Slashdot Reader Builds 'Spaced Linux', a New Devuan-Based, User-Friendly Desktop Distro (spacedlinux.com) 81
"I've been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now," says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. "I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts... I just haven't been happy overall with all the other operating systems out there... "
I've been working really diligently for the last few weeks on a new distro called Spaced Linux that is exactly what I want to use. It's heavily focused on the [zoom-friendly 3D] Compiz desktop, very efficient using the rolling Devuan Ceres backend, and avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage.
It's still early, but it's already working great for me, it's been my daily driver for a few weeks now.
There's also user-friendly themes — everything from Linux, Android, GeoWorks, and Mac OS X to Windows 11, Windows XP, and even Windows 3.11 (dark or light theme). And you can also run Windows apps under Wine. "And let me tell you, Nvidia runs perfectly on here now..." he adds in the video. "It just works really, really well out of the box."
He's now working on voice-command features, bur argues that Spaced Linux "is already extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better."
It's still early, but it's already working great for me, it's been my daily driver for a few weeks now.
There's also user-friendly themes — everything from Linux, Android, GeoWorks, and Mac OS X to Windows 11, Windows XP, and even Windows 3.11 (dark or light theme). And you can also run Windows apps under Wine. "And let me tell you, Nvidia runs perfectly on here now..." he adds in the video. "It just works really, really well out of the box."
He's now working on voice-command features, bur argues that Spaced Linux "is already extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better."
Relavant XKCD comic (Score:5, Informative)
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
I mean, we shouldn't shame the guy for making his own custom Linux distribution. But did we really didn't need yet another one? Why can't these things just be an add-on package to an existing distribution, instead of fragmenting the Linux ecosystem even more?
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The KDE vs Gnome wars and UI "standardization". Let alone breaks spatial browser caused.
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One thing that's infuriating me is that apparently it's now impossible to implement in modern GNU/Linux distros as Wayland does not allow applications (such as file managers) to position windows.
Yeah, really.
And by "not allow" I don't mean "they haven't gotten around to it", they've actually said they're opposed on principle in the mailing lists.
We are running so fast in the wrong direction with UI design it's not funny. GNOME wanted to try something new, and I respect that, but it's like they took everythi
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Why can't these things just be an add-on package to an existing distribution,
This one goes to eleven, you impotent numbskull.
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Distros are more of "the taste of the consumer", specially in basic appearance and utilities.
As long you don't make an incompatibility trainwreck, you can make a bunch of different distros to try to get to different tastes.
The fragmentation is only a problem if you get stuff like "this distros can only run X programs".
If all of em can run all of the software, it's fine and even desirable.
Re: Relavant XKCD comic (Score:1)
He's now working on voice-command features, bur argues that Spaced Linux "is already extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better."
This just in, Developer creates his own Linux distribution and declares it's "...extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better."?!?!
Amazing!
I'm really looking forward to a voice command line interface, that sounds awesome!
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That's essentially what he's done. It's just Devuan with a custom package set and some scripts to make a better post-install experience. I don't think he maintains his own core OS repos other than the packages he's added on (nvidia installer, themes, etc).
I watched some of his video and I wonder if his purpose would be better served by building on NixOS. All of his post-install automation could be done quite reliably by some .nix
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Not only don't we but we especially don't need it to be based on compiz. I've already been down that road. It's all but abandoned. It's way too flaky for prime time. Went back to KDE, much better.
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This was what I was wondering. Great, you made your own distro as a mashup of the things you like. Good for you.
There are good reasons why almost no other distros use Compiz. A big one is that there is no way to run Compiz on Wayland, so every day brings you closer to being majorly broken if you have a hard dependency on X11 / Xorg.
There is a Wayland-based Compiz look-alike called Wayfire, but is the 10+ year old visual effect slop really worth it?
