
Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro - tambourine_man
http://www.apricityos.com/
======
mawalu
[apricity-core]

SigLevel = Never

Server = [http://apricityos.com/apricity-
core/](http://apricityos.com/apricity-core/)

This instructs the package manager (pacman) to load system packages over an
unencrypted connection and disables all signature checks.

Source:

[https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacm...](https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacmanx86_64.conf#L75)

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Package_signing#...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Package_signing#Disabling_signature_checking)

~~~
jakhead
"This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is
narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are
only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the
individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the
mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must
pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous
precipices."

~~~
burkaman
What does this quote mean? And what does it have to do with someone's package
manager configuration?

~~~
sevensor
It's from _Atlas Shrugged_ , and I think it's trying to draw some kind of
parallel between using Arch and struggling against oppressive forces of mental
tyranny. As represented by Apricity perhaps? Arch is for heroic
individualists?

Arch is great and all. I love using it, but I get pretty impatient with people
who think they're smarter than everyone else because they can follow the
detailed instructions in a well-written and lovingly maintained wiki. I get
similarly impatient with B.S. Arch derivatives. If you want Ubuntu, just use
Ubuntu. It's based on a perfectly legit distribution.

~~~
swasheck
I only wish that you'd posted each sentence as separate comments so that I can
upvote each one individually.

Back when I had freedom of choice for my OS at my place of employment, I
wanted to learn about Linux so I chose it. Then I wanted to learn more about
Linux so I moved from Ubuntu to Arch. At first, the documentation is a
lifesaver. However, a bit of time invested in reading it carefully will also
really educate someone in so many aspects of an OS. Not only that, but so many
of the things that someone would really want to use are so well documented. I
learned more about PostgreSQL administration and X from the Arch Wiki than the
documentation from the actual projects themselves.

~~~
dhagz
Thanks to Arch Linux, my first instinct when using a new command-line tool is
to add the `--help` flag, then run `man <command>`. It helped me stop googling
crap all the time.

------
Ericson2314
Eh, new defaults configurations do NOT merit a new distro. I've long believed
this, and since I discovered NixOS it is now clear that there is away to avoid
it.

~~~
hyperhopper
How do you use NixOS to manage your OS and applications and configurations? I
thought it was for having reliable reproducable builds?

~~~
zachrose
Nix the package manager is for getting deep control and hard guarantees about
your dependencies. NixOS uses Nix, but also gives you ways to 1) specify your
system's configuration declaratively from the beginning* and 2) reliably get
that configuration running on another machine without having to worry about,
say, conflicts with existing dependencies.

Or at least that's the theory. In practice I'm mostly still trying to get my
mouse to work. :-P

*As opposed to layering a declarative system over an imperative one, which I think is more or less what Chef, Docker, Ansible, et cetera are doing.

~~~
Svenstaro
That means I'll have to rewrite all my (Arch) packages for Nix in order for
that to work, right? How does it deal with install scripts (inside upstream
packages that you have no control over) that install stuff imperatively?

~~~
gosub
packages are namespaced in a directory for each package/version, like this:

    
    
        /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/
    

if a package is "installed" in an environment (it could be global, user local
or temporary), its files are sym-linked in the "original" position (e.g.
/usr/bin/firefox etc etc)

~~~
roblabla
Small nitpick, they aren't symlinked to their original position, but instead
to a "profile" (global for instance is in /run/current-system/sw, your local
profile is $HOME/.nix-profile).

This has several consequences. It means binaries distributed with the
expectation of libraries being in their original position (e.g.
/usr/lib/libc.so) don't work as is. It also means scripts depending on the
presence of /usr/bin/bash are broken (which happen far too often).

I love NixOS, but that is one of the biggest annoyance I have with the system.

~~~
Ericson2314
Yeah but we're very good at patching shebangs, rpaths, etc.

~~~
roblabla
With packaged softwares, yeah it rocks and it's seamless.

The problem comes from anything that's not packaged. Things that exist outside
the nixos ecosystem.

