One Less Linux

Yes, I know and acknowledge the criticism by many newcomers into the Linux camp about the sheer abundance of Linux distributions. Particularly since many of them are basically based on the same family roots (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch …) and even share the same desktops it’s hard for a n00bie to decide on a nifty system. But no problem, a whole army of eager bloggers is trying to help you with your first steps into the new computing world. They sort the millions of distributions out for you and give you definite hints and tipps about what to do and what to use.

Too bad that all those bloggers recommend totally different stuffz. Ask Orca what she finds a good beginners distro … and then ask Joe Collins … and you’ll get two different answers. Yeah, it’s mighty confuzzling. 😦

apri1
Yeah, Tux is sad. And so is Orca. 😦

Buuuut, back on topic, an answer you won’t get of neither Orcsi nor Joe would be Apricity Linux. Yes, the developers of Apricity have given up and closed their web presence earlier this month. Don’t ask me why. I kinda liked Apricity as it was a Arch based distro and Orca’s a huge Arch fan. I installed it on MiniMe but never got around giving it a real test run. Didn’t even do the initial update and today found out there is nothing to update anymore. 😮 So, whoohoo, I have  a free vacancy on one of my desktops. 🙂 LOL

That brings me to another topic. Maybe I’m a girlgeek (which I doubt) but I have three desktop computers adorning my workdesk; two of them completely devoid of any operation system. I’m not rich, those computers aren’t the best, and rather very cheap they were too. And South Africa ain’t a computer wonderland like the USA where you have an over abundance of computers available for everybody. Still I got THREE of those fukers right here on my table!!! So I really wonder when people are telling me they can’t install Linux since they are afraid to ruin their recent Windows installation. Fuking get a new second hand machine for cheap from Craig’s List or eBay or some cheapo Chinese shit from Ali Baba or Ali Express or stoop low and rob the neighbourly thrift shop! And then you’ll have a wonderful machine to play with Linux.

What irks me probably even more is that term “MacOS look-alike Linux distribution” to describe Apricity. MacOS looks like Linux/BSD, not the other way round. And with all those dockys and planks in modern distros I get the feeling that most are MacOS look-alikes. Nothing wrong with that I guess. Macs are famous for their ease of use. So what? So fucking what??? Mac is Mac, Windows is Windows, Linux is Linux. We have no reason to hide what we are, we’re not standing on shoulders of giants that aren’t our own!

Anyhow, on with today’s article:

apri2
Maybe the devs should have made sure they got all the resources first?

indexBut now I’m becoming kinda angry. I mean it’s absolutely the dev’s business if they are producing a Linux distro or not. It’s their hobby. But I guess as soon as you go public with your project you must make sure to have enough man-, girl- and computing power to support your own distro with everything that’s needed. Download and release mirrors and a lively forum and documentation to find answers to all our questions. Once your distro is out in the open  people are relying on it … and on you and your team! Entering the Linux scene with a big splash, making a fine distro, and huge announcements, even with its own logo and opening to much fanfare is one thing. Closing the doors shortly after and going with a whimper rather than a BANG is another and has no dignity.

Anyhoo, with Apricity out of the way the distro hunt has become a slight bit more easy for you newlings. Well, if you’re a dedicated follower of this bloggy here you’ve found your fave distro already long ago, based on Orca’s recommendations. And then you found your own best distro which meets your requirements even better.

Might I ask my readership what system y’all are using? I’m really interested. Are you on any Linux at all? Or are you boringly on Windows or Mac? Send me love letters!

 

11 comments

  1. i guess they work free apart from all the time they use as you say there are a gazillion distros so be fair if one decides its to much then fair play to them
    BUT i get the feeling only the big boys will exist in perpetuity and will be funded by adverts etc god help the google invasion Only the big boys and gals march on sadly
    of course everyone wants a Mac OS lookalike Yiu can’t beat perfection just a shame the Macs are now overpriced and lacking so much MR Jobs would never have let them decline like that wake up apple give me some usb slots give me a cd drive give me a card reader like the good old days beauty is crap without functionality
    hope your flu has gone, sounds li,e it would have killed most men hihihi
    xxx

    Liked by 1 person

    • Sammie, in the long run nobody can refuse the call of money. Guess why SuSE and RedHat are still things. They both are far from being the bestest Linux distros but they have established huge commercial followings due to their paid for support centers and training courses and certificates and all that stuff obviously needed in professional environments n shit.

