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I ran Void Linux for about a year. I thought it worked pretty well. I like the runit system, which proves you can do a sane service mangement without tons and t

I ran Void Linux for about a year. I thought it worked pretty well. I like the runit system, which proves you can do a sane service mangement without tons and tons of complexity (cough systemd cough). A lot of other stuff took a similar simple Unix approach, which I rather like (Linux, for better or worse, often takes a more complex approach). The reason I stopped using it is because I changed jobs and had to run Vagrant, which doesn't work with the musl libc. I had to reinstall it to the glibc version, and figured I might as well use the more "mainstream" Arch Linux while I was at it, as I was a bit tired of having to spend effort in getting stuff like that to work.

sulam 8y ago
I have to admit I’ve never understood why systemd is perceived as so hard to understand. Still, it’s good to see some real alternatives.
- busterarm 8y ago
  The problem that most people have with systemd is not that it's hard to understand.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Calling systemd insane made you think he didn't understand it?
- Carpetsmoker 8y ago
  Concrete example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 (I am the asker of that question). This is a really weird thing to happen, and not really easy to debug, much less fix. Look at the diff that fixed the bug for an example. No way I could have figured that out on my own without a significant investment in time. With runit, everything is pretty straightforward. Not saying I can figure out every last bug, but I can at least mostly understand what's going on if I spend a wee bit of time on it. Same with Free/NetBSD's rc system, and OpenBSD's rc system. Here, it's really hard to even figure out if this is the expected behaviour or not, as all this logic is fairly complex. I remember watching a talk Linus did about Linux around 2000. One of the reasons he likes Unix is that (paraphrased, as I didn't look up the original) "everything is understandable; you don't understand all of the system, but if you want or need to, you can go in there and understand it and hack on it". Now, that may have been true for the 2000 Linux ecosystem, but for the 2018 system ... yeah, not always. For better or worse, Linux has kind of lost this property to some degree. There are trade-offs here of course (Linux has also gained some stuff), but for me personally, I much prefer the "understandable" and "hackable" Unix systems. I think Void Linux is a good example of that (OpenBSD is another). Oh, and here's another example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 The systemd error message for this unexpected situation was worthless (see my self-accepted answer). It was a simple problem, but took me quite some time to figure out.
  - sulam 8y ago
    Thanks for the example, although its power is somewhat reduced by the fact that you encountered admittedly buggy behavior that has since been fixed. Still, I appreciate that this is unexpected and likely hard for even an expert user to fix.

sulam 8y ago

I have to admit I’ve never understood why systemd is perceived as so hard to understand. Still, it’s good to see some real alternatives.

busterarm 8y ago
The problem that most people have with systemd is not that it's hard to understand.
acct1771 8y ago
Calling systemd insane made you think he didn't understand it?
Carpetsmoker 8y ago
Concrete example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/185495/33645 (I am the asker of that question). This is a really weird thing to happen, and not really easy to debug, much less fix. Look at the diff that fixed the bug for an example. No way I could have figured that out on my own without a significant investment in time. With runit, everything is pretty straightforward. Not saying I can figure out every last bug, but I can at least mostly understand what's going on if I spend a wee bit of time on it. Same with Free/NetBSD's rc system, and OpenBSD's rc system. Here, it's really hard to even figure out if this is the expected behaviour or not, as all this logic is fairly complex. I remember watching a talk Linus did about Linux around 2000. One of the reasons he likes Unix is that (paraphrased, as I didn't look up the original) "everything is understandable; you don't understand all of the system, but if you want or need to, you can go in there and understand it and hack on it". Now, that may have been true for the 2000 Linux ecosystem, but for the 2018 system ... yeah, not always. For better or worse, Linux has kind of lost this property to some degree. There are trade-offs here of course (Linux has also gained some stuff), but for me personally, I much prefer the "understandable" and "hackable" Unix systems. I think Void Linux is a good example of that (OpenBSD is another). Oh, and here's another example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/184338/33645 The systemd error message for this unexpected situation was worthless (see my self-accepted answer). It was a simple problem, but took me quite some time to figure out.
- sulam 8y ago
  Thanks for the example, although its power is somewhat reduced by the fact that you encountered admittedly buggy behavior that has since been fixed. Still, I appreciate that this is unexpected and likely hard for even an expert user to fix.