Orca Flotta

Hackman Linux: Not Ready Yet :/

Moin moin!

Alright? I hope you all are still happy in your self- or gov’mtl-inflicted isolationist camps and use the days of your locked away-ness productively by downloading and installing as many Linuxes as you can get your fingers on. Orca’s for sure trying to do her part as well and looked at a new contender in her favourite field of ArchLinux derivatives:

Hackman
Hackman Linux doesn’t have a website yet but we won’t need that anyway. You’ll find out why pretty soon.

That screen on SourceForge tells us already all we gotta know about Hackman: Calamares installer (our fave, mmmm), XFCE DE, Pamac, Trizen AUR, plenty apps and shell script nobody really needs out of the box. That thing is complete!

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Cool. No Welcome Screen, nobody tells you what to do. Hackman trusts in you as an adult, self-determined penguin.
2
We are responsible adults indeed and start the initial update without being chaperoned. The little Red symbol is attention grabbing enuff as it is, right.
4
Now let’s have a looksee at Neofetch: Just says Arch Linux 64-bit. Doesn’t say Hackman. Can it be … are we on a real vanilla Arch install, just without the hassle and geekshit? I think so! 🙂

Whoa, you noticed it too? Kernel is 5.5.2 😮 I installed Hackman, like, 2 or 3 days ago and did the update. You saw me doing it, right? So wtf aren’t we on 5.5.9 yet?

… Ok, I just checked again, it’s on 5.5.9 now. Pheew! 😉

But now …

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5.5.9, alright. But see the clock? At my locale it’s 2 hours later already. And I particularly took care to let the machine know where I am, already during installation. And  fiddling around with local settings n stuff didn’t help. I’m sure I’ll be able to correctify it all in time but why? It’s small but important stuff like that we come to expect in the fukn year 2020 a.d.
7
And this put an abrupt – if temporary – stop to my review. Surfing with Chromium, searching with Google??? WTF?

Honored developers and maintainers of Linux distributions:

Why you doing that?  I thought you’re the upper crust of the Linux community? The wise ones. The ones with integrity and a sound moral backbone. And stuff like Chrome(ium) and Google is, like, totally counterproductive to the GNU/Linux FOSS approach. If any user wants Chrome on their individual machine, they’re welcome. But issue Chromium as standard and sole method of internet browsing, and searching with Google instead of DuckDuckGo or Startpage is simply unacceptable!

Be independent! Be proud! Be Linux!

… and fix the clock issue ffs!

What else am I missing? Ah, yes, the conclusion:

Apart from the time issues and the bad slipup with Chromium and Google – all of which is easily fixable, even without advanced geekery – I’m slowly beginning to ask myself how many more Arch derivatives do we need? Particularly of the sort that comes with only one desktop variant. It’s all becoming redundant now, and just add to the clutter and the white noise.

I mean I get it, yes, Calamares makes shit easy and you can offer a relatively pure Arch experience or various degrees of forked-offiness. But did any of you ever take a look at Namib? Easy peasy, still 100% Arch compatible, and comes with more desktops than you can shake a stick at. Best Linux distro ever! Why would I install Hackman when Namib and Archman have their own, probably better, XFCE versions?

And now since frederic2ec went AWOL, Namib’s up for grabs I guess. Why not take the perfect and make it perfecterer? Name it Sahara, Gobi or Mojave if you fancy. Orca would be back on your Namib spin soooo friggn fast! Or take Archman and de-Turk it and make it a bit easier to access, or or or. Or even try to punch some cleverness into Manjaro if you feel up to it. But please stop re-inventing the wheel and come up with lesser versions of the original!

Anyhoo, if you a fan of Xfce, please, by all means, go ahead and install Hackman Linux. It’s surely good.

Widdioh?

 

 

PS: I just stumbled onto a fellow SL blogger’s blog where she announced that she wouldn’t post much because of the COVID-19 house-arrest. Ugh. I was like whaaa…? How else is she gonna spend the time-out, if not with blogging and SL-ing? Riddel me that, hun!

 

Anyhoo, I’m just waiting for the car electrician to take me to my van and repair it. See, we’re also isolated since a couple days. If for an entirely different reason. 😉

 

31 comments

  1. I don’t quite get this incomplete distro, neither do I get the Chromium animosity. Chrome and Edge are both built on Chromium and, Edge especially, is a neat piece of work even on Android.

    I did order Rain today so that I can drag my uncapped along wherever I go, armed with a little mifi hotspot and a 24,000mAh power bank. I just posted on LinuxMint last night, I see a few folks did stop to read. It wasn’t meant as a technically correct educational but just as easy reading. Welcome to pop around and take a peek.

