Improving TrueOS: OpenRC

Speaking of Gentoo. The current maintainer of OpenRC over there seems hell bent on introducing all manner of systemd-isms to it.

To the point that certain members of the Gentoo community is contemplating a fork of OpenRC.

I'm on vanilla FreeBSD now. Ports is about equally as cool as Portage, but Poudriere and quarterly branches edges out for commercial use IMO. And I get a neat kernel and community that are both approachable and fun to work with.

EARLY_AP_STARTUP is enabled by default… Is anyone working on enumerating all buses in parallel?

Don't do that on a desktop maybe?

(Also for apps on servers, I use runit to start services in jails directly like `exec jail -c ... command=/path/to/app/command`.)

http://systemd-free.org provides a repo with all the stuff you need, including openrc scripts, eudev, and patched versions of other software that has fallen to the cancer, like the *kits. They provide simple installation instructions, and it should Just Work.

Issues are rare, although the usual Arch caveats apply (anything can go wrong depending on how your system's set up, when in doubt, check the blog/rss associated with your repos, as there might be valuable information, etc). However, I have noticed a few things:

-While the repo does provide pulseaudio, it doesn't provide the 32-bit pulseaudio packages. This means that 32-bit applications that try to use pulse won't play audio properly. However, these are rare. Do be sure to force SDL and openal to use alsa, though.

-Some software (like Samba) expects systemd to be there when you compile it, and wants systemd as a runtime dependancy. However, (again, as with Samba), these pieces of software sometimes provide config options to remove systemd integration. Consult the project documentation, or just run `./configure --help`.

-I have experienced some audio issues in 64-bit applications (namely, firefox). Although I suspect this is unrelated, it's worth mentioning.

Well, if you have auto-updates configured, it would be an easy mistake to make. I have, for example, installed packages and had them go missing due to this. But I'd like an "i'm aware of the risks, let me update quickly" option.

The main reason I run TrueOS rather than just FreeBSD is for the boot environments. I've been screwed too much by dependency issues on port/pkg upgrades and left without something critical too many times, and the bootadm thing is the perfect solution, as you always have a working fallback.

True, but thats the role TrueOS is attempting to fill. They're like the early days of Ubuntu where the whole goal is to create the most user friendly experience for the operating system, making it a great gateway-distro to the rest of the eco system. The more tinkering-focused users can go upstream to FreeBSD.

I actually prefer to start with a blank slate and tinker but the TrueOS people keep coming out with these awesome features that are making it hard not to switch.

This is kind of how I felt when I tried TrueOS. I had heard about all the interesting things they had been doing, like integrating boot environments into their update process - but when I actually went and tried it, it was as though it was an unfinished product. It had multiple things that felt incomplete or didn't work, like the app cafe not working, saying it was installing something but then doing nothing. Maybe this was because they were making the transition from openrc since it was right after their TrueOS name switch from PCBSD, and I think that was when they made the init change.

It kind of felt like they are building a product for no one in my opinion. It is almost as if they are using it as a breeding grounds for new technology in FreeBSD instead of building a stable operating system. If they're trying to use FreeBSD to make something for the average user, do they really care about all these features? I kind of feel like they have been trying to integrate too many new things all at once and it is left things very fragile. I think they should focus on stability instead of trying to integrate so many new things at once. Hopefully this is all just due to them switching to a rolling release model and things will stabilize. I ended up switching to vanilla FreeBSD, maybe I'll give TrueOS another shot once things have settled down.

Still in active development too. :) And no, Jonathan, I haven't heard anything from TrueOS people.

Which is a shame, because if a distribution is being built today, with no existing legacy service script base to cater to (or if it has to be converted anyway), going for anything else than s6 or nosh is staying in the past.