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MX No Frills (Progress)

Off-Topic discussions about science, technology, and non Debian specific topics.
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thmtrxhsu
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MX No Frills (Progress)

#1 Post by thmtrxhsu »

My apologize for not releasing MX No Frills on time. As I reached the deadline, I realized more and more that it did not meet my high standards; it was ok but then most distros and respins are ok and you never go back to them. There is a lot of work that goes in into making a distro; I can't imagine starting from scratch (without any toolkit i.e., Linux from Scratch). My new ETA is somewhere in the 4th week of May; because various items must be tested, fixes made and this takes time. Having to be compatible between two repos creates much "unneeded" work and it probably won't be worth it except for a learning point of view and the beneficiaries; you. Always lots to learn and hack in linux; it's not so much a hacker's dream than a hacker's heaven. Between a baby, MX No Frills, errands and COVID19, I've been busy. So here's a micro preview of some of the work and thought that goes behind creating MX No Frills. Firstly, MX is based off of Debian Buster. Now you might think to create your own MX from scratch, you should start with Devuan, and you couldn't be more incorrect; this is because Devuan has no systemd nor systemd-shim thus is not compatible with any heavily gnome based debian software and because if you end goal is to be fully MX compatible, then using Devuan's repo and MX's will create a dependency hell situation; basically when you install a peace of software it would likely complain that it is missing the mx version of a library or vice versa with very little predictability which is a fancy word for stability. The solution is to hack Debian Buster's netinstall to use MX repo; at task easily done and it works. But even so, you still have the situation where you have two repos MX and Debian and potential for dependency hell; and there are ways around it and installing apt-mx is not one of them; nope nothing that easy...so I was playing with session managers (not login managers all of which are banned from my release, yes only text login), and I liked XFCE because it was very predictable; it almost has magic code to just make things work and who doesn't like that? But I found it's predictability was dependent on using all XFCE components including it's window manager; that's no fun since I think even XFCE is fat. In the past, I had tried LXDE and LXQT. The former did very little very well by lacked that magic that just makes things work; which is not as simple as d-bus though it is a part of it. The latter I found fat, like jesus chris why does something new need to use nearly double the ram between qterminal and pcmanfm-qt etc. And it just felt like an immature desktop environment, and it still does. But I had never considered it from a pure session manager point of view; and actually it does fantastic except for innate evil of only working perfectly out of the box with LXQT components; whatever do I mean. GVFS frustrations; were the frak are my drives in pcmanfm; I mean gvfs and gfvsd is installed and d-bus is launched yet no drives. Now the weird and fantastic thing about it is everything would work if launched from the lxqt-panel as if the panel was imbued with some magic. For example, drives would show in pcmanfm if launched from LXQT panel, but not from LXpanel. Similarly, LXQT modules would show in lxqt-config-session if launched from LXQT panel, but not from lxpanel. I hacked this very quickly by opening an lxterminal from lxpanel and one from lxqt-panel and then issuing the command: export -p. Indeed the LXQT panel was imbued with some export magic such that when compared to lxpanel's lxterminal pcmanfm would show drives and lxqt-config-session would show modules. But I needed to confirm this would work without lxqt-panel, and seeing drives would not. If only I could imbue lxpanel and lxterminal with all LXQT power, then everything would work so I thought. So I did that and it worked. But then I realized something wonderful. I god rid of GVFS (every single) module and pcmanfm-qt showed drives! At last, I had buried one of my constant annoyances in linux and ground up built distros. Suddently, the extra ram that pcmanfm-qt used didn't seem so bad given that the ram hog GVFS took and was now eliminated. Udiskie was used to automatically mount volumes, but sadly it did not automatically mount exFat partitions. Now when you are creating a distro based off a systemd-shim you want the least amount of gnome components possible, and GVFS is a huge gnome component that would surely cause issues at some point. Furthermore, you don't want essential software like a file manager or terminal to be gnome based; you want it based on the furthest thing from gnome; QT. So this was a win win situation. I would increase system stability by many folds, while still keeping the ability to install non-system-fundamental gnome-software. So, I am taking a bit of a departure from MX towards an even more stable system while utilizing less resources system-wide. There's your micro preview of just one of many things I have been up to with the distro.

anticapitalista
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#2 Post by anticapitalista »

Have you heard of paragraphs?

