Weirdness 2020-05-21 05:23 by zlg Life has been rather weird for me lately. On paper it's been average, normal, whatever. I have my 1+ days, I have my zero days... But I'm increasingly feeling like my medicine is blocking progress for me. It increases my appetite, making it harder to lose weight. It puts me *to* sleep, but the sleep that I get isn't restful, I snore more, and apparently toss and turn a lot now when I didn't before. I don't remember my dreams. I wake up irritable and sometimes disoriented. For what, though? I feel numb. Part of it's the way my interests are going (Microsoft EEE'ing open source, kernel-level spyware in anti-cheat software, no physical release for the latest Miku game... I could go on), but I don't feel the same when I do things I usually enjoy. This is the third or fourth medicine I've tried, and the last time I talked to my therapist they suggested college to me. This is *after* establishing a relationship indicating quite strongly that it wasn't in my near future's cards and would be a bad financial decision for me. Like, sure, putting myself thousands into debt for a questionable payout sounds like a *wonderful* idea. That doesn't bring me anxiety at all! So, I think I'm going to talk to my health providers and get on a plan to ramp down off of this medicine. I need to do that because cold-turkeying antidepressants is a no-no. When I get off of it, I want to try alternatives that might actually help, like 5-HTP (the precursor to seratonin), sunlight therapy, etc. I'd rather be crazy and feel something than die inside but be "stable". And it'll free up about $180/yr in medicine costs. I'll avoid a rant and just state that I do not like the state of the medical and insurance fields, as a bog standard patient. I do not want to be part of those markets, but realities force me to be and I think any market that's captive (like medicine, insurance, fuel, food, housing) is ripe for being abused. --- I was pleasantly surprised to find that the aqemu project is still active! [1] I ran into a problem when I was starting to use it recently. It triggered an error related to the '-vlan' argument it was passing to qemu. Turns out that behavior was removed in qemu 3.x and aqemu hadn't been updated to fix it. I'm not sure if the current master fixes it wholly, but in my research I learned that aqemu can export a script of the options you configure it for, so you can at least use the older version of aqemu to *build* the VM, then export the script and run it yourself. Super useful, and will make my distro hopping easier. --- Which brings me to my next topic. I'm distro hopping, after spending about 8 years with Gentoo. I compiled a small list of candidates, with possibly more to follow: GoboLinux Extremely interesting architecture, easy to package for Funtoo Very active and low barrier to contributing. Good tooling. A little too corporate-friendly. Exherbo More or less dead. Small inner circle, little activity, hard-nosed and elitist culture. Sabayon Too nu-Webby website and feel, though it has binary packages and is otherwise a normal Gentoo install with sane preconfig. Void Interesting, kinda like an alternative Gentoo. However, their founder recently freaked out and left, so it's not going to be good over there anymore. xbps might be worth looking into though. Slackware Looks very solid, will need more attention. KISS Very much in line with my ideals. Will try in a VM. LFS The nuclear option. Out of the list, KISS[2] and LFS[3] seem closest to my goal of RH-free computing, but the Gentoo derivatives have powerful package managers with flags and multislots, etc. I haven't tried Slackware as a daily driver in over ten years, so maybe that will be fun. Gentoo spoiled the fuck out of me, though. I love having so much control over what makes its way onto my machine. If their tooling was easier to figure out (specifically catalyst and the profile system) I'd probably just roll my own portage tree. I'm not really married to portage or USE flags specifically, but another source-based package manager that offered similar functionality would definitely make it onto my "check out" list. Otherwise, my only options on other distros are essentially custom packages. I have to admit KISS has gotten my attention mostly due to a recent update on the website, which mentions that it aims to be a distro that a single person can maintain. That is a trait that I feel is lost on a lot of distros. A distribution isn't an easy thing to put together, sure, if you let it. If you narrow your scope sufficiently, it shouldn't be rocket science to maintain a usable Linux-powered OS, or at least enough of one to have a cozy TUI ready for customization. In the worst case scenario for a distro, it goes completely dead. If it ever gets revived in the future, it starts with one person. That one person will need to have the skills to, at minimum, build the distro and fix any bitrotting issues that happened in the interim, for every package that the distro ships. If you build distros that are built for bureaucracies, companies, or foundations, you'll find that it's dependent on many hands to do basic things. These are distros that will be harder to (re)bootstrap, should they die. I'm not sure what KISS falls under in terms of ideology. It feels like it's a more sustainable distribution due to its small size and emphasis on maintainability, but I haven't yet played with its packaging to be sure if it's a good fit for me. We'll see, once I get qemu playing nicely again. (still taking suggestions on BSDs or other alternative OSes) -z [1]: https://github.com/tobimensch/aqemu [2]: https://k1ss.org/ [3]: http://linuxfromscratch.org/