ZephrC

I get that the official Arch forums are a cesspool, but outside of that I see about a thousand times more people complaining about Arch users than I do actual toxic Arch users. It’s getting kinda tedious and unfunny at this point.

I tried out Gentoo for a while, and just using binaries for the web browser and office suite made the compile times a complete non-issue. The problem I had that made me give it up was that when there is software you want that isn’t in the official repos there are a thousand different ways of getting it, and all of them suck. Overlays are supposed to be the solution for that, but man that experience was just awful.

I tried all kinds of things, but in the end all the options basically boiled down to risking breakage, maintaining my own packages, or not using emerge at all, which just feels like it’s defeating the whole purpose of being on Gentoo in the first place.

Look, if you love declarative systems that’s cool. I’m genuinely happy for you that you have much better options now. That can only be good.

That being said, they only solve problems that I don’t have. I do not care even the tiniest amount about whether a system is declarative or not, and I’m definitely not going to go out of my way to seek them out. If you want to call that “out of touch” then so be it.

Uh, yeah, that was the point I was making.

Would you rather they had used AI?

It literally does though. Stable doesn’t mean bug free. It means unchanging. That’s what the term “stable distro” actually means. That the software isn’t being updated except for security patches. When people say stable distro, that is what they are trying to communicate. That means the software will be old. That’s what stable actually means.

Uhh? Good for you?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has it. The Fedora 40 beta has it. Its just a result of being bleeding edge. Arch doesn’t have exclusive rights to that.

Meanwhile I’m over here dual booting Mint and Artix. I like fun, bleeding edge hobby distros and reliable boring ones that do everything I really need completely reliably.

Canonical is a profitable corporation trying to convince people to use their actual closed garden software repository but they can’t even be bothered to do even the most basic of sanity checks to prevent obvious scams from appearing on their store. Stop making excuses for them.

I’m guessing this is probably a joke? I can’t actually tell over the internet. Either way I hate you for doing exactly what makes this whole situation impossible though.

I’ve gotta say: My experience using Arch and its derivatives has really made sympathize with vegans. How in the world are you even supposed to respond when a total stranger just walks up to you out of nowhere to tell you that people who do the thing they don’t know you do will never shut up about it. Like, seriously. What is even the appropriate response in that situation?

That’s totally fair. I’m not some weird evangelist or anything. I just like options and think OpenRC is kinda neat. There’s nothing wrong with systemd, and honestly it’s more work using other options. Not for the actual init system, but for some of the other stuff systemd does. I’ve had to learn cron, and that has been… interesting. It feels like all of the documentation around cron just assumes you already know how cron works. I’m still not sure if I’m doing it right, but I’ve had a good time and my computer works, and really that’s good enough for me.

Here’s my hot take: I don’t care what operating system most people use. If people are happy on Windows, let them stay on Windows. That’s not my problem. When you say we need to make Linux less diverse and interesting to make number go up because more biggerer number more gooderer then suddenly that is my problem. You are trying to make my experience worse for the sake of something I do not care about.

There is nothing wrong with systemd. Most people on Linux are using it, and that’s fine. Options are good too though. I specifically like Linux because it’s NOT a bunch of homogeneous lowest common denominator sameyness. That’s the very thing I don’t want.

Sure, that seems pretty reasonable. Here’s the init script for sddm:

#!/usr/bin/openrc-run

supervisor=supervise-daemon
command="/usr/bin/sddm"

depend() {
    need localmount

    after bootmisc consolefont modules netmount
    after ypbind autofs openvpn gpm lircmd
    after quota keymaps
    before alsasound
    want logind
    use xfs

    provide xdm display-manager
}

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

That’s a pretty simple one though, so here’s Alsa. It’s a more complex one:

#!/usr/bin/openrc-run
# Copyright 1999-2019 Gentoo Authors
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

alsastatedir=/var/lib/alsa
alsascrdir=/etc/alsa.d
alsahomedir=/run/alsasound

extra_commands="save restore"

depend() {
	need localmount
	after bootmisc modules isapnp coldplug hotplug
}

restore() {
	ebegin "Restoring Mixer Levels"

	checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1

	if [ ! -r "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" ] ; then
		ewarn "No mixer config in ${alsastatedir}/asound.state, you have to unmute your card!"
		eend 0
		return 0
	fi

	local cards="$(sed -n -e 's/^ *\([[:digit:]]*\) .*/\1/p' /proc/asound/cards)"
	local CARDNUM
	for cardnum in ${cards}; do
		[ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2
		[ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2
		[ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2
		[ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2
		alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -I -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" restore ${cardnum} \
			|| ewarn "Errors while restoring defaults, ignoring"
	done

	for ossfile in "${alsastatedir}"/oss/card*_pcm* ; do
		[ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue
		# We use cat because I'm not sure if cp works properly on /proc
		local procfile=${ossfile##${alsastatedir}/oss}
		procfile="$(echo "${procfile}" | sed -e 's,_,/,g')"
		if [ -e /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss ] ; then
		    cat "${ossfile}" > /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss 
		fi
	done

	eend 0
}

save() {
	ebegin "Storing ALSA Mixer Levels"

	checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1

	mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}"
	if ! alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" store; then
		eerror "Error saving levels."
		eend 1
		return 1
	fi

	for ossfile in /proc/asound/card*/pcm*/oss; do
		[ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue
		local device=${ossfile##/proc/asound/} ; device=${device%%/oss}
		device="$(echo "${device}" | sed -e 's,/,_,g')"
		mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}/oss/"
		cp "${ossfile}" "${alsastatedir}/oss/${device}"
	done

	eend 0
}

start() {
	if [ "${RESTORE_ON_START}" = "yes" ]; then
		restore
	fi

	return 0
}

stop() {
	if [ "${SAVE_ON_STOP}" = "yes" ]; then
		save
	fi
	return 0
}

That’s definitely longer than a systemd service, but you’d have to write an awful lot of them to be more code than all of systemd. Overall the entire /etc/init.d folder on my PC where all the init scripts even for the stuff I’m not using are stored is a grand total of 147.7 KiB. Not exactly an unmanageable amount of code, in my humble opinion.

That might have been true a decade ago. I don’t actually know. I do know that modern init scripts for modern alternatives to systemd are barely longer than systemd service scripts though. So that’s kind of an insane take.

You know, it’s funny. I don’t actually have much of a strong opinion on The Unix Way or Lennart Poettering, and I’m not super fond of Red Hat, but it’s not like I’m going to avoid everything they’re involved in the maintenance of and still use Linux.

I do like alternatives though, so I’ve been trying out OpenRC recently, and I gotta say I really like it. Of course there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but honestly it’s just simple and fast and stays out of the way, and it’s nice to just open logs in any text editor I like. Systemd can do all kinds of crazy things, and if you need any of them then there’s no reason not to use it, but I don’t, and it’s just kinda pleasant to have something nice and straightforward that I actually kinda understand instead.

Ah. That makes sense. Sorry.

We do have both. That’s the whole complaint. There are still major applications using the decades obsolete standard. It was changed because it leaves your home directory a cluttered, useless mess. Also, if you really want your dotfiles in your home directory you can just set your xdg_config_home to your home directory instead of its default of .config.

You know everything on that site was written in 2004 or earlier, right? That hasn’t been the relevant spec for a long, long time now. We use xdg for that now. Configs go in xdg_config_home.