Void Linux, is arguably one of the most underrated Linux distributions with incredible scripting potential. The article delves deep into some of my favorite features of it.
  •  d3Xt3r   ( @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz ) 
    6•1 year ago

    This is quite interesting, especially that tool to check changes made to /etc. Might have to give Void a try now. But does anyone know what the update cadence is like? Is it bleeding-edge like Arch, where you get new kernels and Mesa etc not long after upstream updates?

    Edit: Nevermind, looks like Void fails my freerdp test. Guess that seals the deal.

      •  d3Xt3r   ( @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz ) 
        9•1 year ago

        It’s just a check on the version number. As per my previous link, Void’s FreeRDP is still stuck on 2.x, whereas 3.x stable came out last December, with the latest stable being v3.4.0, released 3 weeks ago.

        Nix also fails this test btw, since they too are still stuck on 2.x - and this is an example I’ve been using often as an argument against Nix fanbois who tend to claim that Nixpkgs is equivalent or even superior to the AUR, when in reality that’s not the case.

        The reason why I’m so interested in 3.x is because it’s a major upgrade with a ton of QoL improvements. Any serious RDP user will want to switch to FreeRDP 3.x, especially if they’re a Wayland user / game over RDP /use RemoteApps (eg WinApps) etc. So I check the FreeRDP version of a distro as an indicator whether that distro is worth my time or not, hence why I call it the “freerdp test”. 3.x is also consider stable release btw, so there’s really no excuse for a distro not to package it and at least make it available - perhaps with a new name so as to not force an upgrade, if they’re concerned about compatibility issues.

  •  flying_sheep   ( @flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ) 
    6•1 year ago

    Services are bash scripts?

    Oh no. That’s horrifying. I’ll never go back to the bad old days where my system constantly has dozens of untestable buggy bash scripts running.

    I currently have zero bash scripts running on my system until I open steam, and there’s no world where I’d go back.

      •  flying_sheep   ( @flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ) 
        5•1 year ago

        POSIX shells are horrible unmaintainable bug factories.

        shellcheck is not enough to make them safe programming languages. They are acceptable only in an interactive context.

        Having anything encourage people to write POSIXy shell scripts is a design flaw.

          •  flying_sheep   ( @flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ) 
            3•1 year ago

            I don’t think those are better or worse. My point isn’t about some ancient far too limiting standard, but about how easy it is to wreck everything by not knowing some obscure syntactical rule. My issue is about implicit conversion between strings and arrays, about silently swallowing errors and so on. And the only shell languages that I know aren’t idiotic are nushell and Powershell.

            That KDE theme that nuked some user’s home directory? Used a bash script. That time the bumblebee graphics card switching utility deleted /var? Bash script. Any time some build system broke because of a space in a path: bash/ZSH/… script.

            Why would anyone make an init system based on shell scripts these days?