On our strict list “sysdfree strict list of distros without any part of systemd” there are complete distros that can run without systemd or elogind (Obarun, joborun, antiX), and by complete we mean thousands of packages to choose from, and are some minimal base systems that you will have to build yourself software that will run on those bases. Kiss, chimera, sabotage, mere, can all boot and can all build software. (links to Venom to be found in the end of the document)
Venom is one that is becoming more and more gray, it has a base, it can boot with sysvinit scripts or with runit-init as pid1, you can have a desktop, browser, office type of apps, icons, fonts, themes, menus, all functional and ready for work. It does provide choices of what essential parts to have or not. We will not be judgemental of the choices, but it is surprisingly growing. It is not also a conservative base system built with stable and tested build tools of 3-4 years in age, just because it needed to work, it is pretty close to cutting edge of upstream tools.
Venom is aiming to be just as Kiss as Kiss-linux itself, and is very inviting to experienced linux users who want to tweak and modify every little thing that can be modified. It presents itself with a simplistic but effective Posix-script of a package manager/builder (scratch), and other than the iso images with pre-installed software, it asks you to build what you install. Just type
scratch help
in the terminal/console and get started.
This takes some work to develop and continue as a project, it is very inviting and friendly to collaboration/contribution. Its principles and values, to keep mega-corporate trojan horses like systemd out, seem for our standards to be in the right place. And they are in the front page, carved in stone, biding agreements that are part of the Venom identity. You will not get a Void-like 180′ U-turn attitude that today we are, tomorrow we turn the other way, or the pseudo anti-systemd attitude of Devuan/Artix fame, where with the exception of pid1 they are identical to Debian/Manjaro they copy.
The beauty of a project like Venom is independence. Venom doesn’t have to be out of breath, always catching up to another distro it shares software with, like obarun, joborun, antix, and at a daily risk of the motherships changing something that can cause a break to the user.
The iso images are in our perspective heavy for “experienced users”. Vanilla firefox is not really needed in an iso we take so long to download. Yes, it would take for ever to just build a browser so you can read the instructions of installing Venom, building and configuring a new installation. I think experienced users can survive with less at this stage, if documentation is provided in simple html or md format. Experienced users don’t also require the likes of networkmanager and guis to configure networking, they can live with less. That makes them experienced. Experienced users also don’t need gvfs to have volumes mounted by clicking in a file-manager, they can mount and unmount easily from a terminal. But venom provides this luxury for inexperienced users even though it is targeting The Experienced. A 6GB base installation may be heavy, so if you are like us you will spend some time reducing fat off of it. On the other hand build tools commonly found in most upstream software producers are all there.
Spend some time installing and building with Venom, we believe it is well worth the time spent. If nothing else it feels refreshing and liberating. Especially for some of us coming from environments such as Arch where every package has to make concessions to 20.000 other packages sharing a system. This project has a future, go be part of it if the main characteristics match your tendencies. It is also posix minded, not the nonsense found in Guix and Robo-linux of attempting to be vastly different for the shake of being different. Venom is Linux, probably more suckless and slackware-ish than slackware was doomed to become. More Gentoo-ish than the disaster Gentoo has become.
Links to venom resources.
https://venomlinux.org/ website
https://distrowatch.com/venom summary at distrowatch
https://github.com/venomlinux git/source
https://sourceforge.net/projects/venomlinux/files/20230510/ download sysv or runit version iso and installer
systemd-free linux community 
I was just waiting for a specific article to elaborate on my experience with Venom. First, being a source based distro, I had to wait for a suitable machine to afford it (16 Gb RAM and AMD Ryzen 7), but it was well worth the waiting. No trace of systemd, openbox, beautiful theming, fully independent but, surprisingly, offering thousands of packages that are kept up to date with the unstoppable work of just two packagers. It does not take the same strict stance of Joborun, though: dbus is enabled by default and so network manager and automounting, packages are mostly built against gtk3, ipv6 is turned on. SysV is the default and stable init, runit is still in experimental phase (and still buggy) but they are planning on adopting 66 too. The support is mostly offered in their Telegram channel but their team is very helpful and nice. Overall I feel very satisfied with it and I will keep it as my daily driver (unless, who knows, Joborun moves away from Arch and becomes independent too).
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A suitable machine, a Ryzen 7 16GB … don’t say such things here, people might get the wrong idea. Venom, obarun, jobarun. void, antiX, alpine, adelie, will run in machines 1/10 as powerful as this. You better get numactl port and use it in half or less threads/cores when you cook things like kernels or gcc, llvm, and a few others, or your fans (watercooling pump) will be working overtime. Try building a kernel on arch and you never hear the fans pick up. Why? Probably too complex for me to explain, since I don’t completely understand it. It takes hours of slow cooking in arch, it takes an inferno in Venom. I think venom rhymes with Phenom, so I will get those two working together, numactl 0,2 and next pkg 1,3, to split the loading, if that even really makes sense.
time numactl –physcpubind=1,3 scratch build ….
