On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 11:09:11 -0400 Andrew Gwozdziewycz <w...@apgwoz.com> wrote:
> I guess it depends on how you define lightweight. If you define > lightweight as "the distro only has 6 packages," then a) I think > you're being insane, b) more power to you. There's another way to > define lightweight (the way I meant it), which is that it doesn't do > anything special for you and allows you to build the system you want. You sound like Richard Stallman talking about Freedom(R). > Don't want pulseaudio? Fine, don't install it. Don't want GNOME? Don't > install it. The number of *available* packages has no impact on that, > but it sure is convenient when installation is a 'pacman -S' away. It does have an impact when certain packages become a "standard". For instance, Microsoft dropped ALSA-support in Skype in favor of pulseaudio as a part of their EEE tactic. Other examples are the incorporation of udev in systemd (thank god there's eudev and mdev), the assumption everyone uses non-tiling-wm's, PAM, consolekit and many more. The only way for me to escape this hell (especially consolekit and PAM) is Gentoo, because it's the only distro allowing you to get rid of that crap completely. Arch has excellent documentation, but is more or less a mainstream-distribution like Ubuntu and Debian acting more professional than it really is. Cheers FRIGN -- FRIGN <d...@frign.de>
