I have been itching for a change lately. Dont get me wrong I love Arch but I just want to have some fun with a new distro. I have been messing around with the *BSDs and although (Free and Open). Though my hardware support kind of deterred me from them, due to the fact that the Lenovo U410 I am running cant get wireless support. As such Ive been looking for the most BSD like Linux distro. CRUX is where I am heading but I just wanted to see some discussion in the debate between CRUX or Gentoo! Long live source based distros. Thanks.

Try CRUX honestly, I've been meaning to. The ports system looks super interesting.

i think i'm gonna go crux.

@cjm
I know the feel. I wasn't able to use FreeBSD because there is no RTL8188CE support. I decided to just grab an old X201 and everything works great.

CRUX. Everything is so simple and clean. Writing pkgfile's is a dream and the ports system is great. Just my two cents. Although I've never done it, it's like someone did an LFS system with a package manager that wraps make.

Oh, and Crux is a constellation. Gentoo is a type of penguin. Uh, you do the math?

BSD. BSD. BSD.
Support tends to wobble between them all but trust me, you WILL find the support you need, and you WILL be happy. It may be a little more work but your work will be awarded throughout time. Although if you're not looking for a longer(it's not very long, just not short I guess?) term. play with CRUX. CRUX is pretty badass.

Note that I've never used gentoo before, but I'm an "Advanced" crux user.

With those two distros (which are both source-based) you're only comparing the package management system. AFAIK, gentoo is oriented towards easily configuring your packages, while crux is more about simplifying the packaging process itself.

On gentoo, you have a huge package base available, and you change the compilation flags system-wide so that you always compile them with your own compile flags.

On crux, creating package recipes (Pkgfiles) is extremely easy. The simplest format would just be:


Needless to say it only takes a few minutes (seconds?) to package a new software.
the problem is that if a Pkgfile doesn't suits your needs, you'll have to ask the maintainer to update it, or fork it. That's where gentoo behaves better. But I sincerely doubt that gentoo's recipes are as easy to create as Pkgfiles. Now it's up to you to choose what you prefer.

Don't forget that you could use a usb wifi adapter with BSD, which you can take with you if you upgrade to a different flavour or upgrade your hardware, so it's not all bad just because your built in adapter isn't supported. :)

I'm at the moment a Gentoo user. I was very curious of CRUX, so I tried it a few days and I decided to switch to Gentoo. I'm still discovering Gentoo, so I don't know every differences.

First by installing some software on CRUX I had the problem a more recent version of gcc was needed. Unfortunately gcc isn't updated so often in CRUX, so I had to create my own package. Like z3bra told it, it's very easy to write a package recipe, but I think it's much better to update the software. Keep in mind I come from Archlinux and I'm discovering source based distro. From my point of view, In Archlinux gcc is updated when a new version is released, so I think it can be done. I decided I want a full rolling release so CRUX wasn't a good choice for me.

Then when you want other compile flags, you have to write your own package recipe. In Gentoo a package is written and each user can configure the package such that it fits his needs. That's the idea of the USE flag. It's more complicated to write a package, you lose the simplicity of CRUX, but after that the users don't have to write a modified version of the package. For example you want a graphical version of emacs, you have only to activate the "X" flag. You don't want any image support in emacs ? You can disable the support of jpeg or png for example. So you choose what you want.

For me it was necessary to write some ebuilds for Gentoo (the package recipes), but you have much more packages than in CRUX. Depending on your needs, perhaps everything is already packaged for you.

Last thing I discovered is that you can easily change the compiler version. For example if you have some softwares which needs python2 and some python3, you can install both version of python. /usr/bin/python is a link pointing the the version you want. You can also easily switch between python2 and python3. It's the same for gcc for example.

You have now a point of view of a Gentoo user ;-)

OpenBSD and CRUX i don't think you'll need something else :D

You could also give alpine a go! It's simple, solid and extermely light (musl + busybox).

There isn't really any inherent advantage to building from source in and of itself, the real cool stuff comes from being able to customise your programs and your OS however you want it. For example, don't want any program you install to be compiled with pulseaudio support? Add "-pulseaudio" to your USE flags in your make.conf. Want your programs to be built with SSL support? Add "ssl" to your USE flags. You want systemd? Install it! You don't? Well then don't, it's not like you're forced to build packages with features that require systemd, just add "-systemd" to your USE flags and it won't be a problem.

There's obviously more complicated stuff you can do with Gentoo, but for day-to-day usage, being able to mix and match features without having to edit and shell scripts or even know what build system the package uses is great.

I haven't actually used CRUX, but I don't know of any killer features it provides over Gentoo, whereas Gentoo has USE flags, a larger community, lots more packages and overlays and generally more up-to-date packages (although maybe that's a negative, since Gentoo isn't stable).

Don't take it from me, though, you should try both out if you get the time and make your own decision.

(11-07-2015, 04:48 PM)Tristelune Wrote: ...if you have some softwares which needs python2 and some python3, you can install both version of python. /usr/bin/python is a link pointing the the version you want. You can also easily switch between python2 and python3. It's the same for gcc for example.

i do this on arch as well.