Have you heard of antiX?

You can get gnome to work on Debian buster based antiX without systemd and without any systemd-shim.
antiX with runit - lean and mean.
https://antixlinux.com

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golinux
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#3 Post by golinux »

thmtrxhsu wrote:My apologize [sic] for not releasing MX No Frills on time. [snip unreadable gibberish]
You should be apologizing for that impenetrable wall of text. Quite happy to live without that level of mental confusion. Why are you so determined to annoy us with that babble?
May the FORK be with you!

thmtrxhsu
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#4 Post by thmtrxhsu »

anticapitalista wrote:Have you heard of paragraphs?

Have you heard of antiX?

You can get gnome to work on Debian buster based antiX without systemd and without any systemd-shim.
You are suggesting that what I am doing is not only already done, but done better than any one person could, so why do you bother when AntiX would surely meet all your criteria and then some?
What you are getting at makes a lot of sense. But I don't fully agree. However, you make a convincing argument that it would be the best base between MX, Debian, Devuan and itself. In fact, I hadn't
noticed before but antiX is sort of the testing version of MX; test on smaller scale then ramp up. Makes a lot of sense. And testing in the sense of getting away as much from systemd as possible. I haven't used recent versions, so perhaps my grips with it have been resolved. Either way, even if you are correct, I still have to remaster the hell out of it; where you may see perfection, I see a crap load of flaws. Nevertheless, helpful feedback.

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golinux
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#5 Post by golinux »

thmtrxhsu wrote:
anticapitalista wrote:Have you heard of paragraphs?

Have you heard of antiX?

You can get gnome to work on Debian buster based antiX without systemd and without any systemd-shim.
You are suggesting that what I am doing is not only already done, but done better than any one person could, so why do you bother when AntiX would surely meet all your criteria and then some?
Reality check . . . anticapitalista knows more about antiX than anyone else. It's his project.

(You can go stand in a corner now)
May the FORK be with you!

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stevepusser
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#6 Post by stevepusser »

sort of the testing version of MX
Hooh boy.
Image

Steve (MX developer (mostly packaging, but some ideas, too))
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dilberts_left_nut
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#7 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

thmtrxhsu wrote:where you may see perfection, I see a crap load of flaws.
Too many line-breaks?
AdrianTM wrote:There's no hacker in my grandma...

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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#8 Post by sunrat »

dilberts_left_nut wrote:
thmtrxhsu wrote:where you may see perfection, I see a crap load of flaws.
Too many line-breaks?
I didn't read it. Too much eye hurt and brain explody. :roll:
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Those who have lost data
...and those who have not lost data YET ”
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golinux
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#9 Post by golinux »

sunrat wrote:I didn't read it. Too much eye hurt and brain explody. :roll:
Yeah . . . but it's proved to be quite amusing for all of us . . .
May the FORK be with you!

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Zjho
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#10 Post by Zjho »

stevepusser wrote:
sort of the testing version of MX
Hooh boy.
I take it Spock did make it to the end of the OP, more or less.
We can't all achieve that.

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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#11 Post by stevepusser »

Zjho wrote:
stevepusser wrote:
sort of the testing version of MX
Hooh boy.
I take it Spock did make it to the end of the OP, more or less.
We can't all achieve that.
No, he was reading a newspaper, then destroyed the terminal before the user's brain 'sploded. The Spock button is for emergency use only.
MX Linux packager and developer

wino
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#12 Post by wino »

what the...?????????

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#13 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

^ I think the OP is under the misapprehension that anybody here gives a crap...

And I don't think they've noticed that their "respin" threads have been moved to the Offtopic section :lol:

Of course there is the possibility that their <return> key is broken, in which case they should open a support thread about that issue :mrgreen:
deadbang

wino
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Re: MX No Frills (Progress)

#14 Post by wino »

what issue? THat is his normal sate of affairs.

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