I've always wanted to try Solus. The budgie desktop looks intriguing, and I've always wanted to try one that was an O/S of it's own and not a Debian or RHEL derivative. My main hang-up is concerning software availability. Since it's not your typical Debian-based OS the normal (huge) package repositories are out, so do you have to compile everything from source specifically for Solus, or do they have their own pre-compiled archive of stuff?
There is a (growing) repository of software packages and the developers are open to sensible package requests[1]. So far I've found that almost everything I needed was already in the Solus repository.
I have wondered, and certainly not exclusively to Solus, if there’s any reason why some “package capture” couldn’t be built in to people compiling from source for distros where a package isn’t available.
Certainly there would have to be a bunch of checks and balances, not blind acceptance, capturing source code URLs, checksums and the like, potentially reproducible builds, but could be a way to ‘crowd source’ packages. Or is this a solution in search of a problem?
checkinstall [0] lets you create deb, rpm, and a few other formats from Debian, so long as you have a decent makefile. Basically replaces the "make install" step.
It is weird I didn't see the Gentoo Portage and BSD Ports as the first mentions. They are basically forerunners not sure if they are actually the first.
Except for very large applications, most software you would find on the AUR can be compiled in a few minutes or less.
And it's not about "saving the time to recompile", it's about using the source code so that you can keep using the AUR as long as the compilation process does not break.
Well, I've found my weekend project. Gonna install it on an older Laptop that's just laying around. Just for fun and experimentation. Thanks for the info
No problem. I've switched a laptop and my PC to Solus (dual-boot with Windows for gaming), and so far I've had fewer problem than I had with e.g. Ubuntu and other "mature" distributions. If you need support, there is the #Solus IRC channel on freenode (where lead developer Ikey Doherty is very active), or the Solus subreddit[1].
Development can be followed on Google+[2], Twitter[3], and in the #Solus-Dev channel.
Have fun!
I use Void Linux on my home theater box and I've used Gentoo on my main laptop since 2012 (I did a short Hackintosh run from 2008 - 2011, but before that I was on Gentoo since 2003).
Gentoo is a true dev OS and it's not for the meek for sure, but I've grown to love it. I really should contribute more to Void and start making package for it. I think it's one of the best up and coming Linux distros.
A while back, I tried to connect my Bluetooth headset to my low-end notebook. As far as dmesg could tell me, the Bluetooth chip was detected and worked just fine. But it did not detect any devices that were around. After the headphones failed, I tried again with my phone and a tablet (I have too many gadgets, I know) - the result was consistent throughout: The notebook did not discovery any pair-able devices.
After about ten minutes of this, I decided I am too old for this crap and got my good notebook. This time, the notebook discovered the headphones, like it should, and it happily paired with the headphones, like it should, but every now and again, the Bluetooth connection just dropped, and the notebook could not re-discover the headphones until I rebooted it. dmesg was ominously silent about this, it merely pointed out that it had killed the Bluetooth daemon (but I suspect that was a result of the driver or the BT chip misbehaving).
To be fair, otherwise both notebooks work perfectly fine, and I also have no idea if a "Driver Manager" would have helped me with either of these issues. And it is not a deal breaker for me either, because do not normally use my notebooks for anything that requires headphones. But I did run into problems that I suspect were caused either by the hardware or the driver, and dmesg did not help me at all.
In case it matters, though, both notebooks run openSuse Tumbleweed, but I have a hunch neither of these problems is distro-specific.
EDIT: OK, so this was not about enumeration. But still.
BT itself is NOT the problem. Some of the profiles are a bit odd, and others are downright eloquent and wonderful. The LE stuff is actually quite nice in places!
BT chipsets on the other hand, are complete crap. And every single BT stack has its own mess of bugs and is 90% of an implementation of what the spec says, and each stack implements a slightly different 90%, and the remaining 10% is just random bugs.
Strongly disagree. Every time I look into building anything with bluetooth I come to the same conclusion that the protocol is irredeemably awful.
