Armed with nothing but qemu, I set about rediscovering the joy of
mindless tinkering by installing 10 distros in 10 days. This is what I found.
the host
the most boring part is upfront, preparing the host machine. luckily, there is
only one thing to install — qemu
brew install qemu
well, that was easy.
the machine
if we install an OS in a qemu machine (“VM”) that has the same CPU
architecture as our host machine, it’ll run at ~native speed (that how
clouds work, theyqemutoo). I also want nice graphics, and sound. After
experimenting, I arrive
at a qemu invocation that I put in a shell script.
looking at the serial console (Ctrl-Alt-2) shows that the OS is still
booting, so back to the graphics display (Ctrl-Alt-1) and wait.
login as root again, and install X.
which one? let's try them all!
gnome, ENTER, reboot
gnome
looks great. supports color profiles (otherwise the colors look washed out on P3
displays). fonts look crisp.
sluggish (likely because the graphics card I'm using (virtio-gpu)
is emulated; there are patches around for a virtualized
(“native”-ish) card but those are not upstream yet). the display
also hung a few times when my laptop went to sleep (also likely due to broken
emulation)
to try the rest, I rerun setup-desktop again. to do this
conveniently as a regular user
su
apk add doas
echo 'permit nopass m' > /etc/doas.d/doas.conf
^D
indeed, now it looks proper. seeing this, my first impression is of a gnome
:: macos vs kde :: windows inspiration (not copying; using gnome felt fresh)
plasma
similar good and bad points as gnome. I liked gnome's look more.
next up is xfce. I also have a better way using backing images.
pretty much the flip of the previous two. plain look, fonts are less crisp, the
colors look a bit washed out on my P3 display, there's no way to provide a color
profile.
but it is fast, lagless. does not hang on sleep.
next up is mate. setup is faster because I can use the backing image as the
mid-way checkpoint.
same category as xfce. snappy, no lag. fonts seem a bit better than xfce (but I
might be imagining it too). visually I like (or am more used to) xfce.
next is sway. same steps as above. reboot, and voila.
voila? well, nothing happens, I get a login prompt on the text console. I login
and then manually run
sway
this launches a barebones graphical display. after reading around, I find that
pressing mod + ENTER (Cmd + ENTER) launches
“foot”, which I assume is the their default terminal emulator. From
here I can launch other things too.
sway
so this looks like a tiling, keyboard driven, um, thing (their wiki is
curt-to-the-point-of-rudely written, and calls out in bold that sway is not a
window manager, and I'm not yet deep enough into wayland to know what it is
then).
the last stop in our tour of alpine desktop options is lxqt. the same steps as
before, then reboot.
I love the Manjaro icon (that's the reason I'm trying it out, I know nothing
else about this distro)
unlike alpine, we need to decide beforehand which desktop we want (their download
page has good oneline descriptions of all of them btw). I'll try the gnome and
xfce flavored ones.
things are not off to a good start. this is the second error, I'd actually
downloaded the gnome flavor first, which bailed out even earlier, before I
figured I needed the “generic EFI” variant. to speed things up I got
the presumably smaller xfce image the second time. but now this.
eventually I figured that the EFI writable pflash drive that I was mounting as
part of my qvm script — the line -drive
file=edk2-arm-vars.fd,if=pflash,format=raw — was what was making
manjaro unhappy. so I removed it, and instead of the script, ran the following
qemu invocation:
The installer is nice, it detects the time zone automatically, and gives me an
option to switch to Dvorak during install itself (neither of which alpine
could). But it doesn't seem to install anything? because it never asks for the
destination drive.
Indeed, on rebooting, I land here.
I know I'm holding it wrong, but it's time to move on.
the live CD opens to a beautiful gnome in a moominesque vista, with a partial
prime factorization of 42 tatooed on a tree.
fedora workstation
however, it is sluggish, as gnome/kde were with alpine (again, no fault of its
own, I'm just running it an underpowered VM with an emulated graphics card on a
laptop without enough RAM to spare). I also try with more RAM, -m
4G, which is the minimum fedora lists, and that does help a lot, but
still not pleasant.
much better, but still sluggish — I'm comparing to using xfce on alpine. a
peek at top shows systemd minions running around, and the
system already using swap even though RAM is available (but determining memory
usage is fraught with misconceptions I'm not immune too; I only looked here
since it felt slower).
let me try one of the alternative “spins”, to see if one is
lighter. most of them don't seem to offer aarch64 media, aha, the miracle one
does.
I press ENTER, then wait, and wait, but nothing happens.
eventually, I give up and switch to qemu serial console to find that zalgo has
been unleashed
I find this amusing, but instead of tinkering and fixing this issue, it also
makes me realize — I've already found what I was looking for.
alpine and xfce
epilogue
I'd started with the intent of visting 10 distros across 10 weekend or other days
when I had time to fritter
by a coincidence, or a subconsciously informed guess, the first thing I'd tried
was alpine with xfce
I continued half-way-ish, trying more distros, more desktop environments etc,
and I have educated myself with more information than what I'd started with, but
it feels silly to tinker on when I already have a working setup that also aligns
with me:
snappy in a lil 2G ram qemu vm that can keep running in the background for
sporadic tinkers
musl-ed (the dynamic linking gnu fanaticism has wasted more human time than
is justified for a piece of software)
no systemd (irrespective of the systemd debate, because otherwise it'll feel
like work linux, not tinker linux)
I also found out that despite there being almost endless number of distros, the
options for aarch64 are much more limited — the majority of distros are
also x86 only (I think this'll change soon!)
now I'm ending this trip, happy for now with the alpine with xfce vm I purchased
with my time
there, however, are still two distros that I'd like to play with some day
the first one is sabotage linux. its beautiful website has been planted in my
head every since I came across it
