We are a systemd free linux community

Edited again: 2018-11-15

As the previous site started out (08/2017) of the temporary need for Artix users to meet and exchange experiences, share solutions to problems, now that Artix has its official site, we have decided to move in the direction the site had already taken anyway.  Freedom and equality of access and exchange of information.

Antix is to Debian what Obarun is to Arch, and Devuan is to debian what Artix is to arch.  Such projects/distributions seem to be very promising in concept and execution.  Equally promising, if not more, is Void and Adélie linux taking an independent path.  Unfortunately we can not cover the progress of too many distros and at times we may have to drop a few from the list and concentrate on the few we believe there is future and hope.  We have dropped Devuan over a year ago due to serious doubts with the project’s management, and now we have decided Artix has to go too.

Trident + void + zfs one step closer to 1.0

Trident project released a beta image following their alpha releases in the past two months.

For those who missed this developing transition, of Trident leaving its TrueOS/FreeBSD base and moving to linux using Void as its base, here is a summary of what you are missing.  It has been a common story for a distribution being fed-up with linux development, developers being consumed to modify their software around systemd-functionality, and have moved to some form of a BSD-unix base.  As far as we know there hasn’t been an effort to leave BSD to come to linux.  So Trident is drawing its own path making it now a 2 way street.  Here are a couple of juicy quotes of their late announcements:

2020 OS Migration

2019-10-14

…Currently, Project Trident is based on FreeBSD and uses the TrueOS build framework. Over the years, we have accumulated multiple long-standing issues with the underlying FreeBSD OS. Issues with hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users…..

How does systemd prevail if it is so crappy?

Is reddit’s r/linux just a front of IBM’s marketing agents?  Under what remote logic would an announcement for a 5 year old distribution be removed and how could it possibly violate r/linux strict code of ethics?

Obarun: New for December …. upgraded yes, new not at all.
Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/linux.
Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose

Those are the same tactics utilized across news-sites that appear to be “objectively” promoting linux in general, forums of systemd-only distributions, social media rooms and pages. The idea is to portray linux to new users inquiring about linux while on MSwindows, MACos, Android etc. as a systemd related operating system ONLY.

Update your 66? no, you 66-update your 66

Coming up, any day now, is your new 66 package.

obcore-testing/66 0.2.4.0-5 (base s6-suite)
  small tools built around s6 and s6-rc programs

obcore/66 0.2.3.2-1 (base s6-suite)
   small tools built around s6 and s6-rc programs
 No .zstd packaging here, just good old xz, despite of the 0,0094 second decompression advantage. 🙂

Ok, 0.2.4 over 0.2.3… brings yet one more tool to you. Still, the package (66) is only a fraction of systemd, but it has more “features”. That database of trees and services you have created, after a major reorganization of 66 and its service file definitions and syntax do not have to be destroyed and recreated, not for the root and not for the user. Simply run 66-update as root and as user after each upgrade to ensure perfect transitioning to the upgraded software. 66-update -v4 for maximum verbosity.

The next step in development will be a more automated backup and restore of your trees and services structure.

In the past 9 months 66 evolved quite a bit and after each major evolutionary step the safest way to upgrade was to destroy old trees (delete them) and recreate them and populate them with services. Not any more. But that is not all. 66-update doesn’t mean it is a one way procedure, Say you found out something is wrong, you located the bug of the century, something wrong with 66, and you want to downgrade back to the previous edition of 66. You downgrade the package and run 66-update again.

 

PS  Now, if someone who is not banned from r/linux or r/archlinux could try and crosspost this important announcement there, to see if you can do this for a banned user like me, it would be nice to know, that I can still piss them off with my existence.

You want to update your 66, no, you 66-update your 66 from obarun

Gathered evidence of why systemd sucks

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1105854.html

All you need to debate against the dominating systemd, just don’t expect r/linux not to ban you for posting rational arguments and criticism against their employer’s “merchandise”.  I have been banned, Casper the author of the above thread has been banned, and anyone within the linux community that voices concerns on the influx and control of linux by a handful of mega-corporations gets the axe for sure.  And they will always have the excuse of interpreting some rule that was allegedly violated by the critic.

zstd compression algorithm and the dethroned old king xz

Here is the comparative numbers reported by Arch devs on which they based their decision to use this fast but resource hungry compression tool.  XZ still wins in size, loses on time, while ZSTD is a huge loser in memory use while compressing; decompressing is comparable and equally fast.  Zstd (gang) software also relies heavily on very current powerful server grade machines to provide the benefit of speed, to make up what it lacks in quality.   Compression software should primarily be judged on their ability to compress, and zstd fails miserably against this 45 year old trusty switchblade called xz.  So we can conclude that arch has an abundance of computing/building/packaging apparatus, with truck loads of spare ram to parallely process many packages.

My article (a link to it) was removed from r/linux yesterday for no good reason, 100% linux related material, and as I complained I was permanently banned from posting there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ejn5c5/arch_2020_welcomes_its_little_brothers_and/

In case you are wondering I was reporting that arch nearly silently started using this facebook compression algorithm on packaging and here is their own test data to support this decision:

Arch Linux 2020 – what’s there to be happy about?

Happy new year facebook fans and Arch friends (friends of who? we don’t know, not us, not on facebook, not in the past and not in the future, but you must have friends amongst yourselves).

Some of you may have taken the previous post about abandoning Arch as a joke, since most of what we do recently is promote Obarun, an Arch based distribution with s6 and 66 init and service management.   When we published that article we knew nothing of what Hyperbola was planning to do (we assume it was discussed within the community) or whether they were going to give-in to the pressure and incorporate arch’s pacman and packaging methodology change into their distribution.  (Note: Hyperbola may be based on Arch but has its own separate repositories and rebuilds everything on their own to ensure everything is Free).  All of their free packages, as far as we can tell are still compressed with xz.  The bomb was set and it will go off soon (in open/free software tradition of timing kind of soon).  Hyperbola is not just leaving Arch, it is leaving linux, for OpenBSD.  But this is not about hyperbola, it is about Arch….     or skip to here if you are in a rush!

antiX – runit – brief stop and onto s6 and 66 : How to

1st some history/background:
Back some time ago an alternative to sysvinit was developed called daemontools (look at sources below) and people liked it.   From “it” runit was cloned, very similar but started from scratch, to be as small, as light, as simple, and as responsive as hw itself.  Runit set some goals for its development, kept being refined and eliminating any bugs, it worked on as many architectures as people could get their hands on, and the chief runit man decided to put it to bed.  Runit has been frozen in time by its developer.  Don’t expect it to catch up with other system development unless Void decides to clone it and develop it on their own, which in some ways they already do, but it is more polishing up the existing runit.