    I would love a distri that I can adorn with tech gadgets on the desktop. Gears and dials and things. And a nuke for spam.

    The thing with a deeply dependable distro is boredom. It is like driving a 1979 Merc 200. It never breaks, always starts and goes but never excites.

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    • “Chrome and Edge are both built on Chromium”
      Wrong. Chromium and Edge are built on Chrome. American shit. Inacceptable, all of them. I try to be a good socialist and FOSS activist. In so far no proprietary kak gets in my IT carpark.

      I’ve herad about Rain, no idea what it is though. Some mobile thingamajig? I never even take an oldschoool cellphone with me and am totally lost if I need to operate a smartphone.

      Will try to find your post in Mint forum …

      Boredom? Boredom is perfect, it’s great. I love OSes that disppear out of sight out of mind. I almost never even use the menu, as all the shit I need I’ve pulled onto the panel and start everything from there.

      LOL the Mercedes analogy. We had a 1982 W123 280E for more than 12 years. Automatic, AC, central locking, and the seats were still totally comfy. Best car we ever had. And with the 280 fuel injection engine everything but boring. That thing pulled off the robots better than most others! And such a comfy ride, Cruising i style. 😉

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  2. I had this on a very up to date Windows 10 Pro. “… and fix the clock issue ffs!”. Just like Linux should fix the friggen Sleep to Never Awake Again, Ever problem.

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    • Win10?? You serious? I left the Microsoft realm in Win7 times and never looked back.

      What’s the Sleep to Never Awake Again problem? Never encountered that. On what Linux does it happen?

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      • Win 7 was just crap. I am no Windows fan, to the contrary. But, in all honesty, it is light years ahead of most semi-cripple Linux distros. Sleek, fast, light, stable. Well designed and executed. On a good day, I reinstalled it the instant my Linux didn’t let me log in. I am no brand loyalist but also not a brand basher. Win 7 was top heavy, slow. Cumbersome. People loved it. Says something about people.

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        • I thought Win7 was the best Win ever, but still not as nice a Linux. 😉
          And I find nothing crippled i my Linux distros. All our desk-and laptops are much faster and more stable than they ever were on Windows.
          But, ok … we’re the typical mom n dad users, no special software and shit.

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          • Win 7 was only great if you ask the less computerate public.

            So many quirks in so many Linux. Xfce eats its own .ICE files and then need a messiah to get it back to life. So many illogical quirks that made simple tasks complex. Nobody thought productivity as most wanted spanners in their hands or trying to run games. Few thought of actual work. People built new distros just for bragging rights, not to address everyday productivity needs.

            Just today may Mint irked me, out of character. It suddenly has all kinds of repository clashes. I am too tired to have to nanny an OS. COBOL and the days of C/PM were enough, when I was young.

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            • When I had my first custom computer built, back in 2010, Win7 was “The Shit” and much better than every other Windows ever. I realy liked it after the Vista nanny state.

              How you do that? And wtf is that even, repo clashes? In Arch everything just werkz.

              And you’re right about building new distros just for bragging rights. As a housewife, using Linux as my sole operating system, I almost feel like an outsider in the Linux community. “What, you’re actually working with Linux? Stupid woman!”

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              • Any woman cooking dinner on Linux has to be a geeky wizard, not stupid by a wide margin.

                Gosh, I started playing with and building computers in the days of things I can’t even recall the names of. Sinclair, ZX-80, ZX Spectrum, I stand corrected. Commodore 64.

                The Windows 7 superiority was based in hype, opinion, not fact. The thing was obese, lethargic, devoid of much needed drivers and people somehow loved it.

                I have Manjaro, circa February 2020, which is Arch based and its power management sucks. I think the problem may lie between vertebrae L5 – S1 in the Linux kernel. The nerve got severed, I think.

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                • I only had a Canon printer connected to my first self-built. It worked. But we didn’t use it nearly enough and the ink dried out. Since then we put everything we need print-outs of, on a USB stick and have it printed at internet cafés or Postnet offices or sumsuch. Saves money.

                  For power management I can only say it differs from distro to distro. My laughable Acer netbook shows me battery life between 8 and 10 hours. That thing is from 2010 and, theoretically, never lost any battery capacity. And I guess with Archy distros it shows more capacity than with Mint. But who trusts that shit anyway?

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                  • My upright citizen Canon died the same arid way. The only things I print nowadays are letters to my Dad. LibreOffice makes PDF easy and Thunderbird delivers. I even email my blog posts to WordPress.

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                    • “letters to my Dad. LibreOffice makes PDF easy and Thunderbird delivers.”

                      I must be, like, totally stupid but this went straight over my pretty noggin. First you convert letters to PDF and then send the PDF off via email? Why not straight email?

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