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Comment by rev | Hacker News Reader

So, do you still use sysv-rc on your Debian/Mint? I've been trying to hold on to System-V on a Debian for what, about 2 years?, but some bugs found their way in after all and I gave up. Don't like the fact at all, installed OpenBSD wherever Nvidia is not involved and FreeBSD where it is, but still booting Debian from time to time.

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I left Mint (17.X, the MATE spin) with whatever default rc the Mint guys chose. Upstart, I guess. My efforts go into customising my home system to my liking and these days my tastes are simple: Sawfish+dmenu or CDE, when I feel nostalgic.

I'm now writing on a Debian… er… something… system. That version which tried to force systemd down my throat. I switched back to sysv-rc right after the update. What bugs are you referring to?

Hopefully the possibility to switch rc will remain in future (I hear Gnome these days depends on systemd, WTF), otherwise I'll have to look for something else once again. Arch, probably. Or Slack + pkgsrc. Or I'll go back to NetBSD.

Suspend, for one, stopped working for me with sysv-rc. The fact that it's an 8 years old testing/sid mix could contribute.

I found that simple tastes make for an easy switch to... anything (for values of 'anything' not including lunatic fast-moving all-eating godzilla-sized init monsters obviously). My poison is some tiling wm (xmonad or spectrwm work best) + dmenu. A single config file is all you need (my spectrwm config is 4 lines long).

As for a system to switch to Slack seems to be one of the last Linux strongholds. Arch (like Debian) needs tweaking to switch from systemd. There are also those Devuan guys... We'll see what future holds.

Strange, suspend/hibernate with uswsusp works like a charm for me. For the first time since kernel 2.6, too. The only bug which occasionally bites me is that after several suspend/resume cycles the screen randomly blanks for a while and then restores its previous state. Killing X doesn't help, it's the same in the console. Only a reboot fixes it. I suspect the Intel BT driver.

http://systemd-free.org provide painless instructions for the switch on Arch.

Have you tried i3wm? It's my wm of choice, it's tiling and it uses dmenu by default. How does it stack up against spectrwm/xmonad?

No, I haven't, at least recently. I switched to tiling about 7 years ago, tried a range of WMs (dwm, ratpoison), stuck with awesomewm for several months, but as it was changing to Lua-based configuration with too much of a flux, I left it for xmonad. Two things that immediately struck a chord with me were multi-monitor support and sane keyboard shortcuts. This post¹ may add something for you.

I learned of spectrwm only recently, it clones xmonad's UI, but is more practical (written in C, ini-style configuration vs Haskell code, doesn't need GHC installed). Painless switch for an xmonad user.

¹ https://www.acehack.org/posts/2015-09-19-i3.html

i3 already does multimonitor pretty well, iirc, and I don't have multiple monitors yet. Also, I really like i3's keyboard shortcuts. So I'll stick to i3 for now.

Honestly, I think i3 is probably closer to dwm than any of the others you mentioned, and I kind of like it for that. dwm goes a but too far with its configuratiob system, but i3 hits the sweet spot. I want my WM to work, and get out of my way: I have enough things to tinker with.

Although, if I'm ever convinced to go back from tiled managers, I may try sawfish. I do love lisp...

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