💾 Archived View for lesogorov.site › glogs › 2304 › Trying-a-SystemD-Distro-Again.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:39:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I hope I don't start another week-long Systemd post train again.
So today was my first full day off in a couple weeks so I decided to finally distro-hop and try out a Systemd distro like I had mentioned I wanted to do.
is SystemD free really for me?
My first choice was Debian Sid. I've been running Debian stable on my Gemini server and so far have had no complaints, so I figured I'd give it a shot on my laptop, just with the unstable repos so I could get newer software. The install went pretty smoothly, it was my first time using the expert install method over just upgrading a base install of stable. This resulted in fewer apt related hassles which is good since those are of my least favorite to try and solve.
Once I got it up and running I was fairly disappointed. I knew Debian didn't have the widest package selection in it's repos, but I was kinda shocked things like Lagrange weren't in there. However the most glaring issue was the 30 secs - 1 min wait I had to wait for on certain apps, most noticeably Firefox. Sure the first start isn't always the fastest, but in all my time of using Linux it's never been that slow. Additionally pinentry was similarly sluggish which made using passmenu nearly impossible. Once I got it all set up, I decided to just give up and try a different distro: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I had used tumbleweed a number of years ago and remembered it fondly, especially zypper. While not quite as streamlined as yay (or paru) on Arch, zypper does an outstanding job at finding what package you need to install, all in a very clear user interface. Plus yast comes in handy from time to time when you don't want to edit a config file. I didn't realize how fleshed out OpenSUSE really is, on a base install it has a large number of running services, everything coming pre-configured.
I had to manually compile a few programs for both unfortunately.
So far so good on the tumbleweed, I haven't had it installed for more than a couple hours though, so you may see me jumping around again.