      Ubuntu has earned its position near the top. They kinda revolutionized Linux and created general awareness of it. Also let’s not forget the brazilions of moneys Mark Shuttleworth pumped into his company Canonical.
      In so far you’re right, the big boys n gals will be more famous and spectacular and more talk of the town than small hobbyhorse projects such as Apricity.

      But fortunately you’re wrong in your conclusion. In TV you only see Real Madrid and Bayern München and Liverpool and all the clubs with beeeeeeg moneybags. Still football is very much alive, and played each and every weekend by brazillions of hobby kickers. They don’t care much about what the big boys do. They love to watch the professional games. Apart from that it doesn’t have an impact on their own football games.

      Or another example: Did you stop sailing since the crews on AC boats make more money than you?

      I guess it’s the same with all the Linuxes. I guess for example Clem Levebrve and Phil Müller and their teams of Mint and Manjaro developers are well aware of what the big guys over at SuSE and RHEL are doing, Clem should be particularly aware of anything happening at Ubuntu … but that’s it. Clem is a hobbycoder, living of donations and probably a dayjob. He can’t throw around millions of dollars, not even Canadian dollars, and still he’s the head honcho of Mint, the Linux distro with the biggest install base.

      And Phil Müller works as an automobile designer and manages the absolute leading ArchLinux distro in his spare time. He brought Manjaro into the #3 spot on DistroWatch … not bad for a hobbyhorse.

      And Debian, we don’t need to lose any words about the good ole Deb. Despite the gazilllion of other distros based on it, Debian itself is and was always free. Oh, I know there are many professionals providing code for Linux projects, even Microsoft monkeys. And they are getting paid by their respective employers. Still the distros are just hobby projects.

      And the great hood ornament of Linux, Linus Torvalds? I guess he doesn’t have a title or a job description as he’s not really useful for any particular corporation. Still he receives his very generous paycheck from RHEL. And he provides the Linux kernel for everyone. That’s the one thing that has never changed and will never change: The GNU License. The code is Free and Open Source to be used, misused and abused by you and me. As we fukn fancy.

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  2. i never stopped sailing RL it’s pleasure not for money
    in fact i will hit the ionian sea this summer for 2 weeks i have another day skipper with me so she will be great and 3 friends should be a blast
    just need a pink ribbon mainsail hihi

    Liked by 1 person

  3. actually as you mention soccer of football i was 100% right
    it’s the big boys that succed You even said that yourself and yes not many apart from the ardent grass roots fan cares if the little clubs fade away
    bt it’s a lovely thought that around the world millions of kids are running around happy with only a football xxx

    Liked by 1 person

    • No, no, nooooo! You was 100% wrong. The big boys succeed, that is true. And the big boy clubs succeed in the professional leagues as well, all right. But they wouldn’t exist without the grassroots, all the small clubs that provide training and games for the kids and amateur players. It’s the milieu where the future profi heroes are made and where the scouts are finding the new talent. Sammie, first league players aren’t born, they are made. And in order to make them, first you need a sound environment of thousands of village and suburb clubs all around the world.

      And, no, the small clubs don’t fade away, why should they? I know the two sport clubs in the suburb I grew up in were already like almost 100 years old when I was born … and they are both still active. Because every year hundreds of new kids are joining in to do athletics, martial arts, swimming, tennis, badminton, hockey, handball, football, volleyball, chess, ballroom dance, whatever there is on offer …

      Some of them will maybe, with a huge portion of luck, be discovered by talent scouts from the big clubs, most won’t. It doesn’t really matter. We do sports for the fun, do we? And particularly us girls, once we hit puberty and get our first menses we drop out of sports anyway. 🙂 Or we are busy in sports all those boring “lawn and track sports” clubs can’t deliver, sailing, surfing …

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  4. You missed the point totally of course the big boys with money clout win thru and become huge of course, eye learn those skills kicking around at grass roots and get better millions of kids are doing that right now
    Of course not all make the top grade and some will fall away It’s just the same with Linux and any other skills If you ain’t got the bucks you won’t make the big time so yes some falls away and THATS the point
    perversely you agree You just don’t realise it get that tranny down to the beach tranny being a slang name for transits not trannies xx

    Liked by 1 person

    • No, you missed the point little missy.

