Is it maybe too soon to talk about the "philosophy" behind artix/devs?
I remember when Arch first came out, the KISS principle, the "let's do a minimalist intervention and let the users do what they will with their system" style was what drew me to it to begin with. Then over time it became more and more "well we the devs like it this particular way, if you want it different, put it in aur/talk amongst yourselves in the forum." And we did, and it was fine, because Arch was great, and the changes werent too intrusive.
Then came, of course, gtk3, and systemd and some other things, and the big war between "whatever happened to KISS and do it your way" vs the devs "we only meant that for ourselves, not for users at large, and we like it this way" ways of seeing arch, with many users accusing the devs of backstabbing the community, and so on and on, and a lot of bad blood. but that's neither here or there now. We who didnt want systemd forced upon us moved on to other places, and those of us who ended up at manjaro-openrc/arch-openrc are now here.
Where do you artix devs/users stand? I personally liked the original vision - maintaining a tight system base with no hardcoded preferences (like a specific init system, glibc system, etc) or at least the option to break away from the dev's preferred methods, and build from there through community/aur etc, which is how I remember Arch being originally. I know the devs and maintainers do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of packaging, maintaining, etc and have the most say in how they want their distro to be run, but so does the community no? hence the questions, and hence this thread. Where do we want this distro to go? do we have a choice? do the devs want it to go in a specific direction? I'd like to hear your thoughts, all who want to invest time and energy into this new "home". And perhaps the dev heads can set it down in writing (in time) so we all can refer to it in the future.
And the main reason i want to ask now, when artix is so young, is because we didnt ask this of archlinux early enough, at least not fromt he community standpoint, and perhaps a bit before systemd came along we started asking, and by then it was too late and we were basically told to stfu and take accept what the devs fed us. And if that's going to be the attitude, I'd like to know ahead of time before investing too much time and energy.
God I now recognise you I started with Arch 2005 but had to register again in 2008.
I think you are asking the right questions and yes they need establishing now not later as it can then be to late,
I have stayed with arch as in reality I could not find a distro that fitted my needs but Arch has failed and still fails in what I believe.
You should have the freedom to choose and not be intimidated or banned if you do not agree.
I had high hopes for Manjaro but again Manjaro openRC was used just to get popularity not the right reasons. When Artoo made the announcement of Artix well it just clicked I think I was one of the 1st registered forum member if not the 1st after the devs.
I think and hope the Artix team will not let us down but its going to be a ongoing battle with Arch as Arch will not bend a inch to help.
You're actually member #2! :)
I wonder how you managed to register
before me...
i usually keep a low profile on forums and just ask/answer questions if something comes up.
I've been wary about distros since the arch devs pretty much told long time members to accept their ways or take a hike. The whole "we never said freedom of choice applied to the community, just to the devs" was the last straw for me.
I jumped from manjaro/arch-openrc to artix a few days after the announcement, just to make sure it was a serious effort. I'm probably in the low 20s/30s as far as membership (we're starting to sound like a weird secret club lol)
Number 2? You newbies :) I was here before the forum was created.
I was the one banned at Manja for insisting Manja should make it a public declaration that it is now a systemd-only distribution instead of portraying itself as all-init system in distrowatch. Then a few days later distrowatch eliminated the init system as a primary characteristic in the system's description (top-left summary).
Philosophy?
"there is something VERY fishy about the way developers in Arch, Debian, RH, are defending system-d."
The debate has been beyond "reason" for a long time. It is like mechanics all around you agreeing you should have a radio beacon installed inside the crankcase of the engine of you vehicle, because it makes it run easier and better. "Quicker too".
It is a feature I tell you!
If I honestly answer the OP, it will end up with a rant on internet communities, socialist group "we" think, the illusion of users having a say in development and so called branding.
In other words there is no artix philosophy, and there can not be one as that would constitute a "socialist we".
I see. So let's say it 10 of you and each has his/her own philosophy and just meet to work on Artix. How long do you think this would last, if it were true?
Very disappointing answer.
I've come to believe the choices of the Arch devs revolve around doing the least work possible. systemd made their life easier, ignoring their community puts less restraints on them, and keeping the system "simple" (when it isn't - systemd) contribute to this ideal of theirs. They have a right to do so, obviously, but loyal users have suffered as a result. Thankfully, those users don't have to swallow their pride and keep using Arch. It's free software, so of course it got forked.
