www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/linux-users-light-on-horizon.mdwn

[[!meta title="Linux, UNIX and FOSS users: there is light on the horizon"]]

Good morning reader. It is Easter Friday, 2018. Great timing for
writing a blog article in the mountains of Switzerland, next to the
fire.

## TL;DR

Read the whole thing.

## Introduction

I hope I got your attention and you have a warm gut feeling already. If you are
like me, using Linux (or "unix alike" for that matter) for about 20
years, you have seen a lot of changes.

Some of the changes I have been observing include:

- Linux getting attention from a much broader audience (developers, users, corporates)
- Operating system choices have become less important ("people care about higher level stuff")
- The Free and Open Source movement has lost its traction
- Linux (stacks) ha(s|ve) become much more complex

In this article, I want to point you, old greybeard, to some hope at
the end of the tunnel: Devuan.

## Devuan

So let's start with a self-centric, barefaced advertisement so that you don't
claim I wrote this article to subconsciously lead you to [[!devuanhosting]]:
Go to [[!devuanhosting]] and get yourself a Devuan VM, if you like Devuan.

Now, back to the real topic of the post: You might see Devuan as a
"Debian of the retarded people who don't accept the existence of systemd".
Fair enough.

However, you should look a bit more closer, even if your opinion is the former.
Devuan creates a choice. It gives you the choice to run Linux without systemd.

Just for the sake of the argument before, ("people care about high level stuff"),
it is actually important that this is about an init system at the core of your
computer. Yes, it is low level. Yes, most people don't care and most people probably
shouldn't care, because they don't even understand why there is an
init system, nor why it can be programmed very simple (i.e. compare
with [[!cinit]]).

What is important here is that a group of **volunteers** spending
their free time and resources commits themselves to fight for the
right to have a Linux without systemd.

"Why is that important", you might ask. And the answer is very
similar: without these people, we would all still be using a DOS based
operating system with a broken GUI on top of it.

Yes, exactly. If there weren't such volunteers (or even "lateral thinkers")
before, there would not be GNU/Linux distribution for you at all.

## The light on the horizon

So why is there a light? Today I migrated my notebook from Arch Linux
to Devuan, because
[systemd crashes my system on suspend](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58001).

First of all, I do have the choice to change, because of the great
work of the Devuan community. But what really opened my eyes, were a
few things that I had to "manually configure":

Compared to Arch Linux, I needed to install **acpid** and **pm-utils**
to handle suspending. Furthermore I needed to configure acpid to
suspend on lid close as follows:

    root@line:/home/nico/Downloads# cat /etc/acpi/events/suspend
    event=button/lid LID close
    action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

Yes, exactly. It takes 3 commands to install this property of your
system. It is a very clean separation of concerns, and debugging this
setup is as easy as starting acpid in the foreground and showing the
events.

While this, as well as the logical naming of devices (eth0, wlan0),
is just a minor thing, I see that something changed:

There are again people, who fight for their right to do things "the
right way".

## Call to action

If you agree to what I wrote above and you also see the light on the
horizon, I would like to ask you to be active:

It is not necessary to start developing code to support the Free and
Open Source Software movement, to support freedom.

For us, it is necessary to be seen and move forward as a community,
may it be Linux, BSD or FOSS in general.

So instead of staying abstract like this, I ask you to do 2 things:

- Spread the word about this article on IRC, Twitter, or social medium
  of your choice

- Get yourself a good drink of your choice, sit down and say out
  aloud: I am supporting freedom of choice and will fight for it.

Thanks for reading, enjoy your time!


[[!tag foss unix]]