The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Same here but in my case it was more a coincidence rather purposeful purchase.
The PC was cheaper than its counterparts and had somewhat good specification. On the power up I realized that me and my dad just bought something different than usual Windows PC. To be frank, once the OS boot up there was a really nice and thoroughly described readme file that informed what this specific distribution is and if necessary it described option to install Windows partition along side. I was having a really hard time to do anything on this distro. Mainly I was infuriated that my games won't install and double-clicking .exe files does nothing or open an archive.

The system lasted for like an hour or two and was swiftly replaced with nigh-genuine copy of Windows XP bought from some dude on local exchange market in what used to be a factory of some sort.

So yeah, good times.

My 2nd encounter with Linux distro was Ubuntu gifted to me by my so-called uncle, who back then was a policemen. He told me to try it out because at that time police was snooping around for nigh-genuine copies of Windows installed on private machines. One folk from my family was even fined for hefty amount of cash for having... downloading a signifcant amount of .mp3. Probably they got some sort of pirate server somewhere and checked every IP that ever come to say "hello world".
Anyhow, this distro lasted on my HDD a bit longer but I couldn't get it work with ADSL modem (Neostrada by Sagem) and connect to the internet. I probably done something wrong or didn't had the required packege. It definetly had setp-by-step installation for Debain-based system but at the time I didn't knew that Ubuntu was fork of it. So again I moved back to Windows.
Ok, but why do you write like a nigh-homosexual? Are your hands brown?

:story:
 
Yeah, you got me there :*

Shit street is outside my window.

Welcome to the thread either way, my beloved brother. Aap se milkar bahut khushi hoi janaab. As long as you ain’t a jeet who tries to flex with Kali Linux screenshots like you’re a Mr Robot character, and as long as you ain’t a fucking retard, you have a place here.
 
I'd certainly never run Devuan as a desktop or workstation operating system, but as a substrate for my home server? Yeah, it's definitely a viable option both despite and because of being sysvinit-forward.
that was basically the answer i was expecting
i'll stop after this post but i'll address your points
I'm running a home server right now using Ubuntu Server 24.04. Right now, it's 100% perfect the way I have it, and any changes I make for the sake of ideological purity or perceived value would be entirely unnecessary. BUT... if I was gonna redo my home server setup, then Devuan has real value over cookie-cutter Debian or the latest Ubuntu Server LTS. Specifically in the context of divorcing myself from systemd and its myriad of problems (re: CVEs that emerge every time a systemd update happens).
so what this had me wondering was if i was going to run a server like yours which would basically be a glorified docker container or some other very simple home server, i could use pretty much anything and the world would kinda be my oyster at that point. since i don't have a lot of experience with sysvinit other than having used it in the past i don't really have a need for it that isn't satisfied by any other init, and the simpler the use case makes sysvinit more feasible as an option but it doesn't make any other option less feasible, and they still have those benefits in case you ever do need them like hotplugging or daemon supervision or orphaned process management, so they just work better as a general recommendation even in a home server use case
i think pretty much everything else you said was just supporting that simple home server use case but if i missed anything lmk
 
i think pretty much everything else you said was just supporting that simple home server use case but if i missed anything lmk

You're kinda circling around the same few things without necessarily getting anywhere. Allow me to clarify:

a) Yes, theoretically speaking, almost any other init framework would be better than sysvinit for most purposes. This includes not just systemd, but also OpenRC, dinit, runit, s6, etc. If you're setting up a desktop or a workstation operating system on a brand spanking new machine, you're more than likely to be better served by any of those alternatives.

b) sysvinit, on its own, has immense value specifically within the domain of teaching not just Linux, but broader Unix fundamentals. This is why we must necessarily include the BSD world's rc.d init framework. sysvinit is modelled after the init frameworks used by the commercial System V Unices of yore, so your AIXes, your HP-UXes, Solarises, etc. FreeBSD and company's init framework is arranged differently, yes, but they're all still shell scripts at the end of the day, everything's still plaintext, syslogd still stores stuff in /var/log, you know the drill by now. All this shit's important if you're dabbling with POSIX-compliant (or mostly POSIX-compliant) software.

c) The best contexts for sysvinit, at least within the Linux ecosystem within $current_year, generally are home server or small scale production server stuff using a substrate like Devuan or Slackware (Slackware itself never once changing its init since Volkerding started the project in 1993). As a general rule, anything that requires regularly interacting with some type of graphical environment must necessarily account for the systemd-centric bent everything has. Artix, Devuan, even Slackware, they all leverage stuff like elogind, eudev. Generally, but not always, sysvinit won't give you much (if any) headaches while operating squarely within the confines of a headless server context.