For instance, the Android SDK is a bit of pain in the neck to install via the
nixpkgs : it's a mutable piece of software with pieces that auto-update
themselves, made of lots of smaller packages that aren't bundled in the main
package, etc...

However, the binaries google provide doesn't run properly on nixos by default
because of the non-standard install (has to set LD_PRELOAD so it can find the
libc).

~~~
Ericson2314
Well the Android SDK is like the worst-packaged thing ever :). I thought that
its nixpkgs package was one of the greatest efforts to salvage the situation
---the XSLT to automatically convert it's xml metadata to nix expressions is
super impressive.

------
compactmani
This is a project developed by a high school senior. Yes he made rookie
choices as have been pointed out here. If you like the direction of the
project, contribute! It will help him learn.

~~~
embik
I'm _really_ sorry for being overly snarky, but where should one start
contributing to this giant mess? It's basically a few packages packaged up in
a questionable manner (with license violations[1] in the past), none of which
are actually written by the developer himself.

He is styling himself and the OS as a professional project (at least that's
the vibe I get from the website[2]) and he is actually asking for money[3]
while he is putting his users in serious danger (as the current top post[4]
illustrates) caused by his "rookie choices". This is deceptive and prompts
unsuspecting users to install a High School project on their personal
computers in the mistaken belief that they deal with someone skilled. I have
very little sympathy for that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm young and I put up my projects as well, but I don't
style myself a professional or ask for financial support for my half-assed
code while keeping silent about the real nature of my project. Thinking about
it, I might take down some code on GitHub or at least put up a big disclaimer.

[1]
[https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/issues/11](https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/issues/11)

[2] check the "about the team" section, for example

[3] [http://www.patreon.com/apricity](http://www.patreon.com/apricity)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420627)

~~~
jerf
I suggest the disclaimer route. Everything on GitHub really ought to have an
indication in the README.md about why it is there. A single line saying "I'm
just hosting it here and you've got no reason to ever use this" can be very
helpful.

(Plus when someone posts your GitHub repo to HN for some random reason, that
disclaimer can save you a lot of hassle.)

~~~
embik
To be fair, he not only put up his code on GitHub, he also created a semi-
professional looking and analogously worded website. That's not something that
is posted to HN by "mistake". It sounds more like a startup than a hobby
project:

> We are a Chicago based team of developers, dedicated to creating useful,
> intuitive software that helps people better integrate digital computing into
> their daily lives

The GitHub repository also proves it's not "we":
[https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/graphs/contributors)

~~~
jerf
I was replying directly to embik (edit: which is, err, you, which I did not
notice at first). I acknowledge and apologize that my parenthetical could look
like I was talking about apricity, but I was not. I'm not taking the defense
for apricity. Indeed I have a track record of recommending against young
people doing things that will make people who trust them very, very angry when
they can't follow through properly:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974770)
I just didn't see a point in joining the pile-on, which seems to have covered
the bases fairly well.

~~~
embik
And in turn, I have to apologize to you as well because I can see how my
comment could be viewed as arguing against you. I didn't think you were
defending Apricity at all, I was kinda trying to re-inforce your point by
pointing out how he missed to point out important information about his
project. Thank you very much for giving advice to novice developers, I very
much appreciate it!

------
striking
An Arch system with defaults is not an Arch system.

The beauty of Arch is that you set it up from head to toe, so you only have
the things you need most. And if something breaks, you're more likely to be
able to fix it.

Accept no substitute. Vanilla Arch forever.

(I accept that some people don't care about how the sausages are made. In that
case, use Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu, in order of similarity to Arch.)

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
I like Arch. I would love to have it installed on my laptop, but then I don't
want to spend the time actually installing and configuring it. I got fed up
with that stuff using linux 15 years ago. I remember the days when you had to
write your own device drivers. I don't long for them. In fact, I still cry a
bit when I think about that day my RedHat 6 install configured eth0 for me.
Imagine: Plugging a network cable in, and it just works! The future is here!

