Advertising policy on sysdfree (the Case of Artix and Gable)

Dear Gable

If you just wanted to place a plug for your system of choice, like any good fan-boy would, you are welcome to do so.  But when this plug (a form of an informal advertisement for free in web-land) includes inaccuracies, false characterizations, and right-out lies, you open up an area of criticism and correction of your plug that may end up as a boomerang to become a negative advertisement.  And below is your comment and source included, unaltered, unmoderated, and still waits a response.  We thought it would be a valuable separate discussion, since it is a bit off-topic to discuss other objects than the article specifies (not that we were ever so strict on this), to just speak here about Artix specifically, in contrast of its other two Arch alternatives.

On the discussion about elogind and dbus “hate”, is there reason?

A vivid discussion has broken out between members of the community, whether q66 considers her/himself one or not is not our prerogative to define, or exclude anyone, about the hardcore stance against FOSS pests such as systemd, elogind, dbus, udev, etc.  So since the topic of discussion is very specific it would have been best if a topic addressed the specific issue, which is irrelevant to whether Chimera Linux belongs on a strict list of distributions without systemd or not.  The criteria about that list are very clear.  The criteria for the “gray” list are not very clear, but nobody really cares about this sloppy list of gray categorized distros, such as void, artix, and devuan.

Arch-linux building from source – and Obarun to the rescue

What if, there was a benefit in building from source, a system that is commonly used by pre-fabricated binary packages, like Arch or any of its forks and desktop flavors?  What Arch considers a “clean-chroot” is primarily of need to developers ensuring their package can be both satisfied for all dependencies AND are reproducible, as long as this can be achieved within a constantly rolling distribution.  That is open and nearly free condition for you.

Why

Building in a clean chroot prevents missing dependencies in packages, whether due to unwanted linking or packages missing in the depends array in the PKGBUILD. It also allows users to build a package for the stable repositories (core, extra, community) while having packages from [testing] installed.

Scratch most of this for several reasons.  We are not developers, we are building our own system like Gentoo-ers, k1ss-ers, Crux-ers, and others do.  We want to make sure that each of our packages fits well within the parameters of our specific machine, and it wasn’t built on another machine that may not be 100% compatible to ours.

Popular mythology spread by IBM parrots elogind vs consolekit2 1.2.2

Thanks to the great work by Eric Koegel and Antoine Jacoutot we were not wrong again!

Parrots never think of what it is they say, they hear things (generally things are heard through highly paid and supported media that serve corporate and state interests) and reproduce the sound of them.  Not that they are dumb, but they can’t process rational language based communication. 

QUESTION: Why are you dumping consolekit2 and use elogind, that you know is just a significant piece of systemd, which further makes upstream reliance to systemd more acceptable and wide spread?

EXCUSE:  Consolekit is deprecated, it is unmaintained, it will never work with Wayland, and we must support wayland because that is the future.

QUESTION: Could consolekit2 be able to work with wayland?

EXCUSE: No, it never will!

QUESTION: Elogind, being a piece of the most convoluted piece of opensource software ever encountered is very big.  Shouldn’t this be a performance concern?

EXCUSE: No, because consolekit was also huge!

---

ANSWER:  Consolekit2 1.2.2 was released Dec.20 2020 and among its changes is a memory leak fix, NetBSD/OpenBSD fixes/compliance and more.  If you notice in the list of issues and discussion there has been a workaround to get ck2 to work with wayland in Gentoo since 2018. 

Consolekit2 is between a 1/5 to 1/6 of the size of elogind!

---

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.

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!

Where to move to after Arch-Linux-based non-systemd systems?

VD, HIV, STD, Zstd

The deeper issue here is “what is the relationship of Arch-Linux and Orwell?”

Two of the most common intrusive sites reported by linux users that are placed on top of the list of a firewall, so nothing goes in and out between their machine and those sites’ servers, are Google and Facebook.  Google on the one hand, in order to play nice against the free/open software community, has been contributing resources, information, and free/open software to improve their image.  MS purchased github, IBM purchased RedHat, or should we say they made their relationship more formal.  Some developers have fallen for it.  Facebook on the other hand is notorious of flooding the machines of their innocent and unsuspecting users with questionable code.  Facebook not only knows who you really are, what you really like, what you think and what you are interested in, in the vast majority of cases they know in real time your exact location and may even have the capability of keeping track of your moves.  Simply if you have an account on facebook and accessed it once through your “smart” phone, they know.  If you access facebook from your desktop, but on smart phone you only use your google account, they know.  They, they, who is they?  If you are really asking we can go on comments for as far as you can take it.

Richard Stallman on surveillance engines and rogue regimes

Penetration testing (pentesting) distribution without systemd

Interesting inquiry that has lead searchers to this site for an answer but hasn’t yet specifically been answered.  So I will take a shot at answering this.

Basically, and as far as I know, there is a Gentoo based distribution specific to this task and as it is based on Gentoo it is easily free of systemd, although if you really like systemd I am pretty sure you can have it on Gentoo.  This narrows down to options based on Debian (kali and parrot), and Arch (blackarch and archstrike).    There may be others we don’t know of yet.

Hyperbola and freedom in your Arch based installation

If you want to install Hyperbola a new version has just come out.  Hyperbola is very serious about the freedom in software and have gone a step further than most to clean their arch based system out of “non-free” software.

What if you don’t want to install hyperbola but you are running an Arch based distro, Arch, Manjaro, Obarun, Artix, ArchBang, etc etc.. AND you are curious  on how many packages you have installed that are not free.  Do you know?

Edited Dec 11th 2018:  Note on the end of the article