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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: 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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (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.