Surprisingly, yes! It’s hard to judge how bad the performance really is, since it’s in a virtual machine, but all the software that I tested was definitely usable. It’s somewhat slow, but that’s exactly what you’d expect. As we used a lot of unsafe hacks (disabling dependency and file conflict checking, for instance) to get this to actually work, I wouldn’t recommend using this system for anything other than proving it’s possible.
Now is this useful? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no. I can think of exactly zero uses of this experiment (and I must be pretty crazy for doing it).
This is the kind of nonsense computing I can get behind.
So sort of the opposite of “rm -rf /” in a vague kinda way.
I’d love to see a YouTube channel devoted to such things. We often see garbage like “I put 1,000,000 orbeez in a pool and you’d never believe what happened!” so why not a series of experiments like this?
I get an “Unable to connect” using the link.
As for a use case, what about a distro that was designed to work this way. All the packages would always be installed in the file system by the distro and on end user installations it would be retrieved via openAFS or some other distributed caching file system. During network outages you could only access the cached portions obviously, but just think you’d never have to install anything as it would already be preinstalled upstream. The distributed file system would just synchronize it to your machine. Also if you have a network of machines, they could partake in the distribution to rapidly and efficiently deploy updates.
Maybe a silly idea, but food for thought
So do I. The Internet Archive has a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220201161657/https://ta180m.exozy.me/posts/installing-every-arch-package/
For anyone wondering what the “Surprisingly Yes!” is in reply to, the question was “So is this system usable?”
flypig,
I laughed at seeing the login screenshot with all those desktop managers.
And to have a desktop in this state under a fresh install…just wow!
Unfortunately I think it still falls short of the insanity needed to be appropriate for hollywood, haha. It still needs something more to put it over the top. I could be wrong, does arch come with an enhancer app?
“Enhance Enhance Enhance”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeEvZ8WHSvY
This is a parody, but I find some of the dramas that would have us take this seriously absolutely hilarious! I can see a hacker with every application installed as being a god in one of these dramas.
Its certainly not the worst of concepts. Disk space really isn’t a premium these days and in a mostly offline location then it could be really useful. Reminds me of the old SuSe cd/dvd set with everything on it used to sit in my drive for as and when I wanted to install anything. (Internet was dialup so not Really a viable option at the time)
I’m quite surprised that all packages where installable, without a single broken or corrupt one, with just the dependency and conflict checks disabled. Kudos for the Arch packaging team!!
the trick is that packages are likely installed in dedicated small environment. this would not fly on Gentoo, where user already has a selection of packages in their system installed, which current package links against.
And some packages just don’t sit well together at all, especially at build time. Package A doesn’t build against B in version B1, but builds against version B2. But package C doesn’t. Sometimes you simply cannot build two things on the same os since they have conflicting deps.
This is a problem most binary distros do away with, especially if they have a build service that compiles packages on an on-demand vm created from scratch for each separate build.
I assume you realize this, but you’ve gone into full-on troll mode. Consider yourself reported.
Moochman,
I did as well. If this type of sexual harassment bothers you, then make it known to osnews staff.
Me too, This is one of the few sites with good comments section, Just one person is spoiling it.
How do you report a specific comment? I can only see a reply button.
POWER9,
I don’t think that function exists, the only way I know of is to use the email addresses on the contact page:
https://www.osnews.com/contact/
Said the man who posted an unsolicited sexually harassing comment in a previous topic.
P.S. I thought your excuse for trolling and pestering and stalking me was this was a public forum?
Thank you. Previous comments by HollyB always had at least some level of relevance to the topic at hand. These comments are nothing more than misandry, and have no place in a small enthusiast community.
From HollyB:
>>> Said the man who posted an unsolicited sexually harassing comment in a previous topic.
I FOUND IT!!! For anyone that wants to make their own call.
https://www.osnews.com/story/134347/isnt-she-just-misunderstood-the-casio-loopy/
(Page find “typo”)
It took me like an hour to find. I’ve looked through so many Alfman / HollyB comment threads, I’m exhausted. This is the “worst” comment I saw from Alfman.
drcouzelis,
You’ll need an advil after that. What were you thinking, haha.
You know, I was genuinely trying to understand the the issue that was bugging HollyB…no good dead goes unpunished I guess. Since then I’ve learned that she always likes to play the victim even though she’s the worst sexual harassment offender here.
It is hard to imagine what would go in #3 that would not be of greater service to the world than this comment.
This is a completely out-of-context, totally unprovoked attack on an entire class of people. It is an act of pure violence, clueless at best and inexcusable by any reasonable standard. I cannot even begin to comprehend a mind that believes this behaviour puts them in the right; I must conclude that it is intentionally malicious.
@thom – Time to do something before you lose your community.
“women are more likely than men to prioritize helping and working with other people”
Try to square that statement with the tone and sentiment in this comment. Not exactly logically consistent. Lack of critical thinking and social skills indeed. This comment is a mudslide of projection and irony.
You either understand the point made and pay attention to the report or you don’t. I don’t think any more needs to be said…
I just skimmed the article, but I’m assuming this was just the binary packages (as a lot of the AUR stuff conflicts.) This is amusing, could you do it on debian with ‘sudo apt install *’?
leech,
Maybe something like this?
I’m not inclined to try it on my machines though.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a week to run on Debian.
cb88,
That seems like a good guess.
The debian x86_64 architecture alone has 560GB of archives…
https://www.debian.org/mirror/size
That’s enough to exceed some people’s monthly internet quotas, but assuming there were no interruptions and I could use 100% of my bandwidth, it would take at least 22.6hours (and probably more than that due to package fetch latency).
Then the packages need to be extracted and installed, which often takes longer than the download.
I got an estimate of the compression ratio of cached packages on my machine…
Compressed = 86M
Uncompressed = 494M
Ratio = 5.74
Assuming the ratio holds, the installation would require 3216G. But don’t forget about inodes & file system overhead. So you’d probably want at least a 5TB disk.
Storage vendors love to list their highest performance numbers, a best case scenario might be a couple hours to install. However that doesn’t seem realistic when you factor in that the workload is dominated by small random files all over the disk. Also, disk write caching becomes ineffective at this load. A disk’s maximum write performance will only be sustained briefly until the cache completely fills up at which point write speed will drop drastically to the sustainable performance of the underlying medium (if it’s TLC or QLC NAND, that could be bad).
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn770-ssd-review/2
I think a few days to complete the process seems realistic depending on the machine. Raid 0 and raid 10 could alleviate storage bottlenecks though.
None of this factors in the unexpected…
I’ve got a Debian Testing VM, where I’ve installed all desktop environments that are available in the repo. Just to test where UI/UX is currently going.
In this setup most of them are fully usable (in the sense that stuff works and not in the sense that if I like it or not) with the exception of Gnome.
Were you able to get Pantheon from Elementary OS working by any chance? I tried to install it on Linux Mint but I couldn’t get it to show up in the Login screen.
What’s wrong with Gnome… they hit it with teh dumbhammer so hard it doesn’t even provide basic functionality anymore?
Interesting use of Julia. That programming language is promising.