The fact that the massive pile of profiles essentially all need to be supported inside the chipset is what makes their firmware so buggy and unreliable. Software written by semiconductor manufacturers is famously bad, and the approach that bluetooth has taken basically asks them to do more of the firmware work, keep track of more application state, and never get their wires crossed. And because the chipset firmware is almost always a binary blob, system designers have no way to fix anything. Of course it's going to be a massive failure.
What they should have done was built a dumb, encrypted pipe, and let downstream driver and application developers deal with the application-layer logic. Then the semiconductor manufacturers would only be responsible for a basic bulk transfer interface that's a lot harder to screw up. This is why wifi and ethernet and usb drivers tend to work reasonably well, and bluetooth drivers are an unreliable mess.
I get why they did it... in the early days, prices for bluetooth chipsets varied depending on which profiles they supported. This was supposed to be a way for semiconductor companies to differentiate themselves in a world where they were increasingly viewed as commodity suppliers. But because they never bothered to invest in their firmware development (these companies have like 20 people working on chip design and verification and like 3 on firmware), they ended up making everything worse rather than adding value.
AVRCP is quite eloquent. I get the feeling that whoever designed it is upset that it never got properly implemented or used.
BTLE in its entirety is just simple. It is possible to read over the BTLE spec in a couple hours and understand it. (AVRCP can be read in half an hour tops, 15 minutes if you skim the same-y diagrams)
BT SPP is, well, a glorified serial port, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.
If you want a glorified pipe, BT SPP is where you go. You can actually use BT LE to do the same thing, at a much slower transfer rate.
> wifi and ethernet and usb drivers tend to work reasonably well
WiFi and USB drivers are also flaming piles of trash. Since 90% of USB use cases consist of either USB-HID or Mass Storage, there is less to get wrong.
Do anything beyond that and you can easily find yourself SOL.
And Wi-Fi drivers are complete crap. Power management sucks, Wi-Fi chips hard lock and somehow a watch dog timer never kicks in (how?), and they rarely give the speeds that they are supposed to. Intel had some Wi-Fi chip a few years back that, for a good 2 years after its release, it would randomly stop deciding to finding networks to connect to, until it was power cycled. After a couple of years on the market they finally released a firmware update.
Don't get me wrong, Chipset BT Firmware is horrible. I've worked with vendors who obviously weren't using version control, subsequent patches would have regressions that made it apparent they had built today's patch off of old source code that predated the last patch they had sent us. Hilarity like that.
But the OS side BT stacks also tend to suck. Then there is the driver for the BT chip, which can also suck.
The actual BT standard itself, I would argue, isn't the largest part of what is wrong.
It really varies. My bluetooth works without incident with my linux machines, but I once spend almsot half an hour trying to pair with my macbook. I hardly use that macbook anymore because I ran into a myriad of problems.
It still pisses me off to this day how people keep extolling macbooks while denigrating how linux is so unstable and broken because my experience has been exactly the opposite.
In my experience, my Macs and my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed ThinkPad are about on par in terms of how well they work. The Mac handles some things better, the ThinkPad handles other things better. Stability-wise, they’re all very solid machines.
Looking at my co-workers with Windows laptops, I’m amazed at the amount of crap people are willing to put up with. They are so unreliable it’s unreal.
The same headphones will pair with my phone every time without hickups - well, maybe a couple of times, but considering that I use them daily, the problem rate is negligible.
That phone is a (relatively) cheap Huawei phone running Android. I have no idea how far the Android kernel deviates from the regular Linux kernel, so maybe Huawei just put a real effort into writing good BT drivers (or the company that made the BT chip?).
But the fact remains that with my phone and my tablet, Bluetooth pairing with the headphones works very well (= reliably). So while Bluetooth may suck in many ways I do not even begin to comprehend, in my case, I strongly suspect, the problem lies elsewhere.
for Bluetooth to work correctly. Without this, discovering Bluetooth devices often does not work correctly and when I manage to pair my headphones with the laptop, the connection is often lost when wifi is used.
Interesting, hadn't heard about Isenkram. I have no idea if there is any relation. I would have to ask Ikey Doherty (the main Solus developer) directly. The only similar projects he mentioned on Reddit were Jockey and (I think) Gnome Software.
https://github.com/solus-project/linux-driver-management