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I usually refrain from distro- (and editor-, and language-) related discussions but I think Void Linux deserves an exception here: - Everything is remarkably s
by alxlaz 9y ago
I usually refrain from distro- (and editor-, and language-) related discussions but I think Void Linux deserves an exception here:
- Everything is remarkably simple, (mostly) well-documented and straightforward.
- Friendly, dedicated and very knowledgeable community
- Open development, very few hooks to jump through if you have something to contribute
- No systemd, so: rebooting your system isn't a lottery where, if you lose, you get to wait for 90 seconds for some service to stop, your system doesn't start doing strange new things after every update because something that's been working fine since the 1980s has recently been declared broken, no binary logs to get corrupted (and no need to tweak your system and sidestep this brilliant scheme). Of course, you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux, but I'm pretty sure that's about as relevant as the fact that you can't run macOS on low-power embedded systems.
- Completely community-ran and independent. Some things don't happen as quickly as in corporate-backed projects, but you're also not beta testing for their LTS or enterprise-grade releases, either. Also, no bureaucracy, no priority mismatch, no one to shove alpha-quality software down your throat.
It's basically like OpenBSD with more drivers but based on slightly worse and less cohesive technology :-).
- sivers 9y agoThanks for beating me to saying all of that. It's been my experience, too. Void Linux has made me say a good "wow" more than any other Linux. I love that I can use many of my favorite bits of OpenBSD, even doas. xbps takes just a minute to learn, and is surprisingly ("wow") fast and robust. Who knows why it's not more popular, but it doesn't matter. It's awesome.
- mdekkers 9y agoNo systemd, so [...] you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux How so? How is DevOps linked or dependent on systemd in your view? Personally, I find systemd gets in the way of devops.
- a012 9y agoI don't understand, what can't DevOps do much without systemd where most of the DevOps culture involving around automations?
- mdekkers 9y agoThat is exactly my question. OP appears to take the position that not having systemd somehow gets in the way of doing DevOps, which to me sounds like bullshit, and I asked for some more info. Instead of engaging in a discussion, I got downvoted though, so I guess it was "the wrong question", or "I didn't ask in the right tone of voice". This place reminds me of my ex-wife.
- somebadguy 9y agoWhiny victim. Not surprised your wife moved onto better things
- BlackLotus89 9y agoI found the question interesting as well especially since the original post mentions how michael works on void and distributimg it with ansible (many of the things he mentioned sound like devops to me)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alxlaz 9y agoOh, the downvote machine works here as well... Whenever the line between a technical discussion and a systemd bashing thread becomes blurry, someone who does DevOps for a living invariably pops up to say how much they like systemd -- usually for pretty valid reasons. It's also ubiquitous enough that, by this point in time, some of my younger colleagues who do DevOps for a living have never used anything but systemd. Doing Stack Overflow-driven (aka copy-paste) DevOps without systemd is pretty challenging nowadays. Hence the joke. Otherwise, yes, of course you can do DevOps on Void. I can't imagine what you couldn't do DevOps on; I know folks who were doing it on Novell Netware before the whole thing even had a name.
- zzzcpan 9y agoIsn't devops basically an infrastructure engineering, which if anything, is as anti-systemd as it gets. I guess people think of devops as something different then.
- xorcist 9y agoSome people use "devops" as a derogatory term for developers copy-pasting stuff to the terminal. Certain in-terms tend to acquire ironical undertones quite quickly, such as "agile" now meaning certified scrum masters(tm) doing half hour standups.
- digi_owl 9y agoFor me devops is summed up thus: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a-self-ddos/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a...
- O_H_E 9y agoyou can't do much DevOps on Void Linux Why is that ???
- alxlaz 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671791 I can't edit my post anymore :-)
- IgorPartola 9y agoThis is that case where you needed a smiley after the joke. I thought when you said that, that the reason was that it used a too simplistic init system a la OpenWRT, where you can’t check if the process is running, automatically restart daemons, etc.
- pleasestopthis 9y agobut you can check if the process is running and automatically restarting supervised services is the norm.
- IgorPartola 9y agoThe norm for what exactly? There are very simplistic init systems out there that do not supervise anything, and every daemon must come with its in shell script that checks if it is running. Without looking, I don’t know what Void does and the original comment here didn’t make it clear.
- pleasestopthis 9y agoConsidering every major init system ( and process supervisor ) since IBM Aix in has process supervision and auto-restarting to some degree then yes. Void Linux uses runit a descedent of djb's daemontools which does automatically restart services and provides a way to check if it's running by starting the daemons themselves and keeping them as direct childs.
- parenthephobia 9y ago> something that's been working fine since the 1980s has recently been declared broken Void Linux uses runit, which was released in 2004, so I guess they agree.
- nisa 9y agorunit is an implementation of djb daemontools - http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/daemontools/blabbyd.html http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/daemontools/blabbyd.html - the latest release is from 2001 - so this must be around since the early/mid 90ies - it's also what systemd copied to a degree also solaris / launchd got some inspiration from daemontools.
- nisa 9y ago> Of course, you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux.. Why not? runit is really great - it's an implementation of daemontools from djb - it's a powerful system - including socket activation, log handling, you can even run custom check scripts for your services. I'd even say it's more poweful than systemd and better for devops once you go beyond systemctl enable apache2
- ams6110 9y ago90 seconds? You're lucky. I have machines running systemd (RHEL 7) that simply will not reboot unless I use the --force option. They will just sit there with a blank screen forever otherwise.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoAnother nice feature is first class support for ZFS.
- drudru11 9y agoWhoa - that is a pretty big item. Thanks for mentioning that. One of my todos this year is to check out encrypted ZFS on Linux. I will try that on Void.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoI've been running encrypted ZFS on Void for about a year. [Only caveat: I wasn't able to get an encrypted ZFS root working on Void (there is some issue with grub+luks+zfs), but I have system with an unencrypted ZFS root with an encrypted /home on ZFS.]
- drudru11 9y agoI am so glad to hear encrypted ZFS is stable and working. Thanks for sharing that.
- derefr 9y ago> if you lose, you get to wait for 90 seconds for some service to stop Now, now, that's really down to the way you write your RC scripts. Plenty of distros over the years have had timeout-based prereq-waits in their init.d scripts. (Heck, I currently have a prereq-wait of some kind going on in the early-stage init of a macOS system, because it happens to contain a non-Apple-manufactured NVMe SSD formatted as APFS. Seems like TRIMing APFS volumes gets deferred to boot-time.)
- bitwize 9y agoNot only no systemd; Void uses runit, which is systemd's service management principles done The Unix Way™.