I use Arch for my SoC devices (RPi2 and Odroid XU-4), and for that it is hard
to beat. I install what I need, configure it and then forget about it. But for
a desktop? I didn't get a computer so that I could spend an hour getting WIFI
to work the way I want.

I have built LFS more than a dozen times, I used gentoo for the better part of
a decade (back in the days when linux actually was harder to use than
osx/windows). I don't have to prove myself worthy any more. Give me an easy
way to setup arch with stuff like X, network-manager and media hotkeys working
out of the box and I'd switch any day.

So: arch is a very nice distro, but online it has somewhat become what gentoo
was in the early 2000: an e-penis enlarger. The only thing it proves is that
you have the time and knows how to copy and paste commands from the arch wiki.

~~~
rndstr
For me the issue with Just Works distributions is that I actually spend more
time reconfiguring all the parts than if I do it by myself from the ground up.
In my opinion, Arch has the perfect balance between things just working and
allowing you to decide whatever you want ro use.

I just recently bought a new laptop that I had set up within a day. A lot of
that time was spent playing around with various hidpi settings, though.

And it certainly helps that I have most of my configurations in my dotfiles
repo (including media key bindings).

~~~
patrickbolle
I agree with your idea of configuring stuff to an extent I'm a recent switcher
to Arch and love it so far, but on my other laptop I use a Debian minimal
install with i3wm and all my manually installed programs, and I find it is
that fine line between easy to use (installing, drivers, etc) and manual
configuration.

I love Arch, but Debian min install will always have a place in my heart for
getting set up easily while still being extremely fast and custom.

------
towb
This sure looks nice. My problem with nice looking Linux is that I becomes too
limited and I get forced into habits that I don't like. Now all I use is
bspwm, no status bars or anything, a lot of times I miss having something good
looking though. But I became happier when I just let it go, it's easy to go
down that road of constant tweaking.

~~~
embik
I'm not a bspwm user myself, but it can look really nice as well (a different
sort of nice I suppose). You could check /r/unixporn[1] for inspiration /
examples / shameless copy-cat. It's really incredible what some people are
pulling off[2][3][4].

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn)

[2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3r85qh/bspwm_ligh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3r85qh/bspwm_light_yosemite/)

[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3og32q/bspwm_wip_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3og32q/bspwm_wip_colors_inspired_by_arc_theme_not_sure/)

[4]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3xen3g/bspwm_func...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3xen3g/bspwm_functional_wallpaper/)

~~~
towb
Thanks, but I already know it ofc :)

Most of the stuff there is nice but it's nothing more than this really:

\- A nice background.

\- GTK themes and icons which I have, easy enough.

\- A nice looking bar, but the one most commonly used with bspwm is made up by
a messy shell script.

\- Custom terminal colours, looks good in ncmpcpp but I need a usable
terminal.

------
hyperhopper
Strange that they include Pushbullet, and advertise it so prominently, which
is not a free service anymore and was the subject of a huge controversy when
they cut features.

~~~
_yy
It's indeed strange and definitely against the spirit.

There's an excellent open source project which does this and much more:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.kdecon...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.kdeconnect_tp&hl=de)

~~~
pkd
KDEConnect pulls the whole KDE dependencies with it which I do not want while
using Unity. That is the only thing that is stopping me from using it.
Pushbullet works well for now.

~~~
Crespyl
KDE has split up most of the libraries over the last few releases, so the
situation's much improved now.

KDEConnect still pulls in a few dependencies, but it's not 300MB anymore.

------
apatters
I've had a lot of fun playing around with Arch, and it's taught me a lot about
Linux, but it seems to me like the "rolling release, mostly unmodified sources
from many third parties" update model is a no-go for anyone other than a very
seasoned Linux user or someone with a lot of time on their hands.

Things just break or otherwise don't work far too often.

So, kudos to the guy who put this distro together but without addressing this
issue I don't think we're going to see an "easy to use" Arch-based distro any
time soon.

I'm definitely speaking just as an onlooker and a novice here as I'm not
involved in any open source development, but it feels like the whole Linux
community would benefit from more rigorous API versioning and better
documentation of interfaces between components. Even with distros that
presumably do a lot of QA on their core packages like Fedora or Ubuntu, it
feels like stuff breaks a LOT in Linux because of dependencies on the wrong
versions of components. It must be a really tough problem.

