Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.

Sooo fun, :)

Source Mage GNU + Linux (external wiki)

Haven’t tried halloy, but it sounds cool, I wish rust build with shared libs in mind, instead of everything link statically, but it sounds interesting, I’ll see how it is compared to srain which is my current choice…

srain, becuase of being modern gtk, because of being light on dependencies, because of being available on aur, and because I’d like it more (yes there are several things that are also a matter of taste) than the alternatives, :)

Have you read it’s github front page?

This is an experimental cryptographic network library. It has not been formally audited by an independent third party that specializes in cryptography or cryptanalysis. Use this library at your own risk.

BTW, if you look at its issues (including closed ones, which most probably aren’t really closed) you’ll find pretty interesting discussions about its crypto not being right. That said, I’m not sure what irungentoo brings to the picture…

At any rate, if you’re looking for distributed messaging, I’d look into Jami. It also uses DHT and something similar to torrents mechanism. Jami is my only option so far for distributed messaging. There’s also Briar, but I don’t like it for regular messaging, particularly on phones (too much battery usage), neither its underlying technology, but if it’s to your liking, then that’s another option for distributing messaging.

What I post from lemmy.ml wouldn’t be seen there if that were the case, but it’s seen there, so that doesn’t seem the case…

BTW. I’ve already joined… That said, I see the same posts missing. Of course that doesn’t apply to one I made myself from lemmy.ml. There’s also a bot one from 9 days ago, but the rest are at least 1 month old…

pending for subscription, we’ll see, and while pending, still not syncing properly…

I would recommend using apkupdater for closed source apks, in particular enabling apkpure repo, rather than insisting on using google repo with aurora store or any other mechanism.

Also looking for FLOSS alternatives if possile (granted things like whatsapp and waze won’t have alternatives for example).

Some metioned apkmirror as the more trusted repo for closed source apps, however it’s currently formatting apks on multiple apks, and supposedly requesting for the apkmirror own instaler, so I recommend apkpure instead, which is also pretty well regarded, and they also in theory offer the same packages as the ones on google play…

For FLOSS apps, the different f-droid repos (official ones and non official ones such as izzy-on-droid) offer a good amount of them.

These two posts are really enlightening:

How I Built My New Linux Gaming Desktop In 2021 With Amd Cpugpu And Gnu Guix

I Love Arch But Gnu Guix Is My New Distro

From the last, there is a non guix project including packages for guix, which are not officially supported given hey are not free software. I recommend taking a look at the last post at least, since it comes from someone who used Arch, and made the move to Guix, not just opinions from people like me, who haven’t ever used Guix.

That said, Guix is in my TODO list. The thing is that I want to learn a bit more than minimal Guile, so I can write packages myself (there are always missing packages, even on Arch/Artix + AUR, I always have the need to whether tweak something at some point, or create a package still not in there), and also deal with my own services to run with shepherd. So I don’t want to blindly try things out…

It shares with Nix the reproducible build of everything, but the language it uses is Guile, which has some history. Nix has its own language. To me that’s a plus on Guix. But the most important part, is that the official repos are all for free software, and then on the non guix project one can look for non free software pieces, which to me this is also a plus. I guest most might differ.

But again, if you want to try it, even if it’s just because of curiosity, why not doing it so? I hope those prior posts from someone who migrated there might be helpful.

Why not looking for distributed mechanism, which don’t depend on trusting central servers or particular instances on decentralized mechanisms, like jami, or similar?

I don’t think so. Dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant is really light, suitable for light installers, and live USB stick images.

I’ve been using dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant for so long… I do understand currently users prefer NM, but I hope there’s no push for it to be the unique way to manage network connectivity, and on light installers, I hope I’m not force to use NM either.

very few, and one has to try so many times… I gave up. I guess RSS feeds whenever possible. though that consumes disk if local, so I’m really reluctant…

That has never been true, not at the point of the discussions on Debian (on Arch there was never a public discussion that I remember), and of of course not true now.

s6, dinit, runit, openrc and shephered are good options, currently in use by different distros. At the time of the public debian descussions, at least runit and openrc were available, but they were dismissed, and I don’t remember the arguments, but not so convincing at the time, thus the whole discussion about the topic.

