@abloo While arch has been very managable I will admit that I have had some trouble with the dependency rats nest as well, especially when you try to delete a dependency or revert to an older one.

Sadly one of the big issues with a rolling system that aggressively purges older versions and relies heavily on AURs that may need said versions.

Sometimes i miss my Gentoo days just because they would actually maintain quite a few older versions for exactly that reason.

@freemo yeah

Does gentoo let you edi the source before compiling with emerge?

@abloo It has been a few years since I actually used gentoo honestly. But I do recall it being rather trivial to insert your own modified version of a package.

@freemo @abloo you can put your own version of a thing in an overlay

@icedquinn @freemo does it play nicely with updates?

@abloo

It does rolling updates similar to archlinux (but more so from source than from binary)... if you update often it almost always went flawless for me. That said when i finally left gentoo its because I hadnt updated a system in like 6 months and at that point the dependencies could not longer resolve and it became near impossible to figure out how to update the system. Not sure how common a problem that still is, but it happened once or twice to the point where it took me a week or more to fixand the very last time i just couldnt fix it.... so yea it became the reason I jumped ship.

That said I never once had updates be a problem when i was responsible enough to update regularly. Well not a problem I couldnt fix relatively easily anyway.

@icedquinn

@freemo @abloo its always going to be a problem in rolling distros.

@icedquinn

This is true. But the problem has always been significantly less in archlinux for me than it has in gentoo. In arch i can always resolve it even in the worst case scenarios.. in gentoo it would happen more often and be much more severe.

Again all this is years in the past and things may have improved since then.

@abloo

@freemo @abloo i would use non-rolling stuff but for some reason they want to all-or-nothing us

@icedquinn

I really dont like the non-rolling distros in my everyday life. But I must admit if its a device I intend to maybe update once a year or something then it is the only sane way to go. I use it often for my hardware projects with single board computers for that reason.

What i really want to try that seems new and unique and not strictly a rolling or non-rolling distro is guix. The whole idea of rolling back updates and doign them as stages feels like the best of both worlds. I say this as someone who knows only very high level vague details about guix.

@abloo

@freemo @abloo in my nonexistent version of linux there is just a core stable system that gets updated maybe once a year and it's just built in to a read-only image or something stuffed in to ostree.

then all the user software is run with appimage or some local install folder.

non-rolling base image, run whatever rolling workstuff you need.

@freemo @abloo guix and nix are based on using gnu scheme or some pseudohaskell to define how to build projects from source and then on top of that they define how the system works. although nix does more of this than guix does.

you have a source file that defines the desired system state and it runs a lot of scripting language to make it happen.

@icedquinn

Sounds a bit like chef actually just done using different languages.

@abloo

@freemo @abloo yea basically. with some compile caches thrown in.

nix also goes further and you configure stuff like users and group memberships and service configs too. it's supposed to create the whole system from a functional config.

nothing really stops you from running ansible/salt to create a new machine from scratch and then flipping over to it (other than the effort and disk space.)

@freemo @abloo i want to say nix has environmental sandboxing so you can have two programs installed which have incompatible dependencies, since those environments are kept in separate directories that get merged via path shenanigans and the like, kind of like venv but for all the things.

not sure if guix does this.

@icedquinn

isnt guix just the package manager for nix or something? I really need to re-read up on that as I may want to learn it.

@abloo

@freemo @abloo no guix is a whole distro and package manager which uses scheme.

nixos is another distro which uses nix.

@icedquinn

ahh i may have mixed some of that up... will have to play with my VM soon and check out some of the stuff out there I havent had time to play with yet.

@abloo

@abloo @freemo an absurdly silly person could do linux from scratch using please.build (blaze) as the package manager

@icedquinn

Sounds ok by me, but I'd really have to play with it to get an idea... if its using haskell though that already is a plus. More chances I get to play with haskell the better.

@abloo

@icedquinn

This sounds very similar to the computer i envisioned during the 90's as a virus immune computer. Of course the tools to do anything like that were not really feasible back then.

@abloo

@freemo @icedquinn I'm in the habit of updating every day or so, so I doubt that would be too much of a roblem with it

@abloo

Yea should be good then. Honestly all this talk makes me want to install gentoo again but im not willing to take the leap on my main computer just yet.... maybe ill pop in a spare drive and install it just for shit and giggles when i feel my life is getting too easy :)

@icedquinn

@icedquinn

Yea I do recall i had maintained several overlays and found the way they implemented it to be great. Much easier than running your arch repo... Though its been so long I dont remember how to do it off hand other than it just sits a directory in your system you point to with config.

@abloo