Choosing Distro

[Paul Boniol]

As previously noted, I've got some issues with my current Linux desktop / home media server. I had been going with a Ubuntu based distro because I used to use MythTV, and there used to be Mythbuntu that had it largely ready to go. (FYI once you had MythTV working, there were many posts telling of woes if you ever upgraded.)

Now that I'm looking at doing a fresh install, and no longer use MythTV, I don't think there is any influence to remain with a Ubuntu based distro.

I've been thinking about going back to an RPM based distro might be nice, because apt can't tell you what processes need to be restarted after a lib update. Though I do appreciate the Ubuntu LTS system where I'm not forced to upgrade every couple of years to continue getting updates. (And have no experience with rolling upgrade systems, e.g. Tumbleweed from openSUSE which was new before I got into MythTV.)

Anyone care to share their thoughts on the current distro landscape?

Paul

[Howard White]

Paul,

Yes, there is a useful utility in RHEL distros called 'needs-restarting'
that is in the 'yum-utils' package. The analog in Ubuntu is to look in
the /var/run directory and look for things named 'reboot-required,'
specifically the file 'reboot-required.pkgs'. I even wrote a Nagios
test to look for /var/run/reboot-required.

Howard

On 8/24/22 15:14, Paul Boniol wrote:
> As previously noted, I've got some issues with my current Linux desktop
> / home media server. I had been going with a Ubuntu based distro because
> I used to use MythTV, and there used to be Mythbuntu that had it largely
> ready to go. (FYI once you had MythTV working, there were many posts
> telling of woes if you ever upgraded.)
>
> Now that I'm looking at doing a fresh install, and no longer use MythTV,
> I don't think there is any influence to remain with a Ubuntu based distro.

> H

> I've been thinking about going back to an RPM based distro might be
> nice, because apt can't tell you what processes need to be restarted
> after a lib update. Though I do appreciate the Ubuntu LTS system where
> I'm not forced to upgrade every couple of years to continue getting
> updates. (And have no experience with rolling upgrade systems, e.g.
> Tumbleweed from openSUSE which was new before I got into MythTV.)
>
> Anyone care to share their thoughts on the current distro landscape?
>
> Paul
>

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[Csaba Toth]

Our mileage varies greatly. Just this week I'm installing a new laptop. My stance is that I never want to do a dist upgrade and getting stuck with old packages for years. I want to get updates in small little bytes at a time, so I was loogin for rolling distros. I've been rolling with Devuan (ceres / daedalus = equivalent to sid) for the last ~5+ years, and unfortunately I'm succumbing to the systemd cancer this time and giving a try to Debian Sid. I like the concept of having things out of the box, so for example I was rolling with Ubuntu Studio before Devuan, it was Xfce based and a lot of software. I've tried siduction, because for some stupid reason Sid doesn't have a live install CD, I cannot undertsaand why, whereas Siduction offers things out of the box, comes with Xfce choice and also doesn't want to force a swap partition on my SSD (unlike Sid installer).

My disdain for systemd is multi-fold: 1. The way bugs are treated even upsets kernel developers, 2. Poettering's view of CVEs is a tell-tale sign 3. I've been through an unrecoverable server fault because a bad sector happened in the f-ing binary prorprietary log area of systemd and it caused the kernel to not boot, and we could even fix the file because it's binary. Unbelievable, that was the straw that broke the camel's back for good for me. UNIX had figured this out for how many decades: gz + logrotate and you have both the advantages of text logs and compression! Unfortunately some packages like snap depend on systemd, and systemd interleaves with the whole architecture so much now (like a cancer metastasis) that I cannot install snap on Devuan. Maybe one day. I'm not too much of a fan of having two package management systems either (1. native dpkg / apt + 2. snapcraft on top of that like Ubuntu is gravitating towards) + I want a rolling distro so I went back to the roots: Debian. Then I can control more where I want to leverage snap and mostly rely on native package manager system.

Out of the box distros take up more space, but nowhere near Windows: the new laptop's new Windows 11 Home took up 72GB space (this included a ton of vendor specific software though). I decided to finish the install so I can perform a BIOS update because the new UEFI is so picky that 9 out of 10 USB boot sticks don't boot. Anyways, now the WIndows is cloned and nuked. I wish I could buy that laptop with no OS for $100 less (but that's just a dream, I'm even happy I could find a candidate with Ryzen + Radeon, because it's as rare as diamond dust and even if it's not Intel+nVidia). I was researching laptops like System76, Purism, or Framework, but currently I'm still using the highest performance laptops for software engineering tasks. One day I'm craving Purism or one of the mentioned brands.

One more thing for Debian, Ubuntu, and anything with dpkg / apt: I've just come across nala which I'll try. https://christitus.com/stop-using-apt/

I didn't have too many problems with apt per se, but I'll try nala.

The whole installation procedure is pretty preposterous BTW. Siduction was not able to install grub at the end (saying it didn't have enough space, I reused the ~380MB EFI partition of Windows - of course cleaned), I had to chroot, weed out some EFI temporary variable dumps to make it succeed. After reboot my user wasn't in the sudoers. The first apt upgrade had conflicts, I resolved those and then it saw off the branch it was sitting on: it had both lightdm and sddm installed, I needed to select (after a research it seemed it's sddm, but then during the install it restarted something which killed the GUI process tree. Then the DM didn't come after reboot. I could have fixed it but I went for Sid. Sid had trouble either mounting the EFI or the root partition as a part of the installation steps. I had to babysit it and chroot yet again. I'm happy I can get through these with 20+ years of Linux experience but this is very very far from getting into the mainstream. Maybe Pop_OS! and other distros are more usable out of the box, however in my case I needed the freshest kernel and cloning the firmware git repo and installing newest firmware binaries manually + of course update initramfs to get my laptop working (for basic functions such as wifi, screen brightness and similar), and I'm not 100% out of the woods yet.

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[Paul Boniol]

Wow! You have no idea how many pages / responses to this question there are out there that say there is no way to find what services need to be restarted under Ubuntu, you just leave it be or reboot. I thought it used to be part of rpm, maybe they split it out, or maybe I am just not remembering correctly since it has been years.

Thank you!

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[Paul Boniol]

I don't think you have to sell "systemd is bad" to most of us, especially old timers (I probably started on Red Hat 5 somewhere around 1998.). The idea of using binary files for configuration and logs is antithetical to the general concept of Linux. Unfortunately a lot of distros use it. https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/

I've got experience, but I don't have time for tracking down that many low level problems these days. I have other things to do.

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