💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~jara25 › gemlog › 2023-04-28.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 18:56:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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So it turns out that there's a critical bug in one of the live ISOs for Devuan Linux, which is the Linux distro that I am currently using. The relevant forum thread is here:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5679
I do not use the desktop-live ISOs, but many people do, and this is rather frustrating to hear about. The current fix at the moment is rather obscure too. There is no news about this security problem on Devuan's home page at the time of this writing, so how is a new user supposed to know that they need to download these .deb files from some random SourceForge site before installing from the desktop-live ISO? What if they do not even know what a .deb file is? How are they supposed to discover the forum thread from the home page?
It reminds me of another incident many months ago when some signing keys expired:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5213
...so did they have nothing in place to check for that at the time?
These incidents make me question if the Devuan team is capable enough. I understand that this is a volunteer-driven project and that people make mistakes, but since Devuan Linux is an operating system, which serves as the foundation for everything else, the expectations tend to be higher than many other types of projects. The team's communication, as illustrated by the second forum thread I linked, leaves much to be desired. Deriding the Devuan community itself for not noticing the problem, when there are many valid reasons why the average user will never notice, leaves a bad impression and makes people not want to contribute to the project. I have been lurking the Devuan community for a few years, and their development processes have been always rather ad-hoc, with little formal documentation on how to actually contribute to the project.
I have been using Devuan for several years, and I have tried to give the Devuan team the benefit of the doubt, even when that stupid April Fool's joke happened a few years ago. I thought that my days of distro-hopping is over. Sadly, I need to research and try out different distros yet again. Unfortunately, I do not like systemd, so my options are more limited than others. I do acknowledge that systemd is fine for many people, and that's perfectly fine. Everyone has their own preferences. Personally, I find systemd to be too bloated.
The distro that I am considering switching to the most is Void Linux. It is not as user-friendly as other distros since it expects that the user has prior Linux knowledge, and there is less documentation on Void compared to Debian or Arch, but I think I can handle it. It seems that I have a lot of control to shape the system the way I want it to if I put in enough effort, compared to distros such as Ubuntu which can feel too restricting for me sometimes. I have a laptop that I consider my "experimental" system where I try things out before applying it to my desktop, so I will install Void on my laptop first and see how it goes. I know the Void Linux community is small, but from browsing their website and GitHub, their development process seems more formal and more controlled, and there is better documentation on how to contribute. There are a few packages missing in Void that I use in Devuan, however, but hopefully I can find ways around that.
I am not happy that I wrote this article since I know that maintaining a Linux distribution is hard work and often a thankless task, but I am just so frustrated that a project I rely on every day has these problems attached to it. I would be more forgiving if there was proper communication that acknowledges these mistakes without blaming the users, but the way these issues are handled and conveyed to the users is unacceptable to me.