I don't think Artix will suffer the same fate any time soon, people here are passionate and focused enough.
I was always led to believe the Arch devs stand has always been we are a group of friends "this is what we use you are welcome to share if you don't like it use something else, we not need you we are not interested in popularity" a very strange philosophy indeed.
Well, the truth is always something uncomfortable, yet it needs to be told.
Consider this, from a dev pov. It comes rather strange that you read on linux forums something about "we".
Who is that "we", if users talk about eg feature requests? Frankly, there is no "we", there is devs, the team, the we, and there is users, who are not the "we" from team pov.
You cannot allow users to have a say in development, no matter the decision to be taken. You also don't allow people to build a bridge without some knowledge of statics. Sure, as dev you can ask users for their view, but in the end, it is not users who decide or implement something.
I think we should let the issue rest. If there was a "philosophy" behind artix it would have been that as declared by "we the developers" (meaning you Artoo and the rest of the team). Since there isn't there is not much we can talk about, unless it is for "we the users" to criticize the lack of a philosophy.
What we do know about artix is what was published by "Artix", a technical exercise of how to make Arch still be Arch without systemd. Artix wouldn't be artix with systemd. At this point someone may ask "but what is arch-bang then?". It is two things, arch with openbox and artix with openbox. To some this constitutes or defines a specific philosophy.
It is what it is, it is our fault if we read more into it than it actually says.
:-X
Right, artix is arch without systemd, and in terms of philosophy, I follow the simple old unix philosophy.
Its basically too much talk and too less contributions, hence there is a line between users and team, while every user can become a team member by simply contributing something, be it artwork, package maintaining, forum moderating whatever is useful to improving the distro.
I don't think we really need a philosophy for Artix as Artix is not something that we have came up from scratch, I think what defines us (as dev team and as distro) is just that we will never knell down and accept an specific init system to take control of the entire system enslaving the user freedom.
People on dev team is quite different from each other, the only common ground that we all share is that we believe in freedom.
Does a "philosophy" really matter? Think about it, if Artix takes a turn for the worse (doubt it), it'll just be forked and development will continue under a new name; Linux distros are like a phoenix, once development ends for one distro, development picks up for a new one. Point in case, the philosophy is in the distro itself, if we don't like where Artix is heading we'll voice our opinions or simply fork development, that's one of the pros of using Linux.
TL;DR: Don't expect any kind of deep philosophy from Artix any time soon.
I switched to Arch from Gentoo in 2004 solely because I was tired of compiling (and fried a laptop in the process); the amount of freedom Gentoo gives is indeed second to none. However, the way of Arch back then was fairly in line with my own, plus I liked pacman. I didn't read much about the Arch philosophy, "lightweight", "i686-optimized" and "KISS" were enough for me.
Now, laden with the wisdom of a few more years, I can safely say that I don't believe in philosophies and manifestos, they're like opinions of which everyone out there has got one. Neither do I believe that anyone was ever really bound by them. See what happened to Arch after Judd left; KISS went down the toilet or, worse, used to justify incredibly stupid decisions like the move of all binaries to /usr/bin. The adoption of systemd, however, wasn't a stupid decision - it was politics. Also, don't forget that systemd wasn't back then the monstrous octopus it has become these days so it wasn't that bad.
But, eventually, it became unbearable (https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php). What could I do then as a simple user? Cry, demand, request? No, I contributed. Thanks to the Gentoo devs, openrc and eudev came to be and thanks to Artoo and Aaditya (who had already left Arch for Manjaro), the first implementations of an alternative init system (that's how bad it had become, real init systems became alternatives) was possible and I glued some packages together to form an unofficial repository, [openrc-eudev], hosted on Dropbox no less. Then decided to launch a site about the project (https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org), ostensibly hoping to bring any leftover oldtimers together and secretly hoping for some help. A year or so later, Chris (Cromer) appeared and gave new breath to the project, now [arch-openrc], taking it over and overhauling it. The community Manjaro OpenRC edition from Artoo had also hit the street and I felt, for the first time in years, hope. In fact, they both were doing such a good job that I had semi-retired, tending only occasionally to the site. I thought I had done my part in saving the world.