~~~
stegosaurus
Interestingly I've had far, far less issues in Arch over a year or so of using
it, than I did trying to use Debian stable ~10 years ago.

It could be that I'm just more of a unix beast now and so do it automatically
without thinking. I remember having to edit Xorg configuration files, having
tons of unsupported hardware, etc.

Arch has basically just worked for me on all my machines with the exception of
some esoteric features (e.g. zfs requires a bit of fiddling).

What problems have you had in particular?

~~~
johnchristopher
Or maybe hardware is now much better supported whatever the distribution you
use ?

~~~
stegosaurus
That is certainly true. All distributions work much better because the kernel
and userspace are just more solid now.

------
CloudFlrFeedbck
Can you please whitelist Tor in the Cloudflare settings for this site?

------
agumonkey
Arch is becoming more and more a foundation distro.

~~~
simula67
Yes and this is great. I have felt Ubuntu to be way too bloated ( last time I
checked it had many python scripts running by default on startup ) and Debian
is hard to use on the desktop ( "stable" is too slow, "testing" is too
unstable ).

Arch will make a better foundation distro IMO.

~~~
meddlepal
There's always Fedora which has gotten better and better the last couple
releases.

But I like Arch too. I just switched away from it because I got tired of
things breaking if I wasn't religiously upgrading.

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder how people feel about nix. Broken updates are by design a minor issue
since it's transactional/rollbackable.

~~~
meddlepal
How is NixOS as a workstation/desktop/laptop OS? Does it have any major issues
with hardware I'd run into?

~~~
agumonkey
2015 release used kernel 3.18, some drivers were lagging[1] so I went back to
arch. But the latest 2016.03 release is now on 4.4, I'm about to try. I saw
many people saying they were happy using nixos on twitter. It's a paradigm
shift that require a good deal of RTFM. Felt like the first time I used linux
somehow.

[1] my wifi chip took minutes to initialize due to proprietary blob issues.

~~~
meddlepal
Awesome, thanks for the info!

------
crawrey
Ugh, can we please stop using "beautiful" to describe user interfaces?

lyk dis if u cringe evrytiem

Seriously though, it's such a cop out and it cheapens whatever you're trying
to sell.

~~~
Kadin
It's also subjective to the point of being a useless descriptor. One person's
"beautiful" is another person's "terrible waste of precious screen real
estate". It's fine if "beautiful" is a shorthand design goal among a group of
people on a project team, where everyone shares the same design philosophy and
assumptions, but it's not a great way to describe a project to the public.

It's up there with "nice" and "interesting" in terms of non-value words, IMO.

Much more useful would be to describe some of the goals that you, if you're
the developer, _consider_ beautiful. What, specifically, are you going for? If
I'm looking at a project that's what I want to know. Most people don't set out
to make ugly projects (well, mostly [1]) so that's the key differentiator:
what subjective definition of "beautiful" is operative in the project's
design, and what tradeoffs are being made to pursue it?

[1]: Maybe not if you're really into "New Jersey Style" /
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

------
alloyed
Quick note, the layout seems to break when the piwik.js script is blocked:

[https://imgur.com/JdB5UK3](https://imgur.com/JdB5UK3)

~~~
zxcvcxz
I'm not blocking that script and it's still looks like that for me.

Firefox 45.0.1 64bit Fedora 23

------
plaguuuuuu
Are users reliant on Apricity for OS updates, or could it be connected to
whatever update mechanism Arch uses in the event Apricity becomes obsolete?

