into making the build system robust, reliable, flexible, and functional.

Again, it's not package managers that are the real fault. Linux is the way it is because it's extremely heterogenous. Lots of little parts each doing their own thing w/o really considering what every other part (mostly) is doing, let alone what the whole organism is try to do. Imagine a Linux distro as an OS designed by intelligent cats (no, not the Kilrathi). It's very....ADHD.


hamei wrote: And we need a penalty box for anyone who says, "Works in gcc !" -- a line from each ankle to the stern of Arneson's speedboat, fifteen minutes on the Bay. There's nothing like a 50 mph power enema to teach people to keep their stupid trap shut :D

gcc is still the only free, multiplatform, multiarch C/C++/Ada/Java/Fortran compiler out there. Clang/LLVM is coming along nicely, but it's still not there yet, especially on the other, non-Intel architectures. There's a lot of work and effort going into making Clang more robust, and for once, gcc will have some serious competition, which is a good thing.
:Onyx2: 4x R14000 :Tezro: 4x R16000 :Fuel: 1x R16000 :Octane: 2x R14000 :O2+: RM7000 :O2: R10000 :O2: RM5200 :Indigo: R4400 :Indigo2IMP: R10000 :Indigo2: R8000 :O3x0: 4x R14000 :Indy: R5000

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
I used Ada in avionics, professional tools including a professional IDE called "AdaMULTI IDE" made by Green Hills Software. I had a Sparc/SunOS on hands and a professional ICE. Never tried and found anything similar in opensoruce/openhardware.

But I had fun with Ada on my PPC laptop (Apple G3 Powerbook)

Kumba wrote: C/C++/Ada/Java/Fortran compiler out there


gcc has no internal support for Ada, it requires an external core.

Code: Select all

dev-lang/gnat-gcc


GNAT is a good choice, but it needs a bootstrap in order to be compiled, and it's hard to get Ada bootstrappers for MIPS, or for HPPA, it's easy on X86, AMD64, PPC, SPARC, and … may be ARM (I have seen bootstrap ARM/LE around)


Code: Select all

SRC_URI="ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-${PV}/gcc-core-${PV}.tar.bz2
ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-${PV}/gcc-ada-${PV}.tar.bz2
amd64? ( https://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/gnatboot-${BOOT_SLOT}-amd64.tar.bz2 )
sparc? ( https://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/gnatboot-${BOOT_SLOT}-sparc.tar.bz2 )
x86?   ( https://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/gnatboot-${BOOT_SLOT}-i686.tar.bz2 )"
ppc?   ( mirror://gentoo/gnatboot-${BOOT_SLOT}-ppc.tar.bz2 )
Some prowling the streets, looking for sweets from their Candyman , I'm Looking for a new IP30/Octane2
My machine got the Xbow damaged, so I swapped for a second hand Rigol-DG1032Z WaveGen/DDS@30Mhz
IP30 purposes : linux (kernel development), Irix Scientific Apps { Ansys, Catia, Pro/E, FiberSIM, AutoDYNþ }
Other Projects : { Cerberus , Woody Box , 68K-board, SWI_DBG }, discontinued Console hacks { GB , PSX1 }
Wanted Equipments : { U1732C LCR meter by Keysight, alternatives are the welcome }
Hamei I don't think you would want to bother but slack is working well for me so far. I've been using it for almost a week. It is about as close to the "un-distro" as you can get in the sense that it is just a loose collection of packages, the kernel, and an installer to put it together. You add programs with installpkg pkgname.txz which is a tarball. Of course the old tar xvf, make, make install works pretty good too :) There is no branding, no updates to break things, no custom versions, no repositories that have trouble connecting, etc.

Also the paths are where you'd expect and there's no g-damnned sudo.

I will concede to kumba that I have mostly fond memories of gentoo. But emerge definitely has reliability issues. Package managers are not dumb and have a very difficult job to do even just resolving dependencies. I often feel that the decisions they make are often in not the user's interest but instead the developer of whatever the most recently updated package wants.

If I had known about slack a while ago I would have been using it all along (I knew about it, at some point I even had a free sticker??) But I was always told that it was too "advanced" (for 1##7 users only!) and I should stick to more mainstream systems. Like gentoo :P I suppose arch is the new gentoo but I've never tried it and don't care to.

Maybe someday I will update beyond firefox 24. Or at least get a version of adblock that supports it. I almost feel like an irix user when it comes to my default browser :twisted: However (on some level) I like my vintage firefox...
Google: Don't Be Evil.
Apple: Don't Be Greedy.
Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.