A review of porteus
Posted: 18 Jul 2017, 22:16
My experience with gnu/linux systems is a big one. Of course, in my case, 'experience' means how many distributions I have tried and not something advanced. Yes, I am an ordinary user . But not super ordinary because I managed to install gentoo and other no-gui-installation distros so you can call me just ordinary without super. I used debian-, rpm-, arch-, unique and independent format-, source- and, of course, slackware-based systems. There also were non-linux systems such as bsd like. In comparison with them, porteus has a simple and straightforward installation process which is thouroughly explained on the official site. It is surprisingly simple because even a complete newbie could install it despite being not gui based. This is quite impressive and undervalued! In addition to that porteus dev team provided 4 user-friendly desktop environment modules and even made a gui version of usm. So Porteus did try to be a user-friendly system and it still is. However, it is not user-friendly enough even though I find it more than appropriate. It looks like user-friendly but it isn't. Porteus is for power users . It is a bit raising my self-esteem by calling Porteus a power user distribution because I being a not-advanced and plain user was able to control it and use every day but whom am I kidding? However, there are interesting success stories because I installed porteus for several female friends who somehow broke their native systems and they use porteus . Is it a contradiction? Is Porteus a user-friendly distribution in the end? I honestly dunno, because some friends who wanted to learn it and not just use it with my configurations couldn't do it and found some other OS that suited their needs more. I was a bit annoyed by that but I myself left porteus for about a year. I still feel guilty about that XD, however, I finally understand what type of user I am. I am a working from RAM type of os-user and there are several distributions that advertise such feature. For example, puppy distributions. Why I give my preference to Porteus? Porteus is incredibly modular. I don't have a "changes" folder. Instead, I pack my changes as modules and load them when booting into my Porteus OS. Because I use copy2ram cheat I can unplug my PorteusSDcard and continue working knowing that my system will not be accessed and corrupted. This feeling of working in a system that is not connected to a device it was booted from is priceless. That is how I work in Porteus.
However, I did use "changes folder" previously and my system often became bloated and sometimes was saving for a very long time despite working for one minute or less. There were numerous problems with cross-device links but none of this happening anymore when I don't have changes cheat code. The system is so responsive and modules are so awesome that I cannot imagine that convenience elsewhere. I have a series of scripts that help me to choose what modules to load while booting. Another cool thing is that modules' folder accepts symlinks (but not sym folders!) to modules and my scripts just put symlinks to that folder from an external source and remove unneeded. Of course, I run my script once and if I need another set of modules I run another script that tunes the system according to my whim. That's unbelievably great. I like having a system that is constantly pure and only adds impurities that I allow. Such setup allows me not to worry about viruses (popularity of android made it happen on gnu/linux) and also satisfies my functional programmer tendencies which demand to work with immutable state and controlling side-effects. In that sense, Porteus beat nixos in my eyes, the system I ran to but came back. Nixos is pretty complex and does not allow me to carry my system on a flashcard (actually you can install it on flash or sd card but not only writes will kill it fast but nixos demands a lot of space for atomic rollbacks and upgrades, so even if I install nix package manager on porteus the amount of space I would need is unpractical, working from ram turned out is much more valuable and preferable for me). Sadly, Porteus is not the most popular distro but it satisfies me the most. Still, there are competitors. These puppies kinda can be modified to imitate Porteus and its module system, alpine linux becomes very popular among server oses, tiny core linux and knoppix still continue their development. I hope, Porteus also is not planning to step down. I value it a lot and have used it more than any other os and plan to continue doing that.
Best regards and thanks,
Stallix
However, I did use "changes folder" previously and my system often became bloated and sometimes was saving for a very long time despite working for one minute or less. There were numerous problems with cross-device links but none of this happening anymore when I don't have changes cheat code. The system is so responsive and modules are so awesome that I cannot imagine that convenience elsewhere. I have a series of scripts that help me to choose what modules to load while booting. Another cool thing is that modules' folder accepts symlinks (but not sym folders!) to modules and my scripts just put symlinks to that folder from an external source and remove unneeded. Of course, I run my script once and if I need another set of modules I run another script that tunes the system according to my whim. That's unbelievably great. I like having a system that is constantly pure and only adds impurities that I allow. Such setup allows me not to worry about viruses (popularity of android made it happen on gnu/linux) and also satisfies my functional programmer tendencies which demand to work with immutable state and controlling side-effects. In that sense, Porteus beat nixos in my eyes, the system I ran to but came back. Nixos is pretty complex and does not allow me to carry my system on a flashcard (actually you can install it on flash or sd card but not only writes will kill it fast but nixos demands a lot of space for atomic rollbacks and upgrades, so even if I install nix package manager on porteus the amount of space I would need is unpractical, working from ram turned out is much more valuable and preferable for me). Sadly, Porteus is not the most popular distro but it satisfies me the most. Still, there are competitors. These puppies kinda can be modified to imitate Porteus and its module system, alpine linux becomes very popular among server oses, tiny core linux and knoppix still continue their development. I hope, Porteus also is not planning to step down. I value it a lot and have used it more than any other os and plan to continue doing that.
Best regards and thanks,
Stallix