Ever since the systemd thing, I can’t get it to work. :-(
Devuan is OK, though apt-get upgrade broke grub on one of my machines.
I settled on manjaro. I kind of hate it, but at least it sort of works. In particular, I have it on a shared desktop, and “switch user” works.
It took 3-4 hours to get xscreensaver to work (poorly) with multiple sessions. There’s no way to save games in micropolis (open source simcity) because it is a flatpack. I frequently reboot because PulseAudio is still terrible.
Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
If you're willing to run Manjaro (which uses systemd), any opposition to running e.g. Fedora with GNOME? I'd guess multi-session would function fine with GNOME on GDM, and pulseaudio has been replaced by pipewire. Although you could also use pipewire in Manjaro...
> Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
Via running a Linux userland with syscall emulation. Since the GUI and user session stuff in FBSD is mostly the same as Linux (DRM/KMS for graphics, libinput and the xf86 DDX drivers, logind/ConsoleKit for session tracking, D-Bus for IPC) so I don't think this will address many grievances...
> I want Debian circa 2002 back.
Did display managers back then even support running multiple concurrent X servers on the same seat?
I never made the switch from Gnome 2 to 3; I switched to KDE instead. I use a redhat derivative at work, and it's a non-starter for me. RPM + yum is still a hot mess vs. dpkg.
I thought they were recompiling proton for freebsd (it is definitely open source), but I haven't looked carefully.
The "switch user" button is one feature. Whether or not Debian had it in 2002 isn't the point. The point is that what was supported was stable. That hasn't been my experience with it since the pulse audio disaster, and then the init wars.
I should look into switching to pipewire, but the only reason I'm using manjaro is that it mostly works out of the box. I'm not really interesting using a distro that makes me tinker with it to make my sound card (which has perfectly good drivers!) stable.
Devuan is OK, though apt-get upgrade broke grub on one of my machines.
I settled on manjaro. I kind of hate it, but at least it sort of works. In particular, I have it on a shared desktop, and “switch user” works.
It took 3-4 hours to get xscreensaver to work (poorly) with multiple sessions. There’s no way to save games in micropolis (open source simcity) because it is a flatpack. I frequently reboot because PulseAudio is still terrible.
Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
I want Debian circa 2002 back. sigh