d) This isn't to say everything in the sysvinit world within server contexts is peachy. Stuff like Docker Compose still natively requires Linux-specific features and tooling that systemd itself accesses and provides entirely by default. It's 100% possible to run Docker Compose on Devuan without much, if any, headache. That said: obscure edge cases can, and often will, weasel their way into whatever the hell you're working on when you least expect it. In my case, I could swap out Ubuntu Server 24.04 for Devuan Excalibur and run my Jellyfin+Sonarr+Radarr+qBittorrent+Gluetun stack more or less without expecting much in the way of headaches. Someone else doing more aggressive containerisation or virtualisation where you necessarily need the unique Linux quirks that systemd leverages will more than likely skip Devuan, Slackware, and company altogether.

e) Even if you're keenly aware of the benefits that a "better" init framework like OpenRC provides, sometimes, it's just better to buck the trend and actually rawdog Devuan Excalibur or the latest Slackware as your desktop or workstation operating system, regardless of how much bullshit you gotta comb through just to make things work again. You gravely underestimate just how rigid and stubborn tons of us Linux boomers are in this respect. Y'know what agitates a Linux boomer more than the latest Red Hat scandals, the latest outbursts from that contemptible Poettering, or the latest shotgun to the foot that Ubuntu desktops committed? Telling Linux boomers that they must embrace modernity and that their workflows, setups, and tooling is obsolete. Guaranteed recipe for flame wars.

f) Lastly, and this is the point I really wanna hammer home the hardest: sysvinit's just been around significantly longer than systemd, OpenRC, runit, dinit, s6, and company. It was around since basically the dawn of Linux in the early 1990s as this hodgepodge amalgam of off-the-shelf software bits and bobs that somehow form a usable Unix-like operating system. The amount of official and unofficial resources you have to troubleshoot sysvinit problems is mind-blowing relative to all these novel frameworks: your systemds, OpenRCs, dinits, and so on. Not even just troubleshooting, but also tips and tricks to make your life that much easier. No one uses The Linux Documentation Project anymore, but Linux Questions is still alive and thriving. Any Linux boomer who's spent enough time behind a bash prompt knows exactly where to look for some hackish workaround some jack-off thought of in 2002 that still works for your obscure use case.
 
sysvinit's just been around significantly longer than systemd, OpenRC
There's only so much merit to "hammering this home" when OpenRC (2007) was closer to sysvinit's release (1992) than today. DJB's daemontools which was the conceptual basis for runit and s6 was released 1997.

In internet time, this was an eternity ago.
 
Gentoo releases Experimental images using GNU/Hurd:

1775328700667.png1775328718078.png
Gentoo GNU/Hurd remains "heavily experimental" and for now is i686 builds while x86_64 feature parity is a future goal.
(src)

Clearly the year of the GNU/Hurd is soon upon us.
 
There's only so much merit to "hammering this home" when OpenRC (2007) was closer to sysvinit's release (1992) than today. DJB's daemontools which was the conceptual basis for runit and s6 was released 1997.

In internet time, this was an eternity ago.
Technically true. But there are plenty of rarely used projects that have been around a long time. If we're going to look at the actual impact that a project has had, it isn't just 'when was the first release' or 'how many uptime hours', it should be measured by 'functional uptime hours'.

By that metric systemd is, AT BEST, at 0. OpenRC, undoubtedly many billions of hours. sysvinit- orders of magnitude more.
 
Sadly, will see GNU/systemd/Linux verified by TPM 2.0 in our lifetimes:
Poettering hit twink death!

I think its just laziness for people at this point for why they don't want to see what is happening with systemd. Literally nothing the people behind it do points towards increasing user freedom, it is nothing, absolutely nothing but ever marching towards the same goal of locking Linux down and standardizing things to remove user control.
 
I lurk here sometimes so I think this is a good place to ask. I’m usually an Arch user, but I’ve been thinking about switching to a more stable OS. I was considering Debian, but the recent age verification stuff made me rethink it. What’s the most stable and reliable distro? I’m not really a gamer, I just need my system to never break.
 
Ain't no such thing. OSX (I refuse to call it MacOS) gets in your way all the time.

Older versions of OSX (re: pre-10.7) were legitimately excellent. UNIX-certified, MacPorts was basically on every power user's machine, no forced dependencies on the Mac App Store because it didn't exist yet, Steve Jobs' vision for OSX explicitly rejected iOS-ification, Hackintoshes were still 100% feasible to build and set up, and of course... you have a valid fucking OS to sync music to and from your iPhone or your iPod. Not to mention that the Unix environment that OSX shipped with pre-10.7 was a fully featured working environment. Yeah, you had outdated Bash and GCC and all that stuff, but MacPorts had you covered to get all the fun stuff that Apple decided to gimp. The last "good" OSX was 10.15 Catalina... and that's purely because everything from Big Sur-onward aggressively iOS-ified OSX while also running like absolute dogshit on any Intel Mac. Even then, Catalina ain't got shit on Snow Leopard and its predecessors.
 
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