I'm using Devuan on a portable HDD that I use across 3 devices, and Gobo seems like a last stop for me.
Asides from the obvious overhaul to the FHS, one thing I'm really interested in is its ability to easily install multiple versions of a program at the same time. I fucking need this. I had to do some batshit insane autism in order to install XMMS on this fucking machine and I fucking hate the FHS now that I'm taking a look at Gobos. Definitely an interesting solution to dependency hell. Don't know about GLibC and I need to investigate that.

I'm thinking of doing something incredibly minimalistic that I could rsync over to other drives on some of my other machines given that it looks like all you have to do is copy and paste Programs and System over to the same machine if you're too lazy to just rsync the whole drive.

I fucking hate package managers so this is also up my alley. Recipes kind of seems like Gentoo without the autism of Gentoo.
Y'know, it makes me angry at the FHS too. What the fuck is this shit?
I don't like having multiple programs stored in 5 different directories like /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/sbin an whatnot

I haven't installed GoboLinux yet but I will post pics of my machine when I do it. If anyone here has used this distro please let me know how it went for you and any advice you might have.. Greatly appreciated!

>>4572
bump for no good reason
i installed gobolinux last month
feels like a gentoo macintosh
i love the file hierarchy
compile just werks
any and all dependency management bullshit is on me
and i can just press no
my system is free of bloat because i reserve the right to avoid compiling wayland and systemd when compiling my garbage
most of the time i don't even need to press N because i compile 20 year old software
they do the job well
i have a job and i do schoolwork on this machine

however:
if python breaks, the entire system breaks
i have no idea what was going through the heads of the developers when they decided to make Compile (the package manager) dependent on python. A system like this should be built around posix shell or something instead of python.

But..
the general idea of the distro is amazing and I wish it had more polish and more community
Also from the standpoint of minimalism, this distro does not achieve that, it comes with dozens of packages that you have to manually go through an obnoxious installer to remove, or remove them yourself once it's installed. It should have an option to come without anything but the base system, or to come without anything besides a working x server and nothing more.

summarized?

Pros:

File system is amazing and can achieve a minimal nix like experience
Can make recipes automatically that most of the time work
gobonet connect is absolutely perfect
Package manager is actually very good and you can even compile your kernel with it
i've never used zsh before but this and gobo's default rice makes it sexy
Deadest community i've ever seen (except for the irc)

Cons:
Compile is dependent on python
By default it installs a lot of junk (easy to remove)
Deadest community i've ever seen (no real recent internet presence outside of their github and website)

>>4572
I maintain my position that the instability of Linux is a result of it's package management traditions. Almost all packages managers place files in the FHS according to convention, which means that updating them requires you to overwrite files, since they don't have their own directory. This makes it impossible to have multiple versions of packages, because otherwise you'd get dependency hell. The solution Linux offers is to simply update all software as often as possible, and updates are how previously stable systems stop working. I simply shouldn't have to update my window manager, terminal, kernel, GNU utils, or tools I only use ever so often regularily just so other applications can have up-to-date libraries.

Gobo Linux (made by the same guy who made htop) solved the fhs and package manager problem 20 years ago.

>/Programs is where all programs reside. No exceptions. You can explore what is installed in the system by looking inside it.
>Each program entry contains all files for that program, stored in a versioned subdirectory.
>Multiple versions of a program can be maintained simultaneously, so you can alternate between them as you desire, or even use both at the same time when necessary.
From https://gobolinux.org/at_a_glance.html

If I have program X installed on one GoboLinux PC, I can just move it to another GoboLinux PC by just moving its directory inside the latter's "Programs" directory and it will work without having to reinstall it. It allows for versioning without dependency hell or the use of containers.
Why isn't this the top distribution? It compiles from source by default but it's incredibly easy to install binaries as well.

>>10086
> when they decided to make Compile (the package manager) dependent on python.
It is? That is a deal breaker for me. I'm looking to purge python from my system completely. I checked the github page for (https://github.com/gobolinux/Compile) and it looked like there was no python dependencies.

there are some very broken packages at times but a solid concept nonetheless

>>4572
I've been daily driving GoboLinux 017.01 for a while now and figured I'd document what actually works and what doesn't, since the internet presence for this distro is essentially nonexistent outside of the GitHub and the official site. Here's my daily driver notes from a portable HDD setup:

Personally installed on a portable drive, booted from a laptop (i5-6300U, Intel HD 520). Had to do some stupid Grub magikz in the LiveCD to even install but the portability angle works exactly as advertised.. you can rsync the drive or just yank it and plug it into another machine. I installed directly on the laptop first to make sure all the relevant drivers installed or enabled correctly, then used it across other hardware from there. The filesystem is what sold me before I even tried it. If you're coming from anything FHS-based and you've ever had to track down where a package scattered its files across /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share and /etc simultaneously, /Programs is immediately therapeutic.

