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Comment by gunalx | Hacker News Reader

Manjaro has been dead to me for a long time (for different reasons). But this sets it in stone. I used to like Manjaro as a simple stable arch Alternative.

Telemetry should always be opt in.

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Arch has an installer now. Arbitrarily delaying packages doesn't really make things any more stable. If anything it causes stability problems if you use the AUR that assumes you are on latest arch.

Yeah, indeed they've been falling out of grace for years now. EndeavourOS has taken its spot as the beginner-friendly batteries-included Arch desktop.

https://endeavouros.com/

Most of my problems with Manjaro were directly caused by systemd. I’d expect the same problems with endeavour unless they’re fixing upstream arch bugs.

Anyway, I gave Devuan another try a few months ago, and haven’t looked back. It let me put off my inevitable (?) switch to a BSD by at least another year.

"Upstream" Arch works fine, so whatever problems you had with Manjaro, they weren't caused by systemd in Arch.

How could you know what problems they had in order to assert that they don’t exist in Arch and therefore weren’t caused by systemd, especially considering that the only information provided about the problems is the assertion that they were caused by systemd?

Because I use Arch with systemd.

Systemd does have bugs (e.g. the resolver, wow), but these are their responsibility and not something to be fixed by Arch.

Sure, that (minimally distro-patched software) is why I use Arch too, but I don’t think the original commenter was confused by the distinction between Arch (which is upstream to Manjaro) and the software making up Arch’s standard base packages.

Just wait for systemd-telemetry.

> Anyway, I gave Devuan another try a few months ago, and haven’t looked back. It let me put off my inevitable (?) switch to a BSD by at least another year.

I also recommend trying Alpine. It gets most used in other contexts but it does make a nice desktop OS. And it's a half-step towards the BSDs IMHO.

If I were going back to desktop Linux these days, I'd probably reach for Void first. No systemd shit, light, package management seems sensible and well-suited to layering a user-facing package manager on top of it and just treating Void's as the "system" package manager, which is increasingly my preference for how to manage non-server software.

Void is shockingly good on desktop, miles beyond anything else. Stable and oh so simple.

What BSD is the closest to alpine in the Linux space? Which BSD is the smallest in size and very security focused by selecting for minimalism while also being well maintained and used like alpine? That seems like it would be a great starting place for a good desktop os

Freebsd is pretty great and it has elements of Nix too. Like the RC.local config.

I use it on my desktop as daily driver. It's really capable and well documented.

Honestly I would say none of them are really analogous to Alpine; things don't really map that way. That said - I'd say that OpenBSD is what you're asking for: I won't comment on size, but it's very focused on security and correctness, well maintained, and is actively daily-driven as a desktop by its devs. (In contrast, I like FreeBSD, including as a desktop/laptop OS, but historically it's had a bit of a thing where people develop FreeBSD to run on their servers from the comfort of their macbook. They just started an effort to improve that, but that's new.)

That said, all of the big 3 (Open/Free/Net) are pretty great and if your hardware is supported you'd probably have a good time if you don't mind doing a bit of legwork in terms of having to set things up starting from a terminal. Of course if Alpine is your reference point then you'll be fine.

Thanks, this is good information. I'm still curious about size, as it removes attack surface for security. The glibc to musl conversion is obviously not the direct change to occur in BSD, since BSD has its own libc, but an even smaller alternative would be interesting. My understanding is that OpenBSD is about 100x the size of Alpine right now. In modern times, a Rust-based option is also intriguing if the goal is security as well, though things like Redox are _extremely_ heavy for these considerations.

OpenBSD fits what you describe.

I used to run Devuan on servers but all the package versions being far out of date was frustrating. Now I run Guix System (on desktop and servers). No systemd there either.

What's wrong with systemd? From the user's perspective, it streamlines managing services in a uniform way. It's good that journalctl, systemctl, systemd-analyze work on pretty much every desktop and server OS.

The systemctl start/stop/status is no problem and better than init scripts (everything is better than init scripts). The issues stem from the complexity of the system and the amount that each module wants you to use it with other modules.

A simple version of the same is runit. Side by side, you can see the complexity differs by orders of magnitude.

I've used it for as long as it was introduced in Arch back in the days. The system update was an... experience then but that is the only bad thing I can think of.

I'm now using systemd, Wayland, Pipewire and all that in my NixOS installation and can't understand the hate. People should maybe just let go...

What did you switch to?

I switched to Manjaro from Arch in 2017 because I don't have time to debug / fix broken updates, and the same Manjaro install has been completely stable since then.

Is there another distro which can do this (and I also don't want to have full reinstalls / upgrades every few years like Ubuntu/Mint)

Switched to arch and nixos, diffrent machines and diffrent usecases. Arch installer is really nice now, even if you should have done it manually at least once in your life.

EndeavourOS is like a better Manjaro

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