Serpent OS Hopes To Ship Pre-Alpha ISOs In The Coming Weeks

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

We already have NixOS though, COSMIC is also almost a thing

NixOS is amazing and terrible all at the same time though. It's not a good fit for the ~80% of general computer users.

[ermo]

Anyone else noticed the hostname in the screenshots? Looks like Ikey still harbours some feelings towards Solus...

Ikey uses Solus as his daily driver and is still involved with Solus, including mentoring and filling in the blanks for the developers working on the Solus tooling.

People keep talking about Ikey abandoning Solus. Weirdly, I have not heard a lot of people ask themselves why that ended up being the result.

I know what happened because I was there during that time, helping and supporting Ikey as he navigated through an extremely difficult time in his personal life.

I will also point out that, after Ikey initiated and helped drive the resurrection of Solus after the outage last year, a fair few other old friends of the project returned and decided to stick around and help revitalise it.

That sort of begs the question of whether that confluence of events isn't a mere coincidence but rather a direct result of the changes in organisation and leadership style, including having Ikey back?

Food for thought if nothing else.

[[deXter]]

Anyone else noticed the hostname in the screenshots? Looks like Ikey still harbours some feelings towards Solus...

[pabloski]

one of Fedora Silverblue's shortcomings is that atomic updates/the system is managed with a Base OS and then the user adds packages to layers. Whenever you go to update you have to remove/uninstall the layered packages, update the Base OS, and then reinstall the layered packages.

Sadly I see no other way around this problem. I have played with other container-based/immutable distros, like BlendOS, Nitrux and VanillaOS and they all have the same problem, the dependencies are the problem! If ALL the base dependencies would implement mandatory backward compatibility, then it could be solved.

At the end of the day, the container thing works only if you accept to pack ALL the dependencies ( you could more or less reuse glibc ) with the program to run.

Even distros where the base system is moderately rich and not running into containers ( like Fedora Silverblue ) you have the obvious dependency problem. Updating the immutable image means introducing new versions of some dependencies and in turn it could crash the programs installed into layers. Flatpak solution is an abomination, I don't even want to start ranting about it.

Making a special sandbox to load a kernel module, mount a disk, and then export the disk/mount points out of the sandbox for the system to access is just pants on head dumb.

As someone using containers I agree. It is the really ugly part of containers and other sandboxing technologies. I thought VanillaOS could have offered a better way ( considering it is made by the same people making distrobox and bottles ), but no.

If Serpent OS fixes that layer issue, it's already better than Fedora's solution. If it's doing that with a packaging and building solution that's as simple as using a PKGBUILD and working with an Arch Linux system, that can make Serpent OS a major player in the distribution landscape.

It would be great. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I don't have my hopes.

[misuzu]

If Serpent OS fixes that layer issue, it's already better than Fedora's solution. If it's doing that with a packaging and building solution that's as simple as using a PKGBUILD and working with an Arch Linux system, that can make Serpent OS a major player in the distribution landscape.

We already have NixOS though, COSMIC is also almost a thing

[Daktyl198]

Are you sure your information is correct here?

First of all Solus wasn't "leaderless for multiple years". I don't know where you got that information, but that's just plain wrong.

Second, I don't know if you are aware, but when Solus had a three month outage around this time last year (due to a confluence of very unfortunate circumstances), Ikey was the one who stepped in and made the proposal to get Solus back up and running on Serpent OS infrastructure initially (Solus now has its own infra separate from Serpent OS). He's also been actively supporting the current Solus efforts concurrently with building out Serpent OS.

My information was that I used Solus when he abandoned it. I admit the "multiple years" part was an exaggeration, but it took quite a while for the project to find it's feet again after he abandoned it with very little contact. Many of the distro's intended projects were abandoned purely to keep the existing infrastructure alive, and it was a good amount of time before they even had a fresh ISO available to download with updates to the distro. It may have had leadership, but the project never moved forward. I loved the distro, but it ultimately pushed me onto Arch where I've been ever since.

The way Ikey departed left an awful taste in my mouth. It's one thing to announce to your team you are leaving the project to persue other interests, and properly hand off everything. It's another to simply stop replying to your team and literally abandon them to the point where the project's website and repos go down because you didn't pay the server costs and didn't give the team time to move everything over to new servers. He did end up paying for one more month for them to do so, but only as an afterthought after the site had already been down for days.

[ermo]

It's a little weird to me that their first DE priority wasn't Budgie since I thought Joshua Stroble was one of the main people involved with this in addition to Ikey.

Budgie is already present in Solus, where it is maintained by a member of BoB (shout out to Evan Maddock, who is doing a great job in that regard IMHO).

For Serpent OS, this phase is about getting a DE going with the minimal amount of necessary packaging, in order to prove out the solutions. Right now, that DE is firmly GNOME due to how GNOME is pushing flatpaks.

This in turn implies that Serpent can get away with having a trivially rebuildable minimal DE stack + base OS, while initially having everything else covered by flatpaks while tools are being extended to support a better scaleout story than currently.

[ermo]

Simplified, it offers a different way of doing atomic updates and package management. It would take someone who has used this and other atomic distributions to tell us what makes this one special compared to what else exists. As someone who has dabbled with some atomic distributions over the years, the last time I used it, one of Fedora Silverblue's shortcomings is that atomic updates/the system is managed with a Base OS and then the user adds packages to layers. Whenever you go to update you have to remove/uninstall the layered packages, update the Base OS, and then reinstall the layered packages. It's a real pain in the ass when you don't want to use Flatpak for non-free packages, you need to add ZFS or other kernel modules, and or you use other packages that the OS or root user need access to that just doesn't work well in a sandboxed environment. You're not supposed to use layers, but that doesn't work out so well in the real world. Making a special sandbox to load a kernel module, mount a disk, and then export the disk/mount points out of the sandbox for the system to access is just pants on head dumb.

If Serpent OS fixes that layer issue, it's already better than Fedora's solution. If it's doing that with a packaging and building solution that's as simple as using a PKGBUILD and working with an Arch Linux system, that can make Serpent OS a major player in the distribution landscape.

Nice summary.

[ermo]

I just can't trust Ikey not to straight up abandon this distro like he has the last 3 he was involved in. He left his last one leaderless for multiple years before people had to step up and practically create an entirely new infrastructure because they couldn't contact him to get the details to the existing one.

Are you sure your information is correct here?

First of all Solus wasn't "leaderless for multiple years". I don't know where you got that information, but that's just plain wrong.

Second, I don't know if you are aware, but when Solus had a three month outage around this time last year (due to a confluence of very unfortunate circumstances), Ikey was the one who stepped in and made the proposal to get Solus back up and running on Serpent OS infrastructure initially (Solus now has its own infra separate from Serpent OS). He's also been actively supporting the current Solus efforts concurrently with building out Serpent OS.

[ehansin]

I've had loads of issues with the AUR too, I run my own pkgbuild scripts here https://github.com/Quackdoc/pkgbuild...r/cosmic-epoch and you may have better luck with them, at the very least I am trying to keep them as up to date as possible,

I don't find floating mode super usable since it doesn't have snapping and this isn't merged https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/pull/389 for moving, also it doesnt look like the PR addresses resizing with super click.

Thanks for the AUR scripts link and heads up! I think I can window-snap using "Super + Shift + arrow-keys", but trying to remember muscle memory. Pretty sure I can mouse-click and drag to edges as well. Not sure about resizing, have not tried yet.