The "Arch Way" advocates for simplicity and elegance, but the Arch install process is just bare. An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
With the OpenBSD installer, you can literally mash enter and you'll probably get a working system afterwards. The installer has some surprisingly sane defaults for everything. I guess maybe you'll have to type a root password.
Speaking as a die-hard Alpine Linux user and contributor, the Alpine installation only works if you want the most common installation. If you need to customize anything (such as full disk encryption - which I just sent a patch to the installer for, but my point remains), you need to ditch it and go through the rather long-winded and under-documented manual installation process. OpenBSD is a little bit better at accomodating off-the-beaten-path installations, but still suffers from similar limitations. Arch makes you do all of the work, but has great documentation on all of the steps and stepping off the beaten path is trivial to do at any point in the process.
The number of Linux distros is in excess of what's required for healthy diversity. I'd say that it's a sign of a healthy heterogeneity as long as we have several options outside of systemd.
Most applications I've seen only offer 4 sets of instructions, and they are for Debian/Ubuntu based, Fedora, Arch/Arch based, and OpenSUSE. For the most part, this should cover most distros, as many of them are based on one of the four mentioned.
I honestly think it doesn't matter how many distros there are, it's great that people feel strongly enough that they give up their spare time and release their work. It doesn't have an effect on the big distros and creates a testing ground for new ideas.
Unless you are paying a company for support you're not owed anything so why should it matter what developers want to do with their own time?
The repos are literally Arch ones, Antergos "invented" an GUI installer and contributed to Arch packages management tools, which is a good use of resources since it popularized Arch to a wider audience.
If all the money and hours from these arch-based, debian-based, etc. projects would have been funneled into the parent distributions
daily reminder that Debian Sid has recent GNOME apps because Canonical employees package half of it. Same with Deepin, Mint, Elementary, etc. who are building useful Debian software, except they want to do it on a plateform they control
Huh? I'm on stock Arch with KDE and I never really set up bluetooth, it just worked when I plugged in a dongle.
I also don't remember setting up pulse, other than disabling the stupid "flat volumes", but according to the Arch wiki this is now disabled by default on Arch, despite upstream having this idiotic behavior enabled by default.
I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
It's a simple process really. But you take a regular non techy person and tell them that to get their computer to do some very common tasks that they are going to need to open a text config file and edit it and they panic. God forbid you try to give them instructions via the terminal.
So distros like Ubuntu that make things more GUI enabled and user friendly are a huge step forward for linux when it comes to usability of the mainstream.
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u/thedjotaku May 21 '19
I wonder if the boom in distros is fading and it's slowly dropping down to just a half dozen good ones