Renoise on 64-bit Arch Linux

Needs the following libraries:
pacman -S lib32-libx11 lib32-alsa-lib lib32-libstdc++5

Manjaro Linux

Been a while since I've actively sought to use a GNU/Linux distribution for my day to day needs. Windows 7 has proven itself useful, Windows 8 far less so. 8.1 a return to form but the amount of fighting required to do anything out of the ordinary (rebooting to disable driver signing got long in the tooth the second time) meant I've stuck with 7 quite happily out of convenience more than anything else.

The Windows 10 "free upgrade" offer appeared, I accepted, waited until the release and... nothing. Took about 2 weeks before it decided I could install it. And it failed. Wouldn't even begin the upgrade. Couple of days half-heartedly pushing the button, then all the news broke about what was being sent back to Microsoft in terms of telemetry. Keylogging? Sorry, no thanks. Whatever their intentions may be there's no way I'm having anything of the sort, so swiftly removed all the updates related to the upgrade and carried on with 7.

Of course, then the updates to add this nonsense into 7 and 8 appeared. Yes, you can block them at the moment, but this was the final straw. Who's to know when one of these will be a requirement for further updates? Sorry, no thanks.

I had been thinking of getting an Arch Linux installation set up again simply to continue building the GroovyArcade AUR packages. Running in VirtualBox was getting long in the tooth (maybe laziness on my part not investigating how to set it up properly), using an 80x25 terminal was fine for brief excursions but as the only available working environment I was staying away. So I grab the installation image, boot it up and follow the official instructions - up until the point it mentions systemd. "Wait, this is different to last time?" Sure enough, the last time I'd installed Arch was mid 2014 and it was still transitioning to systemd at the time. I'll leave it up to the reader to do their own reading about systemd, suffice to say I have numerous technical reasons for avoiding it, but chiefly I disagree massively with the behaviour and attitude of the developers.

(As an aside, Arcade Otaku sits on a stock Debian server that does have systemd. The reason for this is solely because the host Bytemark is exceptionally familiar with Debian - and should the proverbial hit the fan with an issue I'm not able to resolve I want to be able to call on them for support.)

So where to go? Reading about suggests all the major distributions have transitioned to systemd for convenience. I deliberately try and use original distributions if I can (Ubuntu was good once, then Unity!) which limits choice quite a bit - there are hundreds of Debian based distributions to sift through alone. I'm tempted by Slackware for a few brief moments then remember how much pain it was to get Debian into a desktop setup I liked the last time I tried. Slackware multiplies this by a hundred. Nothing wrong with it, if you want to learn how a GNU/Linux system hangs together, but I learnt that back in the 90s and have no need of yet another refresher course.

A brief stint with FreeBSD impressed me. It just worked. Very unfussy. Until it came to getting Xorg (and by extension Cinnamon) running. Abject failure. And then I couldn't find the tools I needed to create a USB stick to boot yet another ISO - tools that I knew were easy to get on a GNU/Linux setup. So it went. Did feel very much like it would suit running a headless server with minimum effort. May look into that in future.

I have more of a think and realise I'm looking around for something with which I can easily recompile packages, and a usable desktop. And no systemd. I take a look at Gentoo again, something I've not used since the early days of source-based distributions and AdvanceMAME, and stumble across Funtoo. This looks good - easy recompiling, sensible defaults, straightforward desktop. After a minute or two of the installation I remember the original instructions from those early days, and the manual has barely changed. I continue, get the base install, then do an "emerge networkmanager" to get my wireless working as recommended. It goes off and begins compiling 58 packages. "Ah, yes". Back then being able to patch packages and have the system recompile them was a novelty, and we used it because we were looking for the leanest, fastest setup possible to run MAME on. Not a chance I'm spending my time recompiling the kernel or Xorg every time there's a change. Goodbye Funtoo.

There are probably any number of minor distributions that would suit but I'm rapidly getting fed up of the whole situation. I try and follow the instructions given to install Arch with an extra repository providing non-systemd init packages. Another failure, and I can't even be bothered to try and work out why. Back to the whole major distribution thing - if one of these small repos goes down, that's it, you're stuffed. Yes, you can start patching and installing the requirements yourself, but if I wanted to go down that route I'd have gone immediately to Slackware and had done with it all. However I'm quite happy to give thanks to all the community that work on such things and use the fruits of their labour, not rolling everything myself.

Not for the first time I find myself looking at Manjaro Linux, an Arch Linux variant. The Manjaro Experiments is a particularly good read, the screenshots of the various desktop environments look promising (I'm not too bothered which one I use so long as it does what I need and isn't horrendously ugly - GNOME3 is neither of these things, and I really like having decent copy and paste so virtually all standard window managers I find unusable), but it has "optional" systemd. A good start, but having failed to get Arch itself weaned off it I'm not keen to give it another go despite having the packages in the main repositories.

More digging gives more encouraging information. The Manjaro forums have a specific for OpenRC, and being able to go non-systemd is actively promoted as a major plus point of the distribution. Not only that, there's a community ISO available with all the legwork done - OpenRC init, XFCE desktop. I grab the image and throw it onto a flash drive, keen to see if my search is over.

Install takes about ten minutes. It's a LiveCD running XFCE, with a console installation script. It connects to my wireless without any fuss (this may be old hat to anyone who has kept up with Linux on a laptop, but the last time I tried it was with Debian which was a royal pain to get going), just like FreeBSD did. The install script asks some sensible questions, and all the defaults proposed are logical. For no reason other than just to do something a little out of the ordinary I tell it to use btrfs for / and /home, although it's marked as experimental. I've read good things and I'm not holding critical data, why not try it now. Literally no glitches or awkwardness during the installation. It even asks if I want my user to have sudo access (the tedium of sorting this myself means I inevitable never do it and simply su each time instead). Reboot, remove USB drive.

It boots in about 6 seconds flat on the machine I'm using (an old HP nc6400 with an SSD). That alone impresses me, then I log in. It's XFCE with a pleasant enough, fully coherent theme and icon set. The font rendering is nice - the default fonts are good (Droid Sans), it's hugely responsive and quick. First impressions count and I'm seriously impressed. I make two tweaks to font sizes (window titles up to size 10, default font everywhere else size 10 too), and leave it alone. Touchpad defaults are absolutely perfect and the cursor isn't stuttering about whenever I try to tap. Only four icons in the main menu - Terminal is top! Followed by file manager, browser, and add/remove software. Fire up the terminal - XFCE terminal with transparency, that'll do fine. Browser? Firefox. Three cheers for the maintainer. FF may not be the worlds quickest and fanciest browser, but it means I can go directly to the main extensions site and install uBlock Origin before even a single advert has a chance to get viewed.

Literally everything I try works without fuss. I've had a week of messing around with various different possibilities and this is the first time I've not had to do anything beyond installing it. No systemd, all working, Arch based, looks good.

Off to find out how to donate.