Distro Woes

Shortly after the release of Ubuntu 17.04, I also purchased a new computer to use as my main development machine. Although I had been running [Arch linux][https://www.archlinux.org/] up until this point, I decided to try and be a little more mainstream, and try Ubuntu.

The main issue I ran into was that it was a real pain in the neck to get LVM2 set up in any kind of useful way. By default, the Ubuntu installer creates a single swap partition, and a single root partition the size of the entire volume. This leaves no room for snapshots or anything like that.

I ended up migrating the data off, formatting the partition like I wanted, and then migrating the data back. It was a pain getting it to boot again, but it then worked fine.

The next release

Then comes 17.10. My biggest gripe with Ubuntu as been that the releases have too many arbitrary things changed in them. 17.10 is no exception. It changes from Unity to Gnome. Given that this machine is primarily headless, the specific desktop doesn’t really matter much to me. But, I hadn’t figured out how to get gnupg to prompt me via text instead of the GUI, and used a remote desktop to type my password into the machine. This no longer works with 17.10, and as far as I can tell, 17.10 just drops support for sharing the main desktop via VNC.

Much grumbling later, I concluded I need to go back to a distro I have more control over.

Arch

I started installing Arch in a chroot, just to play with it. It is a little painful because you have to create one chroot to run the install in inside of another chroot. Ultimately, I ended up deciding to go with Gentoo.

Gentoo

I’ve used Gentoo on and off several times (one being Funtoo). I decided upon Gentoo over Funtoo mainly because I actually want to run systemd. I did an experimental install on an older laptop to make sure I could get everything working I needed (especially ZFS, non-root).

• Put stuff here about how I installed.