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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by twistedcubic on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:57AM
I used Gentoo exclusively from 2002-2007, on the desktop and on my linode server. After the umpteenth emerge world resulted in broken printing (I teach, so this is a mission critical app for me), I tested Debian Etch on the server, then on the desktop, and never looked back. I've been using Debian stable ever since (Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, Wheezy, Jessie) and printing NEVER EVER breaks. The chances of me ever swicting back to Gentoo, or any other distro, is zero squared. Getting stuff done without ever having to fight your computer is nirvana.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:05AM
If you are happy with Debian then by all means stick with it! However, Gentoo - like Linux in general - has come a *long* way since 2007. The rough edges are a lot less rough. Just rough enough to grab onto and twist the way you like them, but not so rough that you cut yourself just trying to do basic things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:47AM
I went to Gentoo around 2004 or so, despite the annoying inflated exuberance of the user community, because I liked the idea behind it, and its supposed simplicity in upgrading, and because I didn't feel I had time to spend on a Linux From Scratch. I did an install on a server and it seemed to work ok. However, when I did a system upgrade as per the official instructions, my system wouldn't even boot. Dependency hell would have been ok because I had been through those wars with Red Hat, but the kernel wouldn't even load.
After spending several hours on that trying to get it to boot, which included dealing with the self-congratulatory "friendly" funroll_loops community (whenever it got to the point where the easy and obvious things were tried and didn't work, it always evolved into "Don't blame Gentoo for you being an idiot, because only an idiot could screw it up") I threw in the towel and installed CentOS. That went very smooth, and yum almost never let me down.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:10PM
Back when I was using Red Hat, I like them. When they ditched the professional edition without warning I switched to Debian, and I usually like that. I'm not real thrilled with systemd, but finally the rough edges seem to be smoothing out...I hope. At least I can currently boot from images on two different partitions, and that was broken for quite a long time, and I started searching for a better distribution...but they finally seem to have fixed it again. It still requires surgery before each install to change the UUIDs in ftab of the system I intend to keep so that they instead mount to file system identifiers, or the boot will be broken after the install, however. YUCK.
I know why they made the change, but they don't seem to realize just how broken a solution they have adopted.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:50PM
> After the umpteenth emerge world resulted in broken printing (I teach, so this is a mission critical app for me), I tested Debian Etch on the server, then on the desktop, and never looked back.
For real, man? I teach, too. I use Slackware-Current, which is technically the alpha for Slackware's releases but is routinely used instead as a rolling release distribution. Printing occasionally breaks, as do other things. It would break less if I only updated the software on my computer once ever two years and only ran software at least four years out of date like you do, but that would be a rather extreme solution. Here's my solution instead. It contains three steps:
1. Test whether is printing is still working after I update CUPS and fix it if it isn't.
2. In case I forget to do step 1, don't wait until the last minute to print out exams and stuff, which is a good idea anyway.
3. In case I forget to do step 2, print from another computer or the printer itself.
> The chances of me ever swicting back to Gentoo, or any other distro, is zero squared. Getting stuff done without ever having to fight your computer is nirvana.
Happy you found something that works for you. You sort-of went from one extreme (rolling releases) to the other (already obsolescent biennial releases), but ok then.
On another note, printing breaks more often than other, more complex functions of the computer. I think CUPS just sucks.