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Comment by planckscnst | Hacker News Reader

I see nothing good here. It is Ubuntu stripped down to nothing more than Enlightenment (with a butt-ugly theme, of course), Midori (a light-weight WebKit/GTK+ browswer), Leafpad (a poor excuse for an editor), PCManFM (a file manager), a terminal, and a package manager. You can get the same system by spending 10 minutes on a base Arch install.

If they really want to do something significant, they should make an good Enlightenment theme (if that's even possible - I can't seem to find a good one), and make a desktop-suitable version of Eve (a WebKit browser made with Enlightenment's toolkit) as well as other Enlightenment-based tools.

P.S. Sorry to the folks who contribute to this project about the negative tone. I hope you only use it as motivation to do something more than pollute the Linux distribution space.

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"I hope you only use it as motivation to do something more than pollute the Linux distribution space."

If there weren't all these extraneous niche Linux distributions, maybe promising ones like http://nixos.org/ would actually get the attention they deserve.

Now there is an interesting project! That's going to be the next OS on my netbook.

I love that the package manager makes it trivial to have multiple versions of the same program. There are always some programs I like to have a stable distribution-maintained package of as well as the latest development version.

And this:

  $ nixos-rebuild test

This builds and activates the new configuration, but doesn’t make it the boot default. Thus, rebooting the system will take you back to the previous, known-good configuration.

An even nicer way to test changes is the following:

  $ nixos-rebuild build-vm
  $ ./result/bin/run-*-vm

This builds and starts a virtual machine that contains the new system configuration (i.e. a clone of the configuration of the host machine, with any changes that you made to configuration.nix).

For those who prefer the ubuntu package release cycle (or overall system) there is a minimal ubuntu installation:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

Needs an internet connection to install (I think wired).

That minimal CD wouldn't be as same as minimal install, would it?

The minimal CD is the same as the netinstall, and only installs the base (command line) system.

There's also an alternate CD for text-based install - with the option to do a minimal system - but by default, it installs the full system (Gnome and default programs).

The Arch package manager is also much more awesome than that of Ubuntu (IMHO, of course). :-P

Yes, I love package managers that don't provide a mechanism for signing code. I also love compromised mirrors.

That is being fixed "right now"[1], they seem to have most of it implemented (yes, obviously testing and documentation is still needed before its ready for non dev-branch release).

[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=115528 (I haven't bothered checking the mailing list, but the latest forum post in that thread was two or three days ago)

I just don't understand how a distro can call a package manager with unsigned packages ready for a stable branch. It's irresponsible, and if they don't care about that kind of basic need for a package manager, I don't want to put myself in a position where I'll discover (too late) what sort of other obvious oversights they've made.

How that? You cannot even properly search for packages by name. It always searches the description too. Try searching for opera or even only packages that start with opera*.

I love Archlinux but I really miss aptitude.

I just tried the following:

  $ pacman -Ss ^opera

and got this:

  community/opera 11.01-1
      A fast and secure web browser and Internet suite.

Is that what you wanted to do?

Thanks! I swear that did not work some months ago.

I've been using Arch for almost two years and its always worked. I guess your argument may have been slightly wrong (no s after S or something perhaps).

I would, however, recommend using a wrapper like yaourt which can install from AUR too. With yaourt, iirc (I don't exactly install packages very often these days, since I have everything I need), I can just go:

yaourt opera

What do you recommend to those who just want to try out Enlightenment, instead?

I have just familiarized myself with Linux via Ubuntu. I saw this Bodhi on Distrowatch and thought it's a good way to look at Enlightenment.

Enlightenment 0.16 had a ton of themes (some quite gorgeous) up on Freshmeat and that alone I considered a reason to stick with Enlightenment 0.16.

Then Freshmeat decided that they no longer wanted to be a repository for themes, and deleted everything. Gaah!

Isn't this the point of open source though. They have a vision of making a fast lightweight desktop based on linux and they did it. If people don't like it, they won't use it.

The other point is getting lots of smart people to cooperate, instead of reinventing everything under the sun.

In that case there is no reason for any distro of linux to exist. Just one should be enough. There is a lot of reinventio in the space of linux and that is a good thing IMO.

This is just a beginning. A first attempt at what they want to do. Future iterations might bring out something nicer. Again as I said, if it doesn't market will tell them so.

The competition has to be good enough to outweigh the economy of scale.

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