Hi all, On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 10:38 (-0400), E. Liddell wrote: I'm a bit late to this party, but if can wait a bit more, hopefully Slackware 15 will be out Real Soon Now. (Yeah, it has been a long time since the last release, but there is a lot of current activity, and RC1 happened in mid-August, so I have some hope.) Felix, please don't take this harshly, but I think this is self-fulfilling defeatism. I would argue that Slackware still holds a place in the list of "major distros", depending on whether or not you count "significance" as one of the criteria for your list. And, thankfully, Slackware remains systemd-free. <snip> Hear, hear. From my point of view systemd apparently solves problems I've never had, which in itself is all well and good. But The fact that (it seems) more and more software somehow replies on some systemd function concerns me, in that if it gets its fingers into more and more things, at some point it may become some monolithic monster which may turn Linux into the same ball of confusion that MS-windows is, and thus open Linux to security problems which are hard to discover and hard to fix. I really believe that the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy has a lot to be said for it. Good point. Jim

On October 4, 2021 10:48:18 AM CDT, Felix Miata &lt;mrmazda(a)earthlink.net&gt; wrote: >Ordinarily, nothing, but an init system is foundational, outweighed in importance only by the kernel. Indeed, which is why its important to have an init system that works. So the foundational component of the operating system is a dumb basis for choosing one? In my experience, systemd has been nothing but breakage after updates, getting stuck during boot, and in the grand scheme of things its full of security flaws. So why bother saying that derivative distros are a dumb choice if TDE can work with anything? Slackware is a derivative distro forked from SLS, is it dumb to use TDE with it?

I really don't see the reason for debating systemd over sysv over every other init system once again. If the topic starter asked for a distribution without systemd, they must have had their reasons to ask for this. Forcing them to try systemd and downgrading the discussion to a generic systemd-antisystemd debate (of which there is an abundance already) is not a correct approach to the original question. This is really a pointless debate. Systemd has its strenghts and downs, and pretty much everything else out there has. If I went into a shop explicitly asking for pencils and the personnel was insisting that I should buy pens instead, I wouldn't consider that advice the least helpful. After all, everybody chooses their own preferred tool, and Linux should be all about choice, as many believe. On the original question, I have been using Slackware for quite a while and it adequately covers my needs. But I would recommend Devuan – it has indeed come a long way since its first release (it was buggy when I tried it). I recently installed it on a spare machine. The installation was flawless, you could choose from several init systems and even apt was not as annoying as I remember it. I was so amazed that for a moment I caught myself thinking of replacing my trusted Slackware with Devuan.

On Sunday 03 October 2021 10:59:25 pm Felix Miata wrote: The irony of your arguments Felix is it is the same argument KDE4 people made to those who switched to TDE. Especially the, “If you expect to live more than 10 more years,” since TDE recently celebrated its 10 year birthday… Systemd created a major, aka lifelong, schism in the Linux community (to get faster boot times ffs). Steve, if you’re worried about needing systemd for some potential future software, then use MX Linux, it has a systemd shim, so most (probably all really) systemd software runs on it. It also has: - 1 click install off of a Live USB - MX Package Manager (MXPI) that allows for 1 click installs of almost 400 different popular software environments like Zoom, Steam, full LAMP stack, VirtualBox, etc. - 20+ developers and 20,000+ users Pick whatever you want, TDE (and the dev’s and users) will be here for you. Best, Michael

Am Montag, 4. Oktober 2021 schrieb William Morder via tde-users: :-) Stefan

On Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 10:44:15AM -0400, Felix Miata wrote: I'm happy for you that your experience has been different. A file system check is not just fsck, it is also the user interface and the reporting of errors to the user. Or in this case, the *lack* of reporting of errors to the user. The only feedback you get is something close to: Running start task File System Check something something /dev/something/long string of random alphanumeric characters at the boot screen. You certainly don't get any feedback that the check was failing with thousands of I/O errors. To see that, you have to boot into the machine and look at dmesg, which you can't do until the fsck completes, which it won't do until there are no more errors... (One wonders if anyone at Red Hat or Fedora checks their boot scripts on a machine with a failed HDD or SSD. I suspect not.) With no feedback as to why the system was unable to finish, it took me literally two days to work out that it was a dead SSD, by which time it was too late in the weekend to purchase a replacement which meant I lost another day. (I know, I know, we're living in a time when four or five million people have died due to the worst industrial accident in history, and tens of millions more have lost their jobs and livelihoods. I should count my blessings. What's three or four extra days to repair the system? Well, in my case, aside from the frustration, it's about a day or so of lost work.) I eventually worked out what was going on by hard powering off the PC, booting into a rescue disk, identifying the failing partition by its UUID (it was /boot) and commenting it out of fstab. That allowed the system to boot up fine from boot-efi. And that allowed me to fail the ssd from the RAID array, and get back to work for a brief time, except that I didn't realise that swap was also raided, and boy oh boy is it a bad idea to be swapping memory to a failed disk. Go on, ask me why swap was raided. On my PC, in fast boot mode, keyboard and mouse is disabled until after the BIOS passes control to the OS, which means you can't hit F2 to get back into the BIOS to disable fast boot mode or change the boot order. The Fedora community doesn't consider themselves to be bleeding edge, but they sure as hell behave like they are, if not right on the edge, close enough to the edge to be splattered. And you are right about stability. If I could, I would still be running KDE and Linux from 2005 or so. Aside from the web browser, and perhaps a few video codecs, everything I use worked just fine back in 2005 and the last 15+ years has just made the overall experience worse. (Gods, I'm going to be yelling "Get off my lawn" and shaking my fist at clouds next...) I know. But I have learned to expect the worst, always, in any and every upgrade. I expect that it will always take longer than expected, be more difficult than expected, will break things that I didn't expect to break, and invariably I'll end up with applications with a shittier UI. I've so rarely been pleasantly surprised by upgrades. Now there's a name from the past. I remember when Knoppix was gee-whiz new technology. Imagine being able to run Linux from a CD! -- Steve