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posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-devuan-than-devuan dept.

DistroWatch reports

Geeks determined to resist the systemd juggernaut have several options. For me, the most interesting project is Devuan, a fork of Debian. [...] However, it does have a few flaws

[...] It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running that led me to Refracta, a unique distro that fills a niche that has long been neglected. Refracta's existence predates the systemd wars--it was originally based on Debian 5.0, otherwise known as "Lenny". But when Debian 8.0 "Jessie" went full systemd, Refracta moved to the Devuan camp.

Refracta's chief selling point is this: it's a live image that can be quickly installed, customized, and re-installed again. So basically you can roll your own live CD, configured for your hardware and tweaked to suit your personal tastes. It is currently my favorite distro, and I'd recommend it to any Linux geek who has had a little bit of experience. A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness, but once you've got the basics down, Refracta is easy to get used to.

It's also worth mentioning that even without being installed, a Refracta live CD or USB stick makes an excellent diagnostic and rescue tool. It contains quite a few command line utilities that aren't in a default Devuan or Debian installation, including gddrescue, testdisk, smartmontools, hdparm, lm-sensors, iftop, and iptraf.

[...] Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA.

[...] Starting with version 8.0, Refracta has gone whole-hog at banishing systemd, not to mention PulseAudio. [...] One could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:26AM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:26AM (#418818) Journal

    A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness,

    Are we confusing Desktop Environments with Linux here? No mention is made that the default DE is XFCE4

    Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA

    Those are not alternatives. Its rare for any linux system NOT to run both.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:42AM (#418836)

    Yeah, pretty rare indeed. Pulseaudio is a mixer that uses ALSA (the kernel driver portion, anyway). Can't have pulseaudio without ALSA but ALSA works just fine without pulseaudio. ALSA doesn't clobber your CPU usage like pulseaudio nor does it suffer outrageous latency like pulseaudio.

  • (Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:12AM

    by Veyrdite (6386) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:12AM (#418846)

    Two statements here:

    1) Those are not alternatives

    Technically correct, but misleading. Pulseaudio requires ALSA as a backend, so they're not alternatives to each other. But from a user's perspective they can be.

    Some applications only support pulseaudio and some only support ALSA. Others support both or combinations of them along with other audio backends.

    2) It's rare for any linux system NOT to run both.

    Incorrect, however I suspect you mean "desktop Linux distros".

    Android devices: few run pulseaudio
    Popular desktop distributions: most run pulseaudio
    Server setups: few run pulseaudio

    Regardless of whether or not you like pulseaudio, it's wise to provide support for multiple audio backends in your applications. This allows your software to more easily be ported to other platforms and allows users to use a different backend if a bug is introduced in one that breaks your application. The vast majority of the time these problems do not crop up and the use of backend is transparent to the user, but when something does go wrong it all starts to matter.

    Alas, it does take time to add support to multiple backends. I've read ALSA's interface can be a pain, so it might be worth using a library that supports multiple backends. I'm writing from a user's perspective, I've never used an audio lib.

    Supporting multiple backends also helps make sure that your code can still work in ten years time from now. If one backend is difficult to get running or no longer exists, then other options can be used instead. Whether or not people care about this thing is hit and miss: some devs don't care, others do. Up to you.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:12AM

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:12AM (#418868) Journal

      Pulse does not require Alsa, it merely requires A back end. Just about any would do.

      Also does not require pulse. It has its own facilities for stream managment, multiplexing, etc.

      Pulse is just the last in a long line of glue layers of that shambles we call the Linux sound architecture.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:13AM

        by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:13AM (#418869) Journal

        Also does not require pulse

        Meant to say Alsa does not require pulse.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:07PM (#418978)

        A glue layer introduced by a serial-NIHer named Poettering.

        The only thing PA has going for it is that it has a central volume control for each program that hooked into it. But then i wonder how many actually makes use of that even over at Windows where the idea apparently came from.

        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:52AM

          by Marand (1081) on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:52AM (#419300) Journal

          The only thing PA has going for it is that it has a central volume control for each program that hooked into it. But then i wonder how many actually makes use of that even over at Windows where the idea apparently came from.

          It also has the flat-volumes "feature" that can damage your hearing and/or audio equipment. (ref. #1 [fedoraproject.org], ref. #2 [reddit.com])

          I made the mistake of installing PA recently for a program that didn't have ALSA support and got bitten by this. Upstream default is flat-volumes=yes, so Debian used the same. Initially just annoyed me a bit because I didn't like the weird way it interacted with the now-useless "master" volume, up until another application hijacked the volume and set it to 100%. I use headphones and typically consider the volume to be comfortable at ~15% so that was not fun. I don't think it caused any hearing or hardware damage -- though it may have and it's just minor -- but it could have.

          Terrible fucking decision that can actually cause physical harm. Good job, PA devs.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @06:10PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @06:10PM (#423199)

            Makes one love the alsa default of zero master and mute whenever an audio device is initialized.

            • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday November 06 2016, @09:34PM

              by Marand (1081) on Sunday November 06 2016, @09:34PM (#423272) Journal

              Not quite the same thing, but yes. People have complained about ALSA's mute default for years but it is the sane, safe choice.

              Flat volumes is a mistake by design, but allowing new apps to set volume to 100% on launch is a special kind of stupid. Usually Lennart's software's poor design is only annoying, rather than literally dangerous to one's health.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24AM (#418902)

    A distro without pulseaudio is probably a good thing if you want/need to use JACK.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:25AM (#418929)

      Yeah, well you don't know JACK.