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Compiz was GREAT even if you ignored literally all of the visual effect "slop" as you call it. It's got a great set of tools for controlling windows, including window rules which are very powerful. If you don't know about those other tools then you should perhaps have spent more time in ccsm back when it was relevant.
Unfortunately, as you say it is for X11 only (although for me that is not a drawback because Wayland is still bad, especially if you have Nvidia and I do) and more importantly it is not well-ma
Mostly flatpak? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice, so now... I can sleep well with the confidence that my home directory can will get corrupted and my entire os might become useless just because. And that I'll have no warning about any of it until my entire os catches fire, because there aren't any meaningful logs anywhere.
Here for it.
This is the change we needed.
Re:Mostly flatpak? (Score:4, Insightful)
Flatpak, Snap and containers in general need lots of drive space. Good thing storage is cheap these days OH WAIT
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Flatpak, Snap and containers in general need lots of drive space. Good thing storage is cheap these days OH WAIT
Just use a RAM disk instead. :-)
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The programs I use these days generally don't consume all that much space - even if it got really bloated I'm sure most people can get by with under 200GB of installed programs (excluding things like games).
Most of my disk space is data files - videos, music, etc.
Modern games being so big the extra container overhead is basically nothing compared to 120GB for the game assets itself.
If you have 1T
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Something, something, evtx something. Oooh, that's gonna sting.
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Noting that Ubuntu Core is built entirely? from snap packages, so this kind of thing isn't a new idea.
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^^^^ THIS.
I mean, it is not like we want to actually understand the software installed, be efficient with disk space and fleeting RAM, or be able to fix security dependencies, right?
I really hope this push for switching native packages to "containerized" ones comes to an end. Or at least doesn't contaminate too many major distros.
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I try my best to keep atomic package managers off my machine. They are just laziness embodied. I want coders and software makers to honor the speed, memory and storage of my machines. I dont want my machine to have to unpack before it can run something. I don't want 97 copies of the same libraries stored on my machine. I dont want apps or systems that make it hard to share data between apps or don't honor theming on my machine. And I most definitely dont want application management systems that take control
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I agree with a lot of what you say here. However, it's not always realistic for me or other end users as some apps are mandatory for work. I'm specifically thinking of kdenlive and ardour for me personally.
I'm trying to make an elegant compromise. But I certainly hear you!
New Distro? (Score:2)
Is this really a new distro? What makes it a unique distro?
This looks more like a cool bunch of desktop themes more than a distro, to me. I guess the choice of Compiz is the distro distinguishing characteristic? But, Compiz is a dead end, in my opinion. So unless he's developing and maintaining Compiz, I don't expect this to gain any traction.
I am happy that it makes him happy.
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it's an opinionated install of a base distro, which can be and is often labelled a distro itself. the heavy lifting is just left to the base. crunchbang was exactly that and was quite nice and got some following for a while, and last i checked there still was a derivative around after it shut down.
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I used Refracta to make a customized iso that I could install on client computers and machines on the private lan
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It's also Devuan Ceres, which is fairly unique. I'm trying to make a bunch of my family/clients happy as well. It's not *just* for me. However *I* am certainly happy with it already. :)
It won't be a real solo distro till I address: https://github.com/crhy/spaced... [github.com]
The Extremely Distro. (Score:2)
Need more "extremely" to corner the rest of the market.
Spaced Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Can we still use tabs?
Re: Spaced Linux (Score:1)
Personally I'm itching to try out his voice interface for emacs... it promises to to be hilarious to try and watch someone edit a document. (vi users will only fare a smidge better, LOL)
Lost me at "Flatpak" (Score:3)
... avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage.
I'm glad that crhylove brought something to the party, but I won't be partaking. I fully sympathize with the desire to avoid dependency hell, but in my experience AppImage is the only format that does that cleanly, reliably and painlessly.
Yes, heavy reliance on AppImages chews up disk space - and also memory, if you're using a lot of apps which under traditional package management systems share libraries. But they're clean, and they generally don't break when the system is updated and libraries change. The onus is on the user to keep them up-to-date, and I can live with that.
