oh, they have a good test system.  what i mean is breaking versions.  upgrading from one version of software to another.  say a kernel that decides a particular tuning variable  is no longer used in favor of something else.  and all the sudden your database performance chunks horribly because you had to patch.  (yes, that's happened to me more than once).

or, say your favorite tls layer deciding to deprecate ciphers you've manually defined in your configs.

the more versioned systems (fedora and ubuntu, etc) will patch the versions they have until the next release when they make a big jump in software versions (often requiring you to learn large amounts of changes at once).

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 6:28 AM Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
wonderful. with breaking patches: is it fixed like the next day or is it usually later than that?

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 9:21 AM James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
arch has probably the best community (and wiki) in the business.  they also have a huge (and relatively simple) extended software library (AUR)

the main reason most people will speak of arch is that it is a rolling (or streaming) release.  so with fedora or ubuntu, you get new versions every 6 months or so and there may be upgrade scripts but you have to pay attention.  with arch, it's a constant release system.  this means in arch you tend to have the newer versions of stuff most of the time, not waiting on some arbitrary version release window.  the downsides of this is that with a locked version, you can generally count on patches not being breaking, while that is not a guarantee in arch.

also.  arch is one of THE most customizable distros out there (that wiki is so good it's often better than other distros official commercial support).  if you can do the base install (a bit more involved than fedora or ubuntu), customizing your desktop isn't much of a jump.  Sure, you can do this with most other distros, i mean software is software, but with arch you don't have dependencies for chat clients reaching all the way up to base packages.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 6:15 AM Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
also, it was mentioned that arch has benefits..... what are those?

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 9:12 AM Michael <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:
thank yout for the advice.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 9:10 AM James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
Oh sorry, I must have buried the lead.  I use systemd linux systems for my desktopy desktops (ubuntu and fedora mostly).  Aka, the ones i check email, browse the web, play games on.  For my developery desktops I do not use systemd, but that is born of pure frustration and malding.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 6:05 AM Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
So do you recommend system d for a desktop? It assms you don't and then you do.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 8:44 AM James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
two main reasons.

one is ideological.  the way systemd was put into the community rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. i won't get into the details, you can google for that whole war.  no sense bringing it up again.

two is simplicity.  systemd is now over a million lines of code.  to put that into perspective, going by the mythical man month numbers, a single good programmer can average understanding 2 pages of code a day in a complex codebase.  That's 50 lines of code per day.  from the same source, developers produce roughly 10 lines of code per day on average.  now, there's a lot of give around these numbers, but you can get some idea of the scale of trying to get a handle on it if there's a bug you need to work with.

a couple of bugs i've had to deal with in recent memory, extended udp handling in resolved and console output (which was actually correct to standard in systemd, but everyone had worked around the previous bug and that workaround wasn't compatible with the systemd implementation).  neither of these were minor.  the resolved bug prevented adoption of dnssec and the console thing required manual intervention of containers using it (docker, k8s, etc).  i don't know if these things have been resolved either in systemd or the container systems.  the problems in question forced a rearchitecture of our projects as fixes were not going to be fast enough and we haven't revisited them.  for the resolved issue, the systemd project lead flat out said it wasn't a priority.  for the container/console issue, you have to go back in time when the docker team wore "no, i will not merge your systemd patches into our codebase" tshirts to conventions.

in conclusion, i use systemd for servers, desktops, and vms.  I find it quite reliable in most cases.  i think it does a better job with login, hal, service dependency, and mtab than the older system.  for my use case of containers, it is entirely unnecessary and nothing but a headache.  for my developer station, i mald quite enough and have no patience left to deal with it when it inevitably creates issues (oh, no for this thing you need to put your proxy settings 3 layers of abstraction down over here with this particular format) and tend to use the simplest system possible.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 4:38 AM Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
Why would u not want system d?

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 4:15 AM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
On Fri, 2022-08-26 at 17:50 -0700, T. Zack Crawford via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> I would recommend not Manjaro because it's just a less-good arch linux.
> I use Arch Linux. Depends what you're looking for, though.

Or, Artix could be used in order to get the benefits of Arch without systemd.

SteveT
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