Ask HN: Linux, too many changes in not many years | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Linux, too many changes in not many years

16 pointsiwre010 comments

I learnt linux years ago and now, after managing lots of servers and systems I find out problems about networks and other that I can not resolve in the way I knew.

/etc/resolv /etc/interfaces, netstat, ifconfig (hey!, I prefer "i a s" over ifconfig though ) ... not working properly and as its supossed ten years now, and 90% google says... is wrong now

Every distro linux has his way to manage network. Last bug in Kde Neon I was using about proxy configuration (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410843) took me two hours to fix.

So I'm going to try BSD or something without systemd.

Sure I'm tired and old but I don't see advantages win over the problems can occur. It's a mess for me now...

I like the most updated applications, libreoffice,bash ...and love shortcuts with keybindings

for which distro I look?

View on HN

I understand your frustration, I sometimes have it myself when trying to figure out something obscure. And this kind of "knowledge rot" is indeed becoming a huge issue in the main search engines.

Arch Linux provides awesome documentation though. Slackware still follows the old ways iirc.

For *BSD, I'd personally stick with OpenBSD, but not sure how great you can expect it to be as a distro.

There are some systemd-less distributions like devuan, or what I would personally recommend, Void Linux[0]. Void has been my daily driver for over a year now, and it's been lots of fun, while also being rather stable.

Be aware that it is a rolling release distro, much like Arch Linux and it comes with its drawbacks as well. It uses runit as its init system, which is easily configured via shell scripts, and certainly won't change in the near future, because it's feature complete.

Void comes with it's own package manager, "xbps" (X binary package system), which is used a lot like pacman on Arch Linux. You can even freeze packages if you don't want to upgrade them.

All in all, I'd recommend it, but be sure to play around with it for a bit before settling on it. (Oh, and the installer is a lot easier thatn Arch's too, and there are live CDs with desktop environments pre-installed if that's your thing)

[0]https://voidlinux.org/

Alpine Linux may also be a good option if you're looking for something light-weight.

What is the big issue with systemd? I would recommend re-learning somethings.. it seems like any distro worth using in production is using systemd or migrating towards systemd. BSD (which isn't linux) being the exception.

Its not only systemd.

Every DE uses different programs to manage network, so you can not check the same files in order to fix a problem.

And the last problem I had with systemd was wanting to use port 53... you cannot because systemd uses it

That sounds like systemd-resolved. You don't have to use it, and it's easily stopped by normal systemctl commands if you want to use normal libc resolver behavior.

Things evolve. If you’re looking for something more conservative, try Slackware Linux, CentOS, or one of the BSDs.

Linux is evolving and diversifying fast. I'm afraid this will be more so in the future.

Fedora, but that uses systemd.

Works on my machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com