Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

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I have no idea what to recommend anymore. Most of my colleagues, myself included, have either moved from Linux to BSD or OS X land (depending on preferences) or just stopped being too involved. Helping people learn about software in general (and sometimes, but not necessarily, Linux in particular) used to be fun and rewarding. Nowadays, about 70% of the answers are either "Yeah, that's a bug they don't want to fix because they don't think it's a bug" or "I know that's not how you do it in Finder but that doesn't make it broken."

The Linux ecosystem is increasingly centralized and most of the organizations that are centralizing it, like the Gnome project, are actively discouraging contributions that don't match their agenda. This is reducing the importance -- and cohesion -- of any community. It's no coincidence that many people are finding less common ground in software they're all using than in software they're all hating.

The only Linux community I'm still vaguely in touch with (I read the mailing lists and sometimes the forums) is the Gentoo community. Largely because my only remaining Linux machine is running Gentoo. It eats a lot of my time, but stubborn USE flags control seems to be the only way to get a usable Linux distribution lately, and I'd rather spend an extra hour a week configuring it carefully enough to keep crap software out than spend a whole evening each month dealing with sudden breakage. It's not necessarily a friendly community, but most people seem to know what they're talking about.

Frankly, as bitterly as it may sound (and it's coming from someone who started using Linux just in time for the 2.0 to 2.2 switch), I'd rather recommend the OpenBSD community.

What about the ArchLinux community (IRC/forums/wiki etc)?

Arch has both made it easier for new Linux users to adopt it day-to-day while still appeasing the more advanced users, ala Gentoo. The Arch wiki has been the single best contribution to the Linux desktop world in recent memory IMO.

I'm curious how the more hardcore *nix users view it.

> I'd rather recommend the OpenBSD community.

My attempted to use OpenBSD and take part in the community left me disappointed. On the surface it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for (correctness + security). But I was turned off by the culty vibe of the users and it seemed like a backwaters in terms of software versions, as everything outside of the core seemed severely outdated.

I have... mixed feelings about Arch :-). It certainly doesn't appease me in any way; I don't use Gentoo because I like speed or especially DIY. I've done a lot of DIY crap on my Linux machines in the 90s and 00s. I don't enjoy doing it again. The only reason I use Gentoo is that, via the thickest web of USE flags I've ever woven, I can keep freedesktop.org's EverythingKit, most of Gnome's crap, pulseaudio and systemd out of my system. I can't really do that on Arch.

I think Arch is good in terms of "learning experience" for someone who wants to learn more about how a distribution is put together, but that's about it. I used it for a while, back in 2005 or so, but our later contacts have been... less than fortunate. I tried it again two or three years ago and my system regularly broke after every update. I eventually ragequit when I ended up with a system that wouldn't boot because, in The Great Move of Everything to /bin, it somehow managed to screw up the bootloader. I figured my data was going to be next, wondered what the fuck they were thinking even in the context of a rolling release, shrugged and wiped it out.

The Arch Wiki is a great repository of information though. It's even better than the Gentoo wiki was, back before it got (disastrously) wiped out.

> I'm curious how the more hardcore *nix users view it.

They probably think lowly of the whole Linux thing, but what do they know :-)

> But I was turned off by the culty vibe of the users and it seemed like a backwaters in terms of software versions, as everything outside of the core seemed severely outdated.

I found the culty vibe of the OpenBSD community to be far less obnoxious than that around... pretty much any major Linux distribution.

There are quite a few outdated packages in ports though, yes. That's often because of a lack of maintainers, but there are programs where that's just because of compatibility problems. There are very few broken packages, if any, in the ports tree -- and sometimes the broken status is very paranoidly assigned (i.e. I've had packages that were marked as broken but it turned out they ran just fine).

> I tried it again two or three years ago and my system regularly broke after every update.

Having used Arch for years and experienced the same thing years ago I've found that stability has greatly improved in the last year or two. I believe they were going through some major transitions back then and now have found a good stable foundation which they are now building on.

I haven't had it break in a very long time and having brought this up before on HN I've had many other people share a similar experience with Arch.

Although this is possibly due to the fact I've become significantly more experienced with Linux as a result of my professional work. Dedicating yourself to a single distro and becoming deeply familiar with it can be rewarding in that sense.

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