Joborun, as I read in reddit/r/joborun is fed up with osdn’s idiosyncratic on/off for a few weeks at a time, and in lack of open/free alternatives are about to give up, not move forward to independence. Free hosting of binaries is and will probably never be as free as people think. Most common hosts ask for a verified legal entity to give access to, no phantoms, no groups without a corporate or other legal entity. SForge, ibiblio, all abiding by uncle sam’s doctrines, they will never be caught serving files without someone to prosecute. It is fine when you play along IBM’s drum of systemd/elogind, google/facebook’s drum of zstd, eneshey’s base of ipv6, etc. etc.. but when you are among the few fish swimming against the crowd of popular little fishes… (I know it is fish in plural but grammar is too toxic to be left unviolated), like chairman Mao said, then they want to have someone to put behind bars when you take the wrong step and overstep on corporate toes. Unfortunately the non-systemic state economies of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, even Russia, have not made an effort to provide adversaries of the empire some trully open and free service.
I still crack up to the anti-west Russian war, when Google removed all Russian content videos, documentaries, footage (including the ones showing how Ukrainian neo-nazis together with police and army bystanders torched and left the huge Union building burning and just watched, after they had forced hundreds of syndicalists to barricade themselves inside to save their lives. So what did RT do in retaliation to Google’s blockade? They continued to use google scripts all over their website and video/livetv channel. You can’t read a single RT article, even text, without google fully engaged and “recording”.
Independent from Arch? In what way? Arch had a 270pkg core repository, a 4000pkg extra repository, and a 6000pkg community repository (+/- some) and combined the extra to community for a single 10000pkg repository. To say independent one must replicate this infrastructure. To say you will only build 1000 instead of 20000 (Arch + AUR or Debian + ..) then you can’t call yourself a full distro. Some can afford such highrise buildings for head office, some must work out of a van, or a barge down by the river.
Venom is all 6+ kernel distro, how is that tag saying CONFIG_WITH_RUST=xxx set for venom? What about the word telemetry, is it found in those 6.1 and 6.3 kernels? It is turned off? There is this other relatively new thing in the kernel coming from INTEL, the IFS I believe, intel foundry service, where it records certain chip information and ships it to intel to be able to tell you whether your intel chips are about to kick the bucket and from which batch did they come from, as to be able to be improving their manufacturing. ON, OFF, not mentioned and left to default settings by the guy that makes nearly 7 figures or more a year signing off the kernel?
It might be close to the day we must say fuck computing, and everything else this pseudo-civilization has brought. Gladly I would go back to traditional tribal jungle living. Too late? The jungle is gone, cleared for beef mass production, open-pit minning, or massive biofuel-seed production.
Tick, tack, tok, tick, …. how much time do we have left in this hell hole?
pingback https://www.reddit.com/r/sysdfree/comments/13w2oji/more_than_an_article_a_comment_with_in_depth/
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I wonder if it’s possible to view the website with the “links” application? To avoid loading resources from third-party websites.
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I hear you loud and clear, sysdfree-editor here, not logged in anything, using links. When we started this free blog we chose a theme that matched the format we wanted and didn’t use many plugins and scripts. It has changed in nearly 6yr but can still be read and responded to through links (we also keep elinks and lynx to see the differences sometimes). Venom on the other hand is blank without scripts running on modern browsers. This is part of the confused identity and attitudes some distros have. Like the old song said “the revolution will not be televised”, but some think they can buy a tv-spot to broadcast their revolutionary message. It only takes a script to silence your voice by a multinational corporation that is offering its use for “free”. One of these days, when we get enough help and support we may transplant this very blog and its content to neocities, about the only “healthy” webspace we seem to have. pozol.eu joborun.neocities.org/joborun seem as good examples of nearly free autonomous space html1 optimized 🙂
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I suppose it must be Gobo-linux, not Robo-linux; as the lattewr is no more than a variant of Ubuntu, hardly worth of any intention.
Venom is too gui-heavy, thus probably useless for a musophobic like me.
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My feedback about venom, first their isos wipe root password so basically i couldn’t do anything. Fortunately system rescue cd 5.3.2 can do the job.
I joined their telegram to report problems. First one was rust-bin, one of the devs downgraded the version 5 mins after i reported the issue.
Other issue dependencies, some packages are missing or not linked to the packages, no foomatic,
Steam launches well, llvm 32 compiles faster than llvm on gentoo for each new version, the time increases.
The distro is pretty good and stable but lacks of packages, they have a repo for archived when packages aren’t updated but then bring to main, nonfree or multilib repo.
Sysvinit is easy to use, faster not like runit but good.
It’s not ready yet to be used daily it’s more like a debian testing version where you have to play with spkgbuild which i love the structure, it’s short and less confusing like ebuild on gentoo.
The struggle so far is openssl – libressl… You can’t remove openssl properly.
But i’m satisfy by the work pulled in, it needs another year before it starts to make gentoo shakes its butt
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I wrote 2 emails to venom devs with a problem I was having and none replied, so it is good-bye good-luck for me.
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The problem is that they’re very slow when it comes to reply to email or even on GitHub, instead they are very fast and helpful in their telegram group (they indeed encourage everyone to join there for faster support). Of course I understand that using Telegram is a questionable choice.
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Switching from Slackware to Venom rootfs now. I just wish they had more outlets to discuss their distribution than Telegram, maybe mailing lists, IRC, or Matrix.
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