~~~
mawalu
[https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacm...](https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacmanx86_64.conf#L75)

They use the default archlinux mirrors and add one for the extra packages

------
iKlsR
So grab gnome, pusbullet, a dock, paper theme, powerline and maybe play on
linux, profit?

~~~
gosukiwi
I guess it's oriented at people who isn't used to Linux and want a pretty OS
to play with, or people too lazy to do it themselves :p

~~~
creshal
Those people are not going to be happy with Arch.

~~~
ssijak
Yes they will. I installed vanilla arch many times but now I find it too time
consuming and useless to do that by hand. Now when I want arch I install some
arch based distro that at least have proper installer.

------
andrewvijay
Idle mem 500Mb for a gnome based desktop. That's impressive. Trying out
tonight!

~~~
keypress
That didn't sound impressive to me at all, then I checked my memory use on
Debian with Gnome Desktop, and was a bit shocked. It's hard to gauge memory
use, but considering I used to play with OSs that would load to 64MB of RAM
it's hard to see what I'm really getting here in terms of perks. Network
manager and some mounting help is about all that's useful from Gnome Shell for
me.

~~~
andrewvijay
Let's say they built it for an average user. And it's kinda impressive. So how
much was your Debian taking up?

~~~
keypress
Debian 8, about 560MB of 4GB with no apps (but for system monitor), and about
760MB of 4GB with Chromium open, with one tab (new tab).

------
jkot
Transparent shell might look nice, but is useless for work.

~~~
mc808
On the laptop I find transparency useful to read what's behind the terminal
window without constantly flipping back and forth or micromanaging my windows.
But I also use a solid-color desktop, so most of the time it's not even
apparent that anything is transparent.

------
AlexTes
Why would I use this over Antergos? Which is my current goto for preconfigured
Arch.

------
qwertyuiop924
Why would I use this over arch? I mean, If you like pretty pictures, but most
Arch users don't: If they did, they'd be using Ubuntu, or Fedora. Arch is all
about form over function, It's the beauty of a well crafted piece of
engineering, or a wooden table you built yourself, not the beauty of a very
elegant interface that somebody else made. So, for now, I'm sticking to
i3+urxvt.

------
jamespo
I use this and have found it excellent. Even got me back into gnome shell
after recoiling in disgust initially with all the changes from gnome 2.

------
vladimir-y
Does it support full disk encryption on the installation stage via GUI (GPT
HDD, LUKS on LVM scenario, [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-
crypt/Encrypting_an_...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-
crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system))?

------
bad_ip
Honestly, just another gnome desktop environment. One that doesn't follow
Linux standards at that. Sure, high school senior blah, blah, blah. I made a
3d model of a car when I was a senior. Doesn't mean it was any good.

------
grinich
Pretty cool to see Nylas N1 featured! (Check the console text)

~~~
creshal
Do they have actual terms of service by now? When I tried it, I was signed up
to their newsletter by simply entering a mail address into the account setup
dialog, without any indication that I was opting in to have my personal data
harvested and abused.

~~~
grinich
There was a (really bad) bug in one of our releases that did this. You must
have connected then-- sorry. We're a small team moving fast and occasionally
we screw up like this.

FWIW, it now correctly asks you in the setup flow and you can add/remove
yourself in the preferences:
[https://i7.createsend1.com/ei/d/A1/835/432/153754/csfinal/pr...](https://i7.createsend1.com/ei/d/A1/835/432/153754/csfinal/preferences5.png)

~~~
creshal
Oh, _now_ that I complain publicly about it I finally get an apology, instead
of passive-aggressive "it's all your own fault really, stop caring about PII
and just unsubscribe" mails from your staff.

You might want to think over how you communicate with your customers. Customer
privacy isn't something you can just shrug away.

~~~
grinich
Again, sorry about that. Feel free to ping directly if you have other
questions. We've had such a huge response after releasing N1 that we
definitely haven't figured out the ideal way to communicate with users.

Relatedly, if anyone reading is interested in a full time developer
relations/evangelist role at a small startup, please send me a note! :)

------
bad_ip
Aka, Just another gnome desktop environment

------
rootlocus
It's.. so.. beautiful!

