My focus for this laptop is Nerves development so stability is key for me along with a user-friendly package manager and hopefully security configuration tools. Another laptop will be used for all the other stuff that entails email, spreadsheets, etc. For me, the GUI isn’t a priority… good command line tools is important to me because GUI tools often abstract away stuff that makes it difficult to understand what happened under the hood as they say. Recovering from mistakes is not something I want to depend on a GUI interface to have what I need. It’s old school I know but cutting edge features is definitely not what I’m looking here.
wdtnh
dimitarvp
Then you’re probably better off with a rolling release distros like Arch / Manjaro or Void because they religiously keep as much as they can always up to date.
Ubuntu is okay but it grew bloated and they push Snap and its store too much these days and surprise surprise, some of the applications there are not as isolated as claimed and also send telemetry 24/7. Ubuntu became almost as bad as Windows because a simple calculator from the Snap store has been reported to start as slow as 5+ seconds.
I get how people want a stable distro but many of them are lately; this is not 2009 when you’re one small update away from your machine booting into a screen that doesn’t even turn itself on. (Though I hear that it’s still happening to some, sadly.)
So I say go with a rolling release distro.
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tj0
Wow, I did not know that.
Correction on LVM, it does do COW snapshots. However, because they are block based, you can probably only do a few of them before there are performance implications.
Also, I did some more reading on BTRFS and, well, I’m only going to use it for data that I can lose. I was reading some horror stories from HN and one of the pointed to Suse Enterprise Docs, which says using repair could destroy your filesystem.
I mean, you got to be kidding me, right? This is a really elaborate April Fools? Right? Right??
Debian includes the guix package manager by default now. Guix and Nix package managers can be installed on any distro and still work properly, so, like Flatpak, they are an alternate way to keep packages up to date.
I think you will either want Void or Debian+Guix or Debian+Nix. Did you give any of the LiveCD’s a shot yet? As long as the hardware works, you should be good with them.
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warmwaffles
I’ve been using BTRFS for the last 9 years, never had data loss issues. I’m even running a home NAS with 14 drives in the dreaded RAID6 configuration (write hole if power loss happens just right). I have not lost any data yet. I also back everything up religiously so even if I did have loss, I can recover.
I have a love hate relationship with systemd. I have been thinking about trying out Void, but I don’t want to go back to init scripts again. That was a pain to manage 13 years ago before I switched to systemd.
2
tj0
Wow. Let’s not jinx it.
Same. The startup/shutdown parts of systemd are nice, but there are some other components (network, dns, etc) that are buggy. And whenever I have to lookup the proper flags for journalctl, it makes me wonder why they didn’t just quit while they were ahead. The code is so broad that the opensshd backdoor hooked into systemd which then included xz. I’m sure that it all happened in a completely logical and organic way, but that seems like a sentence that shouldn’t be possible to write.
Anyways…
Void doesn’t use OpenRC or SysvInit. It uses a supervisor daemon called runit which uses scripts like this to run ssh. This sets up an environment and then keeps the final binary in the foreground. If the binary crashes or the script exits, it restarts it.
│ File: sshd/run
───────┼────────────────────────────────
1 │ #!/bin/sh
2 │ exec 2>&1
3 │ ssh-keygen -A >/dev/null 2>&1 # Will generate host keys if they don't exist
4 │ [ -r conf ] && . ./conf
5 │ exec /usr/bin/sshd -D $OPTS
The methodology is from daemontools from the late 90’s. It’s simple, robust, and for certain use-cases like dependencies or oneshot - just kind of janky. That being said, I don’t particularly care if a service has to restart 3-4 times because it crashed due to not having a dependency. To me - that just means the supervisor is doing its job. For oneshot, they pause the exit, so it doesn’t restart. In either case, it works.
If you fire up a VM and play with it, you can see the structure is pretty straightforward. 95% of the scripts just start up the binary in the foreground for monitoring.
Interestingly, Void was one of the first distributions that started using systemd, but it didn’t meet their portability goals, so they switched over to runit.
1
dimitarvp
Same. That was my final deciding factor when I was torn between Void and Manjaro and thus I ended up with the latter.
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warmwaffles
The out of order startup is/was painful to deal with. My only solution was to sleep the network start up.
I think the one thing holding back going to Void is just how nice the Arch ecosystem is. I’ll definitely try this.
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dimitarvp
Are you certain? Lately I had to slightly tinker with systemd because I wanted a few NFS mounts working on reboot, and I also wanted a bcachefs cluster mounted as well. But it was really quick and painless (and I regret not writing down what did I do exactly). It was literally change the what’s blocked on what on 2-3 places and it was done. Even rebooted 3 times in a row to be sure and it worked every time.
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warmwaffles
I’ve had issues on my laptop with wlan0 and some DNS issues. There is a race condition with wireless and I don’t know if it was ever resolved, I just resolved it myself by delaying it a little bit. But on desktop with a wired interface, I have no problems.
1
dimitarvp
Ah, you are quite correct there, yeah. I’ve read that wireless interfaces need more time to warm up and this has tripped up systemd indeed. Shame, hope they resolve it at one point because I have zero complaints about it otherwise.
0