I'm not hugely experienced here, so this is just an opinion: if you want to avoid dependency problems, AFAICT AppImages are the best choice. That said, in my limited experience, Flatpaks are at least less problematic than Snaps.
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Was gonna say, people using APT and the phrase "dependency hell" clearly never used RPM back in the day. Not sure if it's gotten better, but I don't care, because I've been avoiding it for two decades now.
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Yeah same. My first linux was Mandrake and all I can remember is chasing down random rpm's to get something working.
I haven't experienced any dependency hell since switching to pacman, although yeah APT is a pretty close second.
Re: Lost me at "Flatpak" (Score:2)
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I used RPM since RedHat 5.1 days (and the really, really rough transition from libc to glibc). That was definitely dependency hell without a tool like yum. Thankfully yum and dnf eliminated any problems rpm had with dependency hell.
Lately the only major dependency hell problems I've had are with apt on debian. By far I've had more problems with apt than yum/dnf.
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amen brother... dependency "hell" using apt is pretty effing good vs flatpak and snap.
My biggest problems have been with trying to install out-of-band programs/versions in APT and having unsatiisfiable dependencies. It's really annoying when there's a program - or a specific version of one - that I really want but can't install. In those cases I look for AppImages, Flatpaks, and Snaps - in that order.
After about a year I STILL hate current versions of Thunderbird; but I can't find any older ones that will install, and I can't find Snaps or AppImages. Similarly, I'd be on an older version of
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I feel you on these comments. That's one of the reasons I'm going with flatpaks. At least for now. Brave browser with manifest v2 ublock is my current go to.
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Eh, they lost me at Compiz. An X11 only DE? Gross.
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LOL. That's a terrible exaggeration.
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System architects:
Statically linked executables are a problem, we should break them up into on-disk libraries to save RAM/disk space, ease upgrading, and enhance security. This means devs won't have to constantly release upgrades when library functions are updated!
Reality:
Libraries constantly evolve, changing APIs and behavior. Developers need to modify their programs to track library changes they didn't need or ask for, and to keep manifests of what versions of each library a given version of their execu
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Had I mod points, you'd be getting an Insightful. Altho, if you statically linked an entire distro it would get pretty huge.
Re: Lost me at "Flatpak" (Score:2)
The system architects were right.
We have everything needed for it to work: Linux allows installing the same library multiple times as long as it's different major versions. Semver ensures that an old program written for libstuff v 1.1.0 will work on a system that has 1.87.65.
The theory is sound, the problem is that libraries developers do not respect semver enough and don't understand you should not break compatibility when releasing a minor version.
And when something breaks, the blame isn't put on the lib'
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Agreed. I'm trying to make this version of Linux a hard-core smackdown to windows entirely. In fact that's secretly the main goal.
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Interesting. I may head that direction in a not too distant future when flatpak requires systemd, which they are threatening. I'm building completely new tools to replace repos/app stores entirely, so making it .appimage instead of flatpak will certainly be a possibility.
Sweet! (Score:2)
It would be cool to see a 3D file browser, too [wikipedia.org].
Re: Sweet! (Score:1)
It would be cool to see a 3D file browser, too.
You mean like in MS Bob? [youtube.com]
Re: Sweet! (Score:2)
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Thanks brother! I've been daily driving for ~3 weeks and been very happy so far. Should be a new release today fixing even more minor issues....
would be awesome (Score:2)
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I am using AI for validation and testing. The AI app I custom built is local AI only based on ollama, and completely unnecessary if you just want to use the OS like a regular desktop. However, the dictation in my AI app is pretty awesome.
Re: would be awesome (Score:1)
Huh (Score:2)
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To be fair, isn't that what a distribution is? I mean Linux Mint is just Ubuntu, Linux Mint Debian Edition is Debian. Lots of distros based on Ubuntu and Debian, including Devuan. All of them could be said to be opinionated customizations of the base distro.
