There is a very nice Linux distribution available. This is called Venom Linux. This is very fast to boot after installation. In my VMWare instance, it booted in a couple of seconds after pressing enter at the boot screen.
This is a live CD distribution with MATE, XFce 4, Lxde and bare-bones Xorg spins available. As well as Lxqt. But this is very simple to install, click the Installer icon on the desktop, or run venom-installer at a root prompt. Use the sudo su - command in a terminal with the live instance to enable a root prompt.
Once you get to the partitioning part of the installation, it is very important to create a 2 megabyte BIOS Boot partition with cfdisk. Otherwise, the GRUB 2 installation will fail, even though you are installing it to /dev/sda. The rest of the installation is very easy.
Once the installation finishes, reboot the machine and remove the Venom DVD or ISO to ensure that you boot from the HDD. Press ENTER at the GRUB 2 prompt and enjoy a very fast Linux boot time.
Once the desktop is up and running, use the scratch install command to install any required software.
For example, install the htop networking utility.
[jason@venom ~]$ sudo scratch install htop Resolving dependencies... [i] htop ( 1 install ) Continue install package(s)? (Y/n) y |
This is quite fast and easy. This is a rolling-release distribution, you do not need to download new versions of the distribution and reinstall to get new packages. Systemd is not included with this distribution, which is a good thing. It is just a very fast init system and a very fast distro overall. The sound works as well, in VMWare, I played a Youtube video and got sound straight away. I recommend using the MATE version of the Live DVD, this works very well. And you can test hardware compatibility before installation.
The scratch search command will find all matching packages for a certain keyword.
For example, this is a search for all packages with the vim keyword.
bash-5.0# scratch search vim [*] (core) vim 8.2.0464-1: Vi Improved, a highly configurable, improved version of the vi text editor [ ] (extra) qutebrowser 1.10.1-1: A keyboard-driven, vim-like browser based on PyQt5 [ ] (extra) ranger 1.9.3-1: A simple, vim-like file manager [ ] (extra) vimb 3.6.0-1: Fast and lightweight web browser based on WebKit/GTK+ [ ] (extra) vimix-gtk-themes 20190225-1: Vimix is a flat Material Design theme for GTK 3, GTK 2 and Gnome-Shell [ ] (extra) vimix-icon-theme 20181214-1: Fresh and simple personality icon theme |
Use this command to search for all outdated packages.
bash-5.0# scratch outdate ==> All packages are up to date. |
This command will sync all repositories with the locally installed system. This might take a little bit of time.
bash-5.0# scratch sync |
There is a simple way to get help for the scratch command, use the scratch help command.
Download a copy of this Linux distribution here: https://venomlinux.org/download.htmlhttps://venomlinux.org/download.html. This is well worth trying out if you are sick of Systemd bloat and want to try out a nice super-fast booting Linux distribution that is built upon Linux from scratch. This would boot very fast if installed on an SSD in a modern PC. And it comes with kernel 5.2, so it has cutting edge hardware support. A simpler alternative to Gentoo.