      You maybe didn’t know it yet but the sporting club culture in Europe is vastly different from the US, here everybody, no matter their talent and physical abilities, can play their fave sport. We have leagues for everything, first thru fourth and maybe even below. And that doesn’t include the professional leagues, which are only two I guess.
      Most of the European kickers are in it just for the fun, they don’t have any aspirations to ever become great sport stars, they just wanna play with and against other enthusiasts. The success of the sports club models proves me right. And again it was the workers culture in Germany that started the whole “folks sports” movement in 18something. We had an emperor and just kicked out Napoleon back then so it wasn’t even any communists or democrats starting it. Sports just for the joy of moving ones body. Nobody’s falling away, people stop for other reasons: job stress, women stress, beer bellies, kids of their own to introduce to the sports … Nofucknbody is even trrying it to make the big time. Professional football is far removed from the real life user experience, just like the America’s Cup is removed from your upcoming sailing holiday in the med.

      Ever heard of the “Turnvater” Jahn? Many roads and places in Germany are called after his name. He propagated gymnastics for the masses. Football is just a side effect since it works in the same club system.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Ludwig_Jahn

      “Jahn popularized the four Fs motto “frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei” (“fresh, pious, cheerful, free”) in the early 19th century.[1]”

      In my opinion he missed the most important F-word. =^.^=

      I don’t get your last sentence tho. Of course I meant Transit, I’d never call my very manly Oubaas a transvestite. Tranny is the nickname for Ford Transits in the anglophile scene ever since they were first built. And as it so happened, just the other day I drove our tranny down to the beach and snapped some photos. Teehee :)))

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  5. You make me laugh you say i’m wrong and everything you say says i was right I saw the tranny pics gimp is such a weird prog with its strange application of layers
    anyway some linux distros or whatever will always fail because they have no money the reason, either the developer isn’t that brilliant or he would be snapped up busy a bigger cause or maybe he thought fuck it this is a waste of time either way You agree with me, and that’s good xxxx

    Liked by 1 person

    • “You agree with me, and that’s good xxxx”

      I agree with you on some of the symptoms but not on the causation. You’re starting from a totally wrong POV, Sammie, as Linux ain’t a competition and not a business in the first place. Nobody gets “snatched up” and you won’t need much money to get your own homemade distro off the ground. Just put it on some server, spread the word and watch the download figures sore. Or not, depending on the yummyness of your distro.

      People like Philip (Manjaro), Ikey (Solus) and Jody (OBRevenge) had the good ideas and built distros the people want and need. So they shooted up in DistroWatch without making much of fanfare but just by mouth-to-mouth propaganda. Quality products: It’s the key to success!

      Apricity failed because they were on the wrong track. Nobody wants a Linux that looks like Mac that looks like BSD. Or maybe the people want it but the head dev failed in finding enough companionsand totally miscalculated the amount of time and elbow grease he needs to invest in his project.

      All that has nothing to do with big bad evil corps snatching up all the talent.

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  6. That’s a pretty vague assumption on why they pulled the plug on themselves, unless you have insider knowledge. Maybe they DID get snapped up to another Linux, Maybe they ran out of money Maybe they …… well maybe anything in the world happened we can only guess.. the point is, that for whatever reason, they pulled the plug I kinda hope they moved on to better and bigger things, than fizzled away like so many before them in every walk of life Good luck to them x
    BUT don’t base your argument on a vague and tenuous assumption xx

    Liked by 1 person

    • Hmmm, I don’t base my argument on vague and tenuous assumptions, Sammie, as I’m not Maiti. 😉 But I base my argument on knowledge I have about the Linux scene. And the most likely reason for Apricity going down is indeed the kinda vague “personal reasons”. That guy had an idea about his perfect Linux and made it … and made it available.

      Then he noticed his own distro doesn’t have enough discerning factors that makes it different from other distros. And he noticed how much work goes into maintenance of his distro, and keeping it up to date … and propaganda and forum and website and community stuff and and and … And most probably, like most basement dwelling geeks his piss poor social skills prevented him from finding enough willing helpers and co-devs. So he gave up.

      Else, why would he, as maker of the recent talk-of-the-town distro, switch over to another, probably lesser (in his mind) distro and work his ass off there for free and just for fun n giggles?

      These things happen, Sammie. All that nifty stuff is made by pimple-faced boys in their spare time. Even well-established distros like Manjaro are suffering from a lot less updates during and shortly after public holidays. BTW, I’ve managed to get my Manjaro back on the Unstable Repository that usually gives me 3 – 6 daily updates. The last holidays made the rate going down to 1 or maybe 2 updates a day. And they have a friggin army of at least 5 or 6 key devs and much more helpers and coders and maintainers.

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