Antix vs Devuan

[Member xinomilo]

Helpful

Up

0

::

my 2c on the subject, as a daily devuan ceres (=debian sid) user for the past 5 years… not rating good/bad, just my experience..

packages :
devuan uses its own repos for some systemd-free debian modified packages + debian repos for most packages (with rewrites in devuan mirrors). so, pretty much the same, but i think that antiX has many more packages/tools in its own repos.. always had the question though, of why compile eg. another firefox, 2 versions of libreoffice and other packages that already exist on Debian(?). but i like that ungoogled-chromium is available, along with seamonkey and other packages..
(probably need to do more antiX training/searching around to get answers, if i ever find some time)
antiX also has some great tools that Debian/Devuan lacks. (eg. chroot-rescue has saved me a lot of time, for a few times…)
being a sid user for ~15years, i think antiX sid is really really unstable 😀 . can’t recall a time i didn’t have a dependency hell or broken system when dist-upgrading to antiX sid. Debian/Devuan sid is stable most of the time tbh.

kernel :
i think it’s also been written elsewhere here, a kernel metapackage to pull latest antiX kernel (eg. antix-kernel-5.10, antix-kernel-4.9 , etc) would be much useful imho. ) but i find antiX kernel performing very well, so i’m happy to have antiX repos installed in Devuan, just for that (alongside stock Debian and linux-libre). 🙂

init :
devuan is mostly concentrated on sysvinit. openrc and runit are supposedly supported, but not really. (with a limited core team that mostly uses sysvinit, it makes sense.). so. runit (that i’m using) on devuan is mostly sysvinit dependant (same as in debian …). a few details have already been posted in the past in this forum too, iirc..
tbh, prefer the antiX way there. closer to artix/void way, which looks “cleaner”. in general, i wish runscripts could be copied from one distro to another with little-to-none effort, but that seems utopic atm.. different runit implementations across distros, no interoperability… 🙁
also good to see antiX using libseatd in latest version, other systemd-free distros seem happy sticking with elogind – not exploring other choices.

desktop:
used MATE, LXDE in the past without trouble in Devuan (switching DEs often just for tests), but with antiX had a hard time using a DE. iirc, slim was a big block for those, but not sure – been some time since last try. using openbox currently in Devuan and hopefully i’ll make a personal openbox respin with antiX in the future.
tbh, don’t like so many items in antiX menus. i get it that there are so many antiX goodies (as seen in /usr/local/bin – don’t know if i find all these useful for default install) that add menu items, but there’s eg. a package in antiX that puts like 20 items (iirc) in Internet section.. requires more scrolling in menus that i like.

lean+mean :
antiX performs much better that any other distro i tried in older hw. eg. last time (=a couple of weeks ago), in a mini laptop from 2006 (32bit), antiX installed in 15-20′, while any other distro i tried (devuan/debian/elementary/lubuntu/lxle) failed or took hours to install.. and performed similarly…
on current working laptop (2016), stripped down Devuan w/ openbox, performs similarly to vanilla antiX in terms of resources, so can’t say i see big difference there. (yes, there might be a difference with default Devuan XFCE, but haven’t really tried that… 😀 )

community:
devuan forums are really tolerant to neonazis/racists. there’s racist/nazi comments in its forums that moderators keep around for some reason. so, as a strong antifascist, i find myself mostly aligned to antiX from a political aspect. (great to have at least one antifa/politically aware distro!).
like the fact that devuan has it’s own gitlab instance, open for community members to register. (no need for gitlab.com, bitbucket.com, github.com, other commercial platforms)
reportbug is nicely modified in Devuan to help users file bugs in packages bug tracker (recognizes/submits to both Debian/Devuan bug trackers). so, very helpful.
irc channel was more active in devuan, antiX channel seemed mostly dormant (if i’m not mistaken)..
in general, would like to see antiX and other distros (including Devuan) using smaller collective+foss tools and not big-tech/proprietary, but oh well.
(eg. framagit.org, weblate, nextcloud).

2c + correct me where i might be wrong..

[Member ModdIt]

Helpful

Up

0

::

xinomilo wrote

I think antiX sid is really really unstable</blockquote,
can’t recall a time i didn’t have a dependency hell or broken system when dist-upgrading to antiX sid

Having upgraded to and run sid over a couple of years I am unable to correlate with your experience.
I had recent issues with missing and mismatching libs. That is to be expected with debian moving fast
toward a soft freeze. The system still ran each time so I just did daily checks, the situation resolved
when upstream was ready and my mirror synched.

Bad update experience can often be caused by an out of synch mirror, that has happened several times in past
couple of years, Aachen was very rough for a while.

Only major issue I often face is with Nvidia drivers, for that no blame on antiX.

Before I moved to antiX I ran arch based, left after massive issues during transitional periods.
eg, major lib changes.

Faschism, no way I will use or support Devuan, I did, some time ago that changed.

Devuan is as you state openly tolerant of faschism and racism as expressed in forum comments.

Without any response from Moderators or devs = I conclude they are in agreement or at least in collaboration.
I am openly and strongly anti faschist and not a supporter of racism in any form or guise.

Desktop and tools, remove what you do not use, add what you like. I find all round best is ICEWM.
There is no systemd dependency madness to cope with so pretty easy, with your quoted 15 years of experience on
sid that is nothing daunting 🙂

• This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by ModdIt.

[Member techore]

Helpful

Up

0

::

ModdIt wrote:

Before I moved to antiX I ran arch based, left after massive issues during transitional periods.
eg, major lib changes.

+1

Love arch but if you have more than one or two computers, it starts to be a bit of a burden to maintain–ignoring systemd which I dispise. Also, I’d prefer to use something that I can put a family member or friend on and maintain that I am actively using as well. If they need something more elaborate, I can put them on antiX’s sister distro, MX Linux.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Regarding Arch Linux, the ONLY Arch derivative that has stood the test of time, at least for me, is EndeavourOS.

I’ve been able to keep it intact for a couple of years.

Once upon a time I had Manjaro working well and I thought perhaps the Arch ecosystem was improving then I experienced a near catastrophe. I forget the extent of the damage but it rendered Manjaro unusable and looked like it was walking through my disk so I killed it before it got everything. A decade ago I had a similar experience with pure Arch.

One of my friends who used to love Arch Linux got tired of the instability and moved his servers onto another distribution and has never had a repeat issue.

Even EndeavourOS recently had a debacle with a GRUB boot loader change that affected many of their users. To their credit they rapidly resolved the issue and helped numerous users to recover their configuration.

As far as Sid, I’ve used it on and off for the past 20+ years and though there are occasionally issues there is good support in a few Debian derivatives that helps a great deal. Siduction is an excellent Sid distribution.

I usually stick with our stock distro and use siduction to test Sid software.

--
Brian Masinick

[Author]

Posts