💾 Archived View for sud0nim.smol.pub › distro-hopping-hell captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:35:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-11)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Sorry for not updating the glog (not that anyone reads it lol) for a while, I was busy with school and something else I'll get into some other post.
Anyway, yesterday I decided I had too many issues with void linux on my desktop and that it was time to hop again. For the past 3 or so years I have primarily ran Artix linux, an arch derivative without systemd. I personally do not have extreme opinions on systemd other than as an end user it is more frustrating to use than openrc or runnit, so I prefer to use those. After these 3 years I have come to the conclusion that systemd-less versions of systemd distros are just a pain. Sure they work fine 99% of the time but then for whatever reason their version of a package has an issue, but the original distro's version relies on a part of systemd so you have to find some workaround or spin up a vm just to do one task. For this reason I wanted to pick a distro that is systemd-less by design and not a systemd-less re-spin of an already existing distro.
You might be saying, "Hey aren't you already on void, doesn't that match your criteria pretty much to a T?". Yes, that's why I picked it, but for whatever reason I just was dissatisfied with my overall experience. I had happily run void before but for whatever reason this time around was more problematic. I was having issues with gpg and getting pinentry to work and applications just kinda lagged.
So I decided I was going to try hopping to alpine linux at approximately 09:00. The install went smoothly but then getting Xorg to launch was giving me issues. I had run the setup-xorg script included in alpine but that by default only allows the root user so I needed to install a few more packages and add my user to a few groups. by 10:00 I had gotten Xorg running but my panel, dzen2, was flashing and audio wasn't working. After considering jumping to pipewire to maybe fix the issue I decided that maybe alpine just wasn't really the right choice. It is great, I use alpine through postmarketos on one of my phones and let me tell you the apk package manager is faster than parallelized pacman. I thought maybe I was having the issue because alpine uses musl instead of glibc so I gave another try with a tried and tested old favorite of mine: Devuan.
I ran Devuan for about 6 months in 2020 as well as debian on my laptop at the time so I was a little excited to be back in the deb/apt side of things. I generally try to avoid apt because out of all the package managers it creates the most issues in my experience. Now mind you I have this experience from trying to run the unstable branch while still having access to the stable repos, but even when I've just ran the pure unstable branch it takes a while before all the upgrade bugs are ironed out. Nevertheless I was excited to see if it had changed any since my last try. So I downloaded the most recent unstable branch iso, installed, and was greeted with a vga-scaled tty. I'm probably using the wrong term but the output screen size was something like 600x480, very small. I've had this happen before and most of the time once xorg starts its back to normal. So I got xorg running, still vga-scaled. So I tried xrandr, the only option was 600x480. I tried xfce's monitor settings (has worked in the past), no dice. So then I thought a fresh install from the stable branch and upgrading to unstable from there might work. NOPE! Now we were in 1920x1080 but both my monitors had the same screen, and no amount of xrandr was helping. Plus a number of packages I use just were not present in the default repos and deb-get, Martin Wimpress's new aur-for-deb, didn't allow me to run it on devuan. So now at 12:00 it was time to jump again.
I've never run a source based distro for more than a week. I've tried to like gentoo but portage causes me far more confusion than it solves and I always run into an issue after a few packages are installed. However ever since I've found kiss linux, I've wanted to run it. It seems so elegant, so small, so kiss-philosophy, and as far as I can tell, it is, I've just never gotten it installed and booting. This time around, I had a kernel installed and all the base packages rebuilt by 16:00, and it was time to install grub. "great it installed without an issue, now lets generate the default config ... NOPE!" for whatever reason it didn't like the disk I was installing to and at this point my patience was running thin. I had just wasted pretty much an entire day distro-hopping and I just wanted a booting system by the night. So at around 17:00 I flashed the void iso onto my usb stick and started the installation.
"WAIT you went BACK to void after leaving it that morning?!"
Yep. But this time I thought I'd just try the musl version of void, I've never used it before and after having no issues with package availability on alpine with musl, I thought it might be worth a try. For whatever reason this was the smoothest and I mean smoothest, without a single issue, install I've ever had from a bare bones distro. Maybe I had a arch install which was smoother but if I did it was a distant memory. I was a bit smarter in how I copied over my configs and sure enough all the issues I left for that morning had resolved themselves.
So after a long day of hopping I'm back pretty much where I started.
That's the thing with hopping, whenever I think I need a new distro to try out I always end up just preferring the thing I just left. I think the only reason I didn't leave void immediately after I had last installed it on my desktop around 2 months ago was because I kept my artix install on the other partition, so I could always go right back. I'm going to give this a solid try, I really don't want to go back to artix. If I find I want to hop again I'm forcing myself to try NixOS as a punishment.