The glibc shipped with 017.01 is from 2019. This matters because a non-trivial amount of software you'll want to compile simply won't build against GCC 14.2.0. This is my current GCC lineup:

/Programs/GCC/14.2.0
/Programs/GCC/9.4.0
/Programs/GCC/4.9.4
/Programs/GCC/4.2.4

Gobo's versioned /Programs directory makes this completely painless to maintain because the multiple GCC versions will coexist without conflict and you just point Compile at whichever version the software needs. This is one of those cases where the distro's philosophy actively solves a real problem instead of just looking nice on paper. On any FHS system this would be a nightmare.

Firefox, FVWM, PulseAudio, Pidgin, VSCodium, XMMS1 (there's a recipe, mostly smooth with a few nonsensical dep errors that are solvable) work fine. Most of my FVWM dockapps required Recipe wrangling but nothing insurmountable. Getting XMMS working on a modern system on any distro requires some batshit dependency juggling while on Gobo it was actually one of the less painful experiences I've had with it specifically because of the version isolation.

The only thing I've had a nasty time with was Mumble. I spent too long on this and gave up. Running it in an Ubuntu Distrobox instead, which works but has its own annoyances (configs don't persist reliably across sessions). If anyone has actually compiled Mumble on 017 I genuinely want to know how.

O yeah.. I've had more or less an empty experience with InstallPackage. Don't bother relying on it. My workaround for smaller programs has been extracting .debs directly into /Programs/programname/version and running SymlinkProgram manually. This usually works unless the binary has hardcoded SystemD hooks... and because Gobo uses neither SystemD nor OpenRC, Debian packages that assume init system integration will fuck you over. Not a dealbreaker but just worth knowing..

Compile depends on Python. This came up in the thread already.
>>10154 was worried about it. In practice it hasn't been a problem for me but it is philosophically incongruous for a distro that's supposed to give you surgical control over your system. A POSIX shell implementation would make more sense. Hasn't broken anything but if Python ever breaks, Compile goes with it ...and effectively bricks the system

>>10087
Gobo requires you to tinker constantly to get to a usable state. I spent roughly two-three weeks compiling things, finding workarounds, and wrangling with recipes before I had a system I was happy with. Most of that time I've blocked out because it was genuinely painful in some places. if you are expecting something you can install and use immediately, this isn't it. If you're the kind of person who finds the tinkertrannying itself worthwhile and wants to actually understand what's on your machine then yea it pays off.

The community is dead outside of IRC. GitHub discussions has almost nothing. If you're using this distro you're largely on your own. There needs to be a larger effort in order to fix this.

i'd much rather live without python entirely
still appreciate the minimalist, “real sysadmin” feel gobo's got though, just wish they'd tighten up the dev process more

devuan on 3 devices feels too corporate and tangled for me, gobolinux lets you finally stop fighting filesystem consistency like it's a warzone, no python bullshit either way. just run whatever kernel you want on the raw floppy, compile your own chaos, and enjoy living in the void of sysadmin purity where nothing else interferes with your build farm

the gobo build process has definitely been improving in, recent releases (even if it's not documented) , what you're seeing is, allso tied to the shift toward arch-based distros like devuan or artix. but i'd say that when they went with a more lightweight "compile" tool instead of one big monolithic manager, it might have worked better than they expected , as someone who's still on python 3.9, upgrading packages isn't alawys smooth...

idk why anyone'd stop using python for a minimal setup but hey there's still other options. my mom's computer is basically a no-go on anything except windows and python so i just got thee kernel bootloader thing from a friend (i've never used that before) to test it out, not sure how much I can actually do with it since all it does now is let me boot into one of three kernels. nah but the file hierarchy seems spot-on though.

My old Lenovo X610 notebook was my favorite for this, solid aluminum case held up to all the compile hell. But Python dependency there? That""'s the move that doomed it.