(16-07-2015, 10:46 AM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: Don't take it from me, though, you should try both out if you get the time and make your own decision.

there it is :D

I used Gentoo and looked at Crux (I would have tried it but I didn't have enough pulsa (internet credit) to download it). I would go towards CRUX. I know that itching feeling to try something new. :)

(16-07-2015, 06:56 AM)z3bra Wrote: You could also give alpine a go! It's simple, solid and extermely light (musl + busybox).

Alpine is really cool, That and rlsd are things that I Really wanna play with when I get my new desktop set up.

(16-07-2015, 06:56 AM)z3bra Wrote: You could also give alpine a go! It's simple, solid and extermely light (musl + busybox).

Woah, I'm checking this out. Busybox and Musl?

Guys, bumping this sub for a simple reason:

Arch suits my daily needs, but I need something more. I'd be glad to be part of the CRUX effort, writing pkgfile is something I'm sure I will like. So here is my question: I have an Asus zenbook, 90% plug n play with Arch. I'm afraid that this kind of 'new' hardware isn't fully supported with CRUX. Do you guys have some similar laptops running CRUX ? Did you encounter such blocking issues ?

CRUX and Arch both use a Linux kernel, so if arch supports your hardware, you can be sure it will be supported on crux too.
You'll have to configure your kernel by yourself though, but I guess I'm not teaching you anything. Crux is not a "plug-and-play" distro.

in general crux is simpler than arch, but has caveats and a relatively bad package manager, with more of an emphasis on creating packages

also you have to compile a kernel if that's a problem

I don't mind compiling a kernel. Not that hard when you know what to do. You're right, the kernel is the main part after all. So I'll give it a try on a bare system (installed a CRUX in a vm few months ago, was fun)

The idea is also to contribute to crux ports, hoping that is not out of my league, but as far as I know, it is fairly simple. I'm pretty sure as soon as I'll be ok with CRUX, the need to hop to an another distro will appear. 'Bis repetita placent'

(14-04-2016, 12:26 PM)sagittarius Wrote: I don't mind compiling a kernel. Not that hard when you know what to do. You're right, the kernel is the main part after all. So I'll give it a try on a bare system (installed a CRUX in a vm few months ago, was fun)

The idea is also to contribute to crux ports, hoping that is not out of my league, but as far as I know, it is fairly simple. I'm pretty sure as soon as I'll be ok with CRUX, the need to hop to an another distro will appear. 'Bis repetita placent'

Great stuff! 6c37 will accept new maintainers relatively quickly if you throw us a couple of pull requests, as for contrib maintaining, the crux team expects you to run your own repo for 2-6 months before applying to the team.

I've seen 6c37's work lately, and I must say I'm pretty impressed. I'll check it out as soon as I have a running and robust CRUX machine.

I stucked at Gentoo.
Gentoo: very customizable with USE flags, and I don't have systemd/udev,the userspace device-manager is mdev from busybox.
Crux, more simple and easiest package management, but I'dont like this use the latest packages (seems like Arch, and also rolling distro).
I don't need the fresh packages, this also my reason.

Sorry for my worse English.

(02-06-2016, 03:47 AM)stephant Wrote: Crux, more simple and easiest package management, but I'dont like this use the latest packages (seems like Arch, and also rolling distro).
I don't need the fresh packages, this also my reason.

We use the latest stable packages in Crux's repo, and when we say stable, we mean latest that doesn't break something else on the system. A good example recently was Firefox and GTK. It's also not really a true rolling release distro.

Depends on what you call "rolling". To me, crux follows the rolling release model. Ports are updated when they get new releases, and not only to fix security issues. There are not "backports fixes", and the only thing that is "fixed" is the base system (coreutils and the toolchain). There are updates that "break" other packages (for example, when libpng went from 1.5 to 1.6). So yeah I think crux is more a rolling release distro.

The thing is, the base system will NEVER break in your hands due to an update, as it it only updated on "fixed releases" (3.1, 3.2, ...). In this regard, it's "semi-rolling" ;)

I think the Crux more simple than Gentoo, and use newer packages but, nowdays Gentoo update circe is faster then year ago. Some thing not working anymore on my system, its bad and little toward from Gentoo.

I have also gone from loving rolling release to hating it after experiencing systemd eating massive amounts of ram after one update or being unable to log in after another one (reinstalling all packages fixed the problem). Next time, I'd probably go for something more stable, since I don't need the freshest software anyway most of the time.

Edit: weird line breaking.

Crux ports don't seem to use checksum... that's sad :( https://crux.nu/ports/crux-3.2/core/ports/Pkgfile

(04-11-2016, 10:50 AM)TheAnachron Wrote: Crux ports don't seem to use checksum... that's sad :( https://crux.nu/ports/crux-3.2/core/ports/Pkgfile

Try to look closer

Wow I would have thought it would be linked to the build script. Interesting, does it have a reason to be seperated?