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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: 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.

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