fungalnet wroteI think it is the same reason I gave up on Gentoo really quick, it doesn't work out of a box and takes too long just to get it running well for a day.
i love old computers. i dont even like apple, but recently i found a vintage apple (not mac, from the looks of it) being used as a business card holder. it had the cords so i asked if the person working had ever tried turning it on. this wasnt a model i was familiar with.
"probably one of two things will probably happen if you turn that on. it will come up with a prompt that lets you type in basic commands, or it will do nothing because it needs the caps replaced."
i have no patience for the old-fashioned style of compiling though. imo all compiling should be centred around automated, deterministic builds. so what if it takes 20 years to get there? its the best direction to go.
then you can pick up an old server, download a buildbot, set it to go and instead of babysitting your compiling, you can just monitor the progress over the network.
purists will say this is no good, i say even if youre a purist, this is progress that means more people will be able to compile their system.
yes, there are some efforts along these lines. i really mean there should be far more of them and they should be a little more complete.
because i dont feel like compiling any more than fungal does, i dont want to spend any time on it, and this is something that should be fully automated for those who want it to be. automation is what computers are designed to do, and compiling is something almost nobody wants to do.
as of today, setting up the automation is still quite a lot of work. when more aspects of distro building are fully automated, there will be a lot more freedom and bad decisions like the one made by arch will be a lot easier to reverse.
also it would be a lot easier for me to make a 32 bit version of obarun with zero cost or effort to eric. recently while having a bit of trouble with void linux, i decided to try obarun on that machine. turns out it was a 32 bit machine too, i only got as far as the bootloader.
"how can i build your os?"
"first you have to download the build script."
"then what?"
"run the build script, it will build the default configuration."
"thats it?"
"unless it gives you an error, then go to the forum and report the error."
if at least 90% of errors are user errors, then a tech support forum is the reasonable first stop for such problems.
im aware that the example we were given probably runs the first time, i simply think there should be more automated build tools in general (configured and ready to run.)