Just curious to know if anyone has been using the same distro for multiple years/decades and what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?
“We now added AI to the kernel”
Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can’t fix.
Not sure… I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I’d rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool… but I really don’t want to use a weird language for making packages, I’m just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.
I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?
From what I understand the package managers remove files they themselves created but not files created by the application itself like config files and other stuff
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
Snap getting installed, ads when starting a shell. Basically the reasons I ditched Kubuntu.
I feel this so much, if you want that experience you may as well be using Windows! What did you switch to?
Exactly! EndeavourOS, my first Arch distro. It’s nice and easy to use, although Arch package updates are very different from say Debian. They don’t differentiate between security fixes and typo fixes so you’re either updating all the time like me or updating less frequently and being vulnerable. And then there’s also the issue of rarely broken bleeding edge packages; I had to pin a bunch to prevent upgrading from KDE 5 to 6 for a while.
I’ve been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I’m officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:
- openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I’ve tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
- openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.
Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It’s just that I’ve tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it… I’m totally hooked on openSuSe products though.
Out of curiosity how is life without systemd better? What does it taste like?
Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I’m not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you’re doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.
I’m also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.
Boot times.
I love how you chose one of the prime advertised features of The Cancer – and my rhel6 could boot faster than rhel7 every day.
By comparison, Systemd feels like jumping on the back of a charging gazelle and hitting it with a salmon in the hopes it’ll go the other way, all the while it’s bleating and emitting and defecating from its regular port and a whole new journald port of its own choosing. And often tripping.
Runit has been solid and fast. I’ve seen it on several projects - I want to say alpine and proton/vm and gitlab’s own weird setup - and it’s never let me down. I wish rh could have seen that instead like I wish they picked James over Mike for automation.
the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.
i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(
an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat
It is? What issues are you having?
I’ve used the Jellycon plugin for a while and it worked amazing.kodi is really good for local media, but none of my media is local. instead of using the smartTV-style jellyfin UI, jellyfin indexes the media from the server and throws up a text-only list of media in a folder structure. if i rip another movie, it needs to be indexed.
though it is pulling the index and functioning as expected, it makes the experience feel like browsing in dolphin for spreadsheets instead of getting ready for movie night.
the experience was bad enough where i just plugged the old streaming stick back in and hid my failur. i didnt tell the wife about my experience (she hates the streaming stick and wanted an OSS option). i said i would deliver one, so she thinks i just haven’t done it yet. :(
Ah wait, maybe I can help!
When you tried it, were you using the Default Kodi skin? Because if so, the list view it uses by default does indeed look crappy, but it’s customizable!When you open the Movies or TV list, look at the bottom left, you should see a icon that looks like this:
What this means is, you can press the direction listed to open a options menu. So for example pressing Left when this is shown opens this sidebar:
Try changing the display mode from “List” to something like “Poster” and you get this:
The movies you see on this screenshot are all coming from my Jellyfin server, not too bad eh?
And this is just the beginning, if you look into the built-in Add-ons store in Kodi, there’s tons of third-party skins you can install, and thanks to the “Playlists” and “Widgets” system in Kodi, you can really fine tune your setup!
This is what my Kodi homescreen looks like with the Arctic: Zephyr Reloaded skin and a bunch of tweaking. It’s setup to show the next episodes of what I’m watching right away:
It’s all still coming down from my Jellyfin server. The icons on the left are shortcuts to open the full library view of the server instead of the local media, allowing me easy access to my library instead of having to navigate a bunch to reach the Jellycon Lists. You can customize these views too:
Now, setting this up can get pretty annoying, specially as all these settings seem to be 15 menus deep into Kodi and the skin settings and you might find yourself going back and forth quite a bit, but I think the end result is well worth it.
If you ever fancy giving it a try again, I’d recommend installing Kodi on your computer and playing with it there. When you got something you’re happy with, transferring the settings over Raspberry shouldn’t be too hard. Hope this helps!
whoa - this looks amazing!
i am definitely still in the working phase of wanting something, so i will be checking this out again within the week. thank you!