Then, in July 2017, an email from Chris pulled me out of my nirvana: "We can't run forever behind Arch, we're forking it! Are you in?"
The rest is history. (https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/news.php) I won't retire any time soon. Yes, fuck philosophies; we've got work to do!
P.S. We do care about our users, we do get frustrated about reported installation errors, we do try to sneak out of our real life jobs to fix bugs. We would certainly like to satisfy every single reasonable request, implement more init systems, have thousands more packages in our repos but we just can't at the moment as our resources are limited. Want a philosophy? Here's one: join us!
[EDIT: systemd-free.org is now systemd-free.artixlinux.org]
Thanks all, though as pointed out the "philosophy" seems to be "we package and develop init agnostic Artix distribution" which is fine. I agree that there is no "we" (outside the dev team and even then it's more a common purpose rather than a guided vision). I just dont want to be here a year or more later and find out that dev1 and dev2 who put the most work into it decide that next-big-iteration-of-package is the ONLY way to go. As long as there is freedom (and room) for choice, I'm fine with whatever you guys do.
all I ask is not to be forced into any particular box ;)
Hmm, that is somewhat difficult.
Just an example, we already forced openrc to be default init.
While packages are compiled to be no systemd, ie supporting generally any init except systemd, we got the openrc layer on top.
The artix team could decide in the future to switch to s6 to be default init.
Other example is elogind, its default and not consolekit2 for technical reasons.
Point is, "force" is basically a two edged sword, we also do it in fact.
Why not include consolekit2 in the system repository for those that would prefer it over elogind? Is it simply because of the trouble-shooting that could come from it?
The state of ck2 atm doesn't justify the effort. It would require many separate packages specifically compiled against ck2, eg pam, polkit, NM, sddm, plus a kernel change audit_syscall enabled, and unmaintained pm-utils for power management and unmaintained cgmanager for cgroups1. Most DEs work much better with elogind, and with ck2, you also need specific ck2 patched DE packages.
Not gonna happen any time soon to see ck2 in repos, unless ck2 closes the gap to elogind and reaches feature parity.
For those at home keeping score...
Eric S. Raymond's musings about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" have been turned into the "Cathedral and the Big Box Stores" thanks to the likes of Red Hat, Gnome, et al. Seems that TRUE user contributed based software is largely disappearing. And its because of this "branding", "rapid release", and agile methodology pushing for linux distributions from RH, Gnome, et al. that gave rise to and forced systemd on us all. (IMHO)
So when the systemd fiasco finally hit Arch - I was bummed. I chose not to have that software. Like nous stated above, gentoo (or the funtoo derivative headed by former gentoo BDFL Daniel Robbins) was too much on compiling from source. My server is setup with funtoo, but I wanted something for the desktop I could "just use", albeit without systemd. Choices were/are few and far between. At least Google was sympathetic and pointed me in useful direction towards the earlier incarnation of nosystemd Arch.
And here we are...
What is the Artix philosophy? Arch without the crapware?
Or am I putting too blunt a point on this...
Even if only for keeping systemd out, yes.
And, personally, I'm all for unofficial user repos; for example one for consolekit2 along with the assorted packages
@artoo mentioned, would be the perfect example of user contribution.
It would provide a ready-to-use testbed that would show the status of ck2 and in due time, when/if ck2 implements missing features, receives support from DEs and works well enough for everyday use, it could be moved to the official repos with a vengeance. Devs love ready meals!
no. that was never the model anyway
How many users used and loved the Arch BSD scripts simple to use, just 1 file rc.conf handled the whole management of startup and startup apps so simple that is what drew me to arch.
The good of Arch still is its stability forget the crap Manjaro users are fed.
The bad is forcing users to use systemd instead of embracing choice, which is a back stab as choice is what made Arch popular in the 1st place.
The user chose every single item they installed now its mainly meta packages split down that in itself is still better than no choice at all as per the Manjaro, you will choose a desktop we will choose what you use on it by default.
The polarization between individual pkg developers and "corporate" structures I believe is very misleading and false. And I am trully devoted in supporting the underdog against the powerful even with neighborhood cats.
