[sf-lug] News on some less "mainstream" distros

[acohen36]

As a reminder, I recently and previously wrote [01] about various distros 
with different desktops. Some Hopeful news and Questionable news on some 
of these, at least those I've recently seen so far.

Some hopeful news is that the systemd-free Devuan distro [02] is at least 
"planning" to come out with its Debian Stable/Stretch and Testing/Buster 
equivalents fairly soon. Devuan Ascii is similar to Stretch and is "In 
development", and Devuan Beowulf (intentional use of the same name as the 
Linux Beowulf clustering-management technology [03] ?)  is similar to 
Buster and is "Coming soon".

Also several pieces of what are to me Questionable distro news.

LinuxBBQ which I mentioned before in [01], is now recommending BORK! "an 
openbox minimal spin" [04]. That's unfortunate, b/c there is the usual 
meaning of "bork" in the tech world [05] to mean "Irreversibly damaged". 
Is LinuxBBQ's BORK! implying that if one installs this, it _may_ bork your 
machine according to this definition?? Ouch!


Partially quoting a recent Devuan mailing-list posting [06]
~~~~
..If you want sans-systemd that's rolling release, you have no shortage: 
Void, Funtoo, Gentoo. Devuan is the only committed sans-systemd that is 
version-release. Why would anyone want to change that?

If you like rolling release, why not switch to Void or Funtoo?
~~~~

IIRC, I previously mentioned Void Linux [07] in an SF-LUG post from three 
months ago here[08].  Advantages for both Devuan and Void Linux are that 
they have _multiplatform_ installation releases for architectures _other 
than_ just the current "gold standard" x86-64/amd64 (see [09] and [10] 
respectively), e.g., for 32bit x86 and RPi3's ARM. This newfangled, 
systemd-free, and gentoo-based Funtoo Linux [11], OTOH, currently lists 
_only_ 64bit, non-ARM installation releases[12]. To me, that fact of being 
stuck in "Betahood" seems to be a decided deficiency, and calls into 
question how successfull this systemd-free distro will be.

All this is my opinion only.
Please feel free to contribute your own.

-A

References
===================

[01]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q3/012765.html 
[02]https://devuan.org/ 
[03]http://www.beowulf.org/overview/
[04]https://linuxbbq.org
[05]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bork
[06]https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20170915.031152.4fddbada.en.html
[07]https://www.voidlinux.eu/ 
[08]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2017q2/012645.html
[09]https://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan/devuan_jessie/README.txt 
[10]https://www.voidlinux.eu/download/ 
[11] http://www.funtoo.org/Welcome 
[12]http://www.funtoo.org/Subarches 
===================



acohen36 at sdf.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org