Re: Right now my computer is in the shop.

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Author: James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
CC: James Mcphee
Subject: Re: Right now my computer is in the shop.
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 <
> wrote:

> also, it was mentioned that arch has benefits..... what are those?
>
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 9:12 AM Michael <> wrote:
>
>> thank yout for the advice.
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 9:10 AM James Mcphee via PLUG-discuss <
>> > 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 <
>>> > 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 <
>>>> > 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 <
>>>>> > wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Why would u not want system d?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 4:15 AM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <
>>>>>> > 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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>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> James McPhee
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> James McPhee
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>>
>
>
> --
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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--
James McPhee

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