I’m not a systemd opponent, but claims of not having compelling alternatives doesn’t feel right. I used Arch with systemd for a while, and I moved later to Artix with s6, and I’m thinking on testing dinit, and I have no issue. I guess if some major distros had made the move to runit or openrc, they would be more used as of now. BTW, at work, for containers and VMs I actually need to use systemd, and I see no problem with that.

It’s totally true sysVinit was way hard to keep maintaining on distros, and something else was required. Probably given the influence from major distros changed the game over systemd, and now that’s considered standardization now a days, but something else could also have become the standard. What’s for sure is that there are success stories of using something else, Guix with shepherd, Artix with several inits (dinit, s6, runit, openrc), Gentoo with openrc (one can choose others, like systemd), void with runit, chimera with dinit, and the list goes on. Variety is not necessarily a luxury, in this case it means one can choose whatever aligns better to one’s needs, believes (perhaps simplicity, perhaps minimalism, perhaps free/libre considerations, etc), and so on.

What’s also true is that for work purposes, one can’t be negligent learning about systemd, most probably one will need to deal with it sooner or later, because major distros, and in particular commercial ones, already embraced systemd, and that’s not changing any time soon.

The sad effect of wide adoption of systemd, whether one opposes it or not, is that now services/daemons developers focus on providing systemd ready daemons, and for anything else the distro developers need to port to non systemd alternatives, and even build applications without systemd if that’s possible at all. And if one is looking for a daemon not packaged by the non systemd distro of choice, ones is on our own creating the proper service/daemon, but not something impossible.

The main problem with systemd has never been the time it takes to boot, it’s more on the lines of what @z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml and @StrangeAstronomer@lemmy.ml mentioned.

true !

Well, there are alternatives. There’s /e/ (murena.io now a days) and distroot, and you can use gnupg with others who also use gnupg, and with distroot you can use its own encryption as well. There’s tutanota and prrotonmail, which use their own encryption mechanisms but only work with the same providers and not with other providers…

I mean there are already several non big corps providers of email. Distroot also provides xmpp, nextcloud, and several other services, the same as /e/. I can’t tell I’d trust more TB than the alternatives, several of them are non profit. But there are options. It’s sad before smart phones, some big corps were already dominating the services, and after them, things got even worse. But there have been, and still are, options for refugees. That’s not the issue in my mind.

The big issue, is that those big corps do what they want, excluding those not using them. All of them, no exception, place received messages from /e/ to the spam, that if the email even reaches the final user, some times it gets discarded by the service without even getting to the end receiver. Several mail registrations for whatever account, banks, insurance, stores and so on, don’t even accept email addresses if not from the big corps. So the huge and toxic influence from big corps doesn’t get corrected by another non big corp service. It’s like with FLOSS alternatives, or more private alternatives in general, the issue is the power most users give to those big corps. Most users prefer those corps services, at times ignoring the non big corps are not less comfortable, but most of the time they don’t even care, even if told there are easy enough alternative they would still select big corps. Then with such power, big corps not only dominate, but also discriminate non big corps users…

Ohh, that’s an android app. I use PC/laptop to check on subs… Thanks any ways !

That’s so sad. So perhaps it’s time to say goodbye to reddit frontends, :( I’d prefer to setup rss feeds, but even those are getting rate limited now a days.

Sadly, even with the movement to lemmy, several interesting technical subs are still strong on reddit. The thing with local feeds, is disk space, and self-host is something I can’t do at the moment. At any rate, with the last libreddit front end down, I can’t even easily get the subs I was locally subscribed to, :(

Oh well…

Mozilla being Mozilla, I’d guess. They should have gone sel-hosted with sourcehut, or at least gitlab. Or if not self-hosted, the choice should have been at the least gitlab or better, given it allows to chose DCO over CLA. But perhaps not everyone cares… I remember when gitlab introduced DCO, and how that helped debian and gnome to migrate to gitlab. After allowing DCO, other projects migrated as well.

I’m not that fan of gitlab, and I’d prefer sourcehut for open source projects, but if wanting something closer to github, then gitlab might be the answer. But Mozilla is a corp, maybe they don’t care much about these things, and as a corp, perhaps they were looking for CLA sort of contribution any ways…