Not all collective effort has to be of the corporate hierarchical type. The true separation, I believe, exists between formal organization and loose "free" association, to which also individual or small group enterprise belongs. The ten people that make up the team named Urnix (imaginative name) are all really nice, friendly, helpful, tireless, good friends, ..... but Urnix is just a name for that small group of friends. Urnix stands for nothing, no defined goal, no publicly known organizational structure, we don't know what they believe in or why they are doing it. On the other hand you may have three who are not even friendly between them or to anyone else, under the nametag Strunix that has very strict commitment to specific goals, the way they work, committed to why they are doing what they are doing, and what they will not do to achieve their goal. I go with Strunix, Urnix or Joeblo are not to be trusted or even worth a try.
The real difference is expected commitment to continuity. An individual or a loose/free association at any given point vanishes in thin air. A formal organization with well defined goals, values, principles, commitment, has continuity unless all long term goals have been met. Even if after a while not a single person from the founding members is around (quit, died, thrown out, etc.) the organization still exists as long as the goals of its foundation have not yet been met.
Fungalnet can publish the world\s best browser tomorrow, that is most secure, light in resources, has zero bugs, and more functionality than any other. Who is to say that it will be around and functional when the system it runs on has changed, the day after tomorrow? Then fungalnet vanishes and reappears as JackO and publishes a great mail/news reader pkg?
The hell with the "little guy" then! It is not the size that matters but the content of what it is they stand for.
Arch without systemd is good enough for me! 8)
Have been using archbang artix/openrc for a few weeks now and loving it. Well done to the devs on making simple init scripts like openrc do there best with arch linux.
Roy Maples?
Philosophy is everything. It governs every facet of our lives, yet modern society is largely ignorant of that fact.
Same goes for this question.
In my opininin the reason the linux kernel project has been so outstanding, consistently, for so many years is a clear, often stated, base philosophy. A philosophy brutally enforced by LT and that is a factor in almost every code decision.
So here is my attempt at a Artix Flag Manifesto. ( in order of priority)
1) Bang for Buck.
Concentrate effort in places that give the greatest benefit.
2) Upstream is not God.
Upstream GNU projects can AND DO get it wrong, it is up to the only guys left in the chain , the distro, to correct those mistakes. Likewise it is up to the distros to pressure upstream to head in the right direction.
3) End users do exist.
Why do we do this if not to , in some way, satisfy an end user? Without a user Linux is an excercise in computer science, just like Unix was. Its analogous to a chef, you have to make food that most people like, but you CAN NOT make food that everyone will like.
4) Linux is not alone.
Ms, Apple, Android, BSD, do exist, plus a host of other wierder Linux based projects. No reason to put the blinkers on. And no reason not to directly compete.
5) Everyone contributes.
Only really big distros can afford apathetic users, in these early days everyone should contribute, in whatever way they are capable.
I have no idea to tell you the truth
Maybe?
But then are we not into a English language discourse?
Am I being informative or pontificating. ? Does it reallly matter?
But if it really really offends will re-write ( honest gov ) lol.
Philosophy as the urge to learn, the drive to acquire as much knowledge as possible, does define the things we do, or we wouldn't do them. You can hardly want something that you don't know that it can exist. Even those that seek a relationship with god is because they have believed she exists. The difference among philosophies (if it could possibly have a plural) is the methodology used to acquire knowledge. There is the scientific methodology and then there is everything else.
Now GWB would use the excuse for the most enormous stupidity he advocated that god told him so. So if god tells you something it must be true and it exists. End of conversation.
If I tell you that vinegar is an acidic solution and you don't believe me, there is a way to continue the conversation so we can figure out who is right and who is not.
It is fine but what I have learned as I've grown older is to take myself less and less seriously as I grow older.
Please, leave politics and religion out of this thread and this forum. Thank you.
Philosophically, such statement is not appreciated, it tell more about you than about anything else.
Please refrain from that. Danke.
Never Again
No Pasaran,
etc.
The chief developer of Artix is German, but that shouldn't be the reason why you shouldn't have made this unfortunate comment.
For those who haven't understood yet:
Artix began as a systemd-free Arch, is aimed towards intermediate to advanced users and never promised nobody anything. Take it or leave it.End-of-thread.