Hey @thomholwerda does your site has a list, possibly with small reviews, of GNU/Linux distros not poettering’d (no systemd, no UsrMove, etc.) and not derived from Red Hat or Debian? Something suitable for running servers (VMs or bare metal) on, not (just) desktop-ish things, but also development environments.

(I just don’t trust the ability of the Devuan group to keep things working suitably, given the dystopia and sabotage in Debian rising to unpalatable levels.)

This is, unfortunately, becoming severely minority territory…

@mirabilos @thomholwerda Just wondering, what's the issue with merged usr? From what I understand, originally /usr used to contain user directories, but some old machine ran out of tape space on its / tape, and admins of said machine decided to borrow space from the user directories (and move these to /home). Everything after that event was just cargoculting and inventing ideology to support it, and - if anything - the / /usr merge should be seen as going back to the roots.

@thomholwerda @ar it’s a poetteringisation of systems, a fuck you to both extant practices and interop; people are going to write scripts with #!/usr/bin/sh and #!/bin/perl now because it works on their badly-warped version of a "modern" unixlike but it won’t work like this elsewhere, just causing more global pain.

It’s also implemented in a way that’s incompatible with the way dpkg operates, and the proponents just ignore the concerns of the dpkg developer. It causes no small amount of potential breakage and some small amount of real-life breakage I’ve already seen.

@mirabilos @thomholwerda which extant practices? Ever since I've started using unix-likes (around the release of redhat7, mandrake8, and later freebsd5.0), I've viewed the / vs /usr split very arbitrary, and propped-up more by ideology than any practical benefits, especially in the days of journaled filesystems (granted, on bsds that came a bit later, and softupdates on freebsd were a bit sub-optimal in that regard on real hardware), where the likelihood of corrupting /usr (if on a separate volume) but keeping / intact were a lot lower .

As for scripts, the fact that *bsds tend to arbitrarily decide what's "basesystem" and what lives in the package manger (though on freebsd there's the pkgbase move that attempts to fix that…), install package manager stuff under /usr/local, and yet - somehow - people don't write scripts with /usr/local/bin/whatever in shebangs.

And the system I'm using now has nothing under /usr but /usr/bin/env, and only /bin/sh in /bin, and yet things still work. Mostly thanks to automation that changes all #!*/bin/<whatever> to #!/usr/bin/env <whatever>, but still.