I did find it funny that he keeps saying he has 30 years of Linux experience but doesn't seem to know anything about systemd. Connects to the mossad? Kind of lost all credibility at that point in his video.
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They're not random things. I'm targeting usability for all users. I used to be a serial distro hopper, so I'm coming at this not from a vacuum.
Also, there's no currently shipping desktop based on Devuan Ceres, which has a lot of advantages....
Compiz (Score:2)
Re: Compiz (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for Linux to feel as good as Compiz on Ubuntu 7.04
It's not terrible now, but there was a long period of
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Yes, this is one of my main goals, and I think we've already achieved it. One of my main motivations is that Linux Mint continuously ignores Compiz beta testing issues that I've submitted almost every version for the last 5 years.
User friendly UIs... (Score:2)
We've had user friendly User Interfaces in Linux for well over a decade now. As far as I'm concerned, Windows 95 UI was perfectly fine and Linux has had that for nearly as long. Everything after that just got worse and worse.
Sure, they added some extra graphical fancy stuff, but generally speaking, not a lot changed from win95 up to win7. Then 8 fucked it and it never really recovered.
KDE has been "Windows-like" for at least two decades now. Perfectly user-friendly enough.
The migration from Windows to Linux
Re: User friendly UIs... (Score:2)
Sure, they added some extra graphical fancy stuff, but generally speaking, not a lot changed from win95 up to win7. Then 8 fucked it and it never really recovered.
Uh, 8.1, 10 and 11 have perfectly fine user interfaces, each is just a minor iteration off the previous version, skipping (with extreme prejudice) anything related to "tablet mode" in Windows 8.
You may have issues with the underlying implementation and privacy issues, but the UIs listed are solid.
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Maybe. But highly inferior to the interface in Spaced. 3 Try it out. I'm putting out a new release today hopefully.
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I can't stand how the start menu has changed over the past 3 iterations. I'm so much happier with XFCE's simplistic, straight forward layout and zero ads or things bothering me.
Win7 was fine. I was happy there. When they EOLed it, I went Linux full time and have only missed windows once or twice for a specific game that I was having an itch to play.
All the changes Windows constantly seems to be going through seems very anti-user to me. Things were pretty much "good enough, don't touch it" by win98, regardin
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Linux recently hit 10% users. THIS is the year of desktop linux, which is why I'm trying to make something awesome and normie friendly.
Also, try it out first, the Compiz configuration is very useful. It's not *just* eye candy.
And I agree, it is shipping by default with the Win 95 desktop layout.
Ohh so scary dependency hell! (Score:2)
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I also love apt. But there's a lot of normie friendly advantages to an app store with flatpak integration, which is what we are aiming for.
And yes, I've seen dependency hell many, many times. Although not recently in a debian/devuan distro.
Support? (Score:2)
Or it it just someone who told OpenCode make me a distro and then for some utterly inexplicable reason, recorded a who youtube video with his face on it?
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Devuan Ceres is a rolling release. So.... yes? I'm working on this continuously at this point, and I hope to have the momentum to promise long term support and stability. But admittedly, that is clearly on the ToDo list.
This is yet another early self-footgunning project (Score:2)
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If/When flatpak takes the systemd poison pill: We will fork it or switch to appimage or something. As of now it's all talk and there's no shipping systemd code in flatpak at all, so....
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Compiz is awesome. You should try out my distro. 3
Um..like uh, man uh uh. no. (Score:2)
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Is it just me who found it odd that he was not wearing a shirt?
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Hence the head crop. It's super hot in San Diego this time of year.
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Your criticism is very well founded. My video sucks. The OS is awesome though. Compiz settings alter the experience a lot. I've opted for what I feel will be the best settings for normies without prior experience. Give it a shot in VM, but you might want to wait for 8.26.3 I'm fixing a lot this morning.