Antergos

Talk about other linux distributions, or even other OSes.
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salixious
Posts: 38
Joined: 30. Oct 2014, 08:12

Antergos

Post by salixious »

For anyone considering Arch Linux, I highly recommend giving Antergos a try. It's to Arch what Salix is to Slackware. I played around with it about two months ago and I was very impressed with it. Unfortunately, it uses systemd, so if that is an issue for you (it is with me), then you may not even be interested in Arch or a derivative.
marcxjo
Posts: 27
Joined: 1. Apr 2014, 18:56

Re: Antergos

Post by marcxjo »

salixious wrote:For anyone considering Arch Linux, I highly recommend giving Antergos a try. It's to Arch what Salix is to Slackware. I played around with it about two months ago and I was very impressed with it.
I've heard great things about Antergos, and I've been itching for a painless preview of Xfce 4.12. Any chance you tried its Xfce offering?
salixious wrote:Unfortunately, it uses systemd, so if that is an issue for you (it is with me), then you may not even be interested in Arch or a derivative.
Not to troll, honestly; I've seen this debate all over the internet, and it's still largely lost on me. What exactly is the beef with systemd from a user perspective?

From a development standpoint, I get it pretty quickly. It's in no way modular in the traditional Unix sense, it seems to obscure much of what it does (or at least makes it incredibly difficult to track down its logs), and it doesn't play nicely with other DEs, or at least it didn't out of the box. (I'm thinking of e.g. the double-suspend issues that would arise in DEs like Xfce early on in its existence, solved only after the Xfce devs patched *their* stuff, which seems annoyingly unfair to them at best.) The lead developer at PCLinuxOS has indicated that at least one distro builds it successfully only with the help of something like 40 patches; having just built MintMenu with 14, I can't imagine building anything after today that requires even 20.

As for the user perspective, though, I rarely tweak even my sysvinit/rc.d scripts, if only to make sure basic things like timely internet connection happen. My issues have come down to its bugginess, but that seems irrelevant to most of the debate. For my own part, I recently purchased a netbook that I slapped Fedora 21 on, on a whim when no other live disk would boot and openSUSE wouldn't render boot messages properly after a successful install. systemd bit me twice in the midst of that; the first time it twizzed out and forced the liveuser to log out when I passed 'kill -USR1' to the dd process that was wiping my hard drive (the DD process had just finished seconds before, unbeknown to me, which seemed to be the culprit for the systemd fail). The second time (and I can really only guess that this is systemd after playing with system upgrades and experimenting with various kernels) was after an update caused the machine to fail to shutdown via GUI (i.e., the "shutdown" button in the menus offered in Xfce and MATE) ever again. The drive would appear to spin down, but e.g. the monitor wouldn't deactivate, and even X didn't appear to properly halt as Plymouth would hang until I held down the manual power-down button. *Cringe*

Point being, systemd seems pretty annoying, but bugs can be fixed. When those issues go away, I can't imagine it changing my computing experience in any radical way. Why should a user be so incensed about using it for the long term?
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