Devuan, Refracta, Peppermint, Venderfoul Wolf

Posted on by Robin

So the tinkering continues, mostly unsuccessfully. I can’t help myself I guess. In my last post I complained about Devuan’s weirdness and pondered the future of the distro, which I think might be as bleak as Debian’s and for that matter, desktop computing in general.

Still, I like the idea of no systemd, thumb my nose at Wayland and every other bit of “free” software that is required by Big Tech in order to allow me to use what is mine as I see fit. But it’s getting harder and harder to obtain, much less maintain that liberty when it comes to desktop computing. I would have a lot more fun if I quit caring so darn much about it I guess.

Even though I have successfully installed Devuan a couple of times, it has always been a hassle compared to – oh, I dunno – every other Linux distro I’ve tried including Slackware. But okay, I’ve never attempted Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, or Arch. Probably never going to.

Using the Devuan installer is a pain. Using the Refracta installer is a pain, and it argues with you the whole time. I tell it where to install GRUB and hit Next:

You have chosen not to install GRUB. Proceed anyway?

No, no, nooo! Install GRUB! Put it here!

You have chosen not to install GRUB. Proceed anyway?

Repeat, repeat, give up, quit.

So I tried Peppermint’s Devuan edition, with it’s distro-agnostic Calamares installer. Installation failed. Repeat, repeat, give up, quit. So I tried RefractaOS with it’s cool mostly-GUI installer. It works sometimes, sometimes not. It’s moody or something. To the rescue: Venderfoul Wolf Linux! No systemd, XLibre by default, and a whole ‘nother installer called “lupinus.” The lupinus installer is fast and flawless. Success! At last!

But:

You need root permission to do Any. Little. Thing. Apps don’t remember logins, passwords, settings, nothing. Plus you still have all of Devuan’s weirdness, slowness, and mixtures of unwanted cruft that you can’t get rid of.

  • First of all, don’t tell me I need your permission! I’m an American for cry’n out loud!
  • Second of all, my computer exists to serve me. Failing that, it has no effing reason to exist!
  • Thirdly, add whatever dependencies you need to do what I command, but for cry’n out loud, not huge libraries of code that rival the kernel for size and memory consumption!

Can I fall back on GhostBSD again? Nope. For some reason it won’t allow me to send email anymore. I searched and experimented and ended up on the phone with my email provider to no avail. One error after another, no sending of outgoing mail is possible in Geary, Evolution, ClawsMail, Mutt, or Thunderbird. But no trouble at all in Linux.

Deal breaker!

Back to old reliable, simple, nice ‘n’ gooey MX-Linux. Fast, easy, simple, uncomplicated, but compromised with “unethical” (to my mind) stuff. But functional, so there it is.

More Devuan Coolness

Posted on by Robin

I have learned a lot in the last few days. I guess sometimes I just haven’t paid attention, or maybe I was in a hurry and skipped some stuff. But some of this stuff really matters in the long run, so I’ll share what I have learned about some software and projects that change the picture quite a bit.

The first and most surprising bit of news has to do with the evil tentacle moster called systemd that has come to dominate most Linux distributions. Like a pendulum in search of balance but always over-shooting the center and swinging between extremes, I assumed that even a single molecule of systemd was a terminal cancer that would lead to the inevitable takeover of my OS by IBM / Red Hat / Big Tech and all software freedom would be lost. So I stayed away from “systemd-free” Linux distributions that used any systemd components whatsoever, like elogind, for example, which is considered a needful shortcut to getting some desktop environments to work properly.

Yeah but is doesn’t have tentacles, teeth, claws, or quills, and it is completely inert when used the way it is included in “not-fully systemd-free” OSes like OpenMandriva, MX-Linux, and Devuan. Inert. Inactive. Paralyzed. Dead. It’s a place-holder, and that’s all it is. Without it you have to use shims, or do some serious voodoo to get a modern desktop environment to function efficiently. Why should developers bother with all that extra work just to claim that they’re “totally” systemd-free? Systemd components here and there are permissable, non-cancerous, inert placeholders that “satisfy” dependencies. Even in GhostBSD, some systemd components are included in the “Linux compatibility layer” to make some applications (certain browsers, Gnome apps, etc) work on BSD.

