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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: 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.
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