The second lesson I am still learning is that a nice Graphical User Interface (hereafter: GUI or “gooey”) isn’t always the easiest way to get things done. Now I’m a big fan of a gooey point-and-shoot desktop, and still scared of the terminal. But if I take my time and pay attention to what I’m doing without being in a rush, the terminal is a powerful secret weapon. Many of the gooey tools I always relied on are just scripts – terminal commands – that you click on instead of typing them. That’s nice, but the price of such convenience is sometimes high, especially in the big, resource-hogging desktop environments like Gnome (woke, agenda-driven, crazy) and KDE (equally woke, agenda-driven, and crazy). I love my Xfce desktop and I’m not all about dumping the desktop for a window manager, but the lesson came when installing Devuan for the first time. I never did figure out the text-based installer, so I went with the Refracta installer, which is “kinda sorta” gooey, but keyboard dependent. It’s not 100% gooey, but it made things make sense and I was able to install Devuan confidently and fearlessly. I chose Devuan because it’s non-political, systemd-free,and the only agenda is to make good software avoiding (woke) Debian’s relentless moves towards corporate domination of Linux and free software.

The BSDs lag way behind Linux when it comes to hardware support, wireless drivers, and gooey tools. I’m still very much a GhostBSD fanboy and I still send them a monthly donation! It’s an awesome project with great aims and goals, a great team of techno-wizards working like crazy to make an awesome FreeBSD-based OS specifically for the desktop. I love it! But it doesn’t work on my laptop and the latest version is halting and awkward on my desktop, probably because XLibre, the default, is still getting it’s feet wet. But keep an eye on it, because it’s making great progress and – again, it’s ethically sound, free of systemd, social / political agendas, and corporate bovine excrement. My daily driver has become Devuan, and the Refracta tools do everything I always relied on MX-tools to do! I was able to effortlessly make a bootable iso of my existing system, write it to a USB stick, and re-install it – all with a nice mostly-gooey toolset that actually precedes the MX-tools everyone likes.

Tinkering is fun again! And no one is more surprised than I am.

From MX-Linux to Refracta

Posted on by Robin

In search of a non-woke OS (that is, one that doesn’t hate me for being white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and conservative) and that also “just works” without the Big Tech intrusions like systemd and PulseAudio and which might include the cool tool set that spoiled me so much in MX-Linux, my experiment with GhostBSD was the closest I have come until yesterday, when I discovered RefractaOS. Based on Devuan and equipped with the original tools (iso maker, snapshot, etc), RefractaOS is older than Devuan (originally based on Debian before the latter went woke, adopted systemd, rage-quit X/Twitter for political reasons, etc) and originated the nifty neato tools that MX “gets credit for” because it’s more popular.

Going back to 2011 there’s this post in an old thread on antiX forums about RefractaOS, in which the lead developer praises RefractaOS for it’s speed, low resource consumption, and tool set! I wish I had known about this before, since there’s a whole ‘nother thread on MX-Forums expressing gratitude to the MX developers for MX-Snapshot. They re-wrote it, probably improved it for their distro-specific needs, and should be congratulated for doing it so successfully. “Anticapitalista” properly credits RefractaOS for the software. It shows that good ideas can be shared, adapted, and used by other distros. It’s Free and Open-Source Software being used as it was always intended – to the benefit of all. Kudos to “anticapitalista” and the MX team both for the software and for giving credit where it is due.

MEANWHILE, back in the Batcave on Robin’s old hand-me-down computer, a fresh install of GhostBSD (Xfce) was underway to cleanse the system of all the “Linux stuff” that had to be added in order to make Brave browser work. As much as I love that browser, it crashes frequently on GhostBSD. So I am back to using ungoogled-chromium (or Iridium – both are great) and adding a huge ginormous hosts file to handle ad-blocking. It’s pretty effective, but doesn’t come close to Brave’s privacy protection. Another issue has been simple tasks like getting the sound to work and a printer/scanner installed. Both are complex tasks (for me anyway) accomplished through the dreaded terminal and editing config files. GhostBSD ain’t for rookies, and not really for users like me who are easily spooked by unfamiliar technology. I don’t know that Xfce will still be supported in future releases of GhostBSD, and they are moving from the MATE desktop to something called “Gershwin” from the GNUstep project. Screenshots of that desktop look reminiscent of Windows95 or something. Eww. Seems like a step backwards, and news of it – and the switch away from Software Station planned for future releases, sent me back to resuming my search for a simple, friendly, non-woke, modern, systemd-free OS that “just works” and helps me avoid the dreadful and terrifying terminal.

A fellow MX-user who got in trouble with moderators for the same reasons I do (mentioning XLibre and/or Lunduke) told me about “non-woke” Devuan and sent some wicked cool looking screenshots. He bragged about it’s speed, simplicity, and low resource demands in spite of it’s full-fledged Xfce desktop.

Researching Devuan more deeply, I found RefractaOS and the original “MX-tools” I previously thought existed nowhere else but in antiX and MX-Linux! Except for Systemback(2), which is meant for Debian and Ubuntu-based systems.

It looks like literally everything I wanted in an OS. I’m going to install it to a spare HDD and put it through it’s paces today. STAY TUNED!