Makes me feel like a hacker and makes other ppl think that I’m smarter than I am… That and there are certain things that are just more convenient through the terminal
I’ve been using Xubuntu LTS on my work laptop some 10 years now. All the customization I do is remove snaps and add flatpaks. It just works.
I have RHEL and derivatives on my work machines, where I spend most of my day. I don’t like the RPM package system, which they tried to improve upon several times already. I don’t like Gnome, is too opinionated for me.
I had a colleague who used Gentoo, to claim superiority. His laptop spent most of the day burning kilowatts with the fans blowing. Not for me. Having everyone build packages from source is very unneficient. "Oh, but the security of building your own binaries! " Well, did you look at the code you’re building? No? Well then.
I end up always going back to the DEB ecosystem, with a XFCE desktop. Lately I’ve been using Manjaro with XFCE and Flatpaks, no AUR.
Not too ick someone’s yum, and this ventures outside of Linux.
I dislike the BSDs. Great for getting pf, and not being a homogeneous shop, but just different enough to be difficult outside of one specific use case.
Gentoo was similar. It may be different now, but a pain on the Xbox.
Mint was too dumbed down and ugly.
Ubuntu is useful, but likely harmful with it’s constant pushes to commercialize everything.
Redhat is needed for work, but the commercialization drives worse quality. Documentation seems purposely bad to drive training courses.
Some applications take some time to load up visual elements that you don’t need before you can start using it. When you got a lot of work to do sometimes that just slows you down.
A lot of CLI programs do one thing and do it well while also working excellently in custom scripts.
“Not exactly Linux”, but FreeBSD. Gave it a couple tries but gave up when I realized its minimalism is a placebo at best and its “super security features” can (also) be achieved on any other standard Linux distribution.
For simple tasks you don’t need CLI. Most GUIs implement basic workflows and do a reasonable job at it (obviously not counting the ridiculous amount of time Windows needs to “compute space requirements” while deleting an empty directory. Seems it’s more important to get that little popup on screen and run the animation a few times than actually doing the job).
It’s when you get past the basics that CLI comes into its own. Those grindy things you do in Windows clicking one thing at a time? Glue a couple of commands together in the CLI and it’s done in a tiny fraction of the time.
Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don’t work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I’ll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I’ll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it’s very familiar to me, and there’s not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I’ll probably just stick to it.
I’m talking mostly about musl, but Void with glibc still requires more work than a “just works” distro. As such, I didn’t see a point in trying Void with glibc, because the biggest benefit I saw to switching was for musl. It’s great for some, but not for me, just as I wouldn’t use Gentoo. There were a lot of things that didn’t run, I don’t have a full list. I know for a fact that Steam (or any Steam games) wouldn’t run, I’m fairly confident that the OnlyOffice suite wouldn’t work, I believe that EasyEffects wouldn’t run which was a big problem, since I use that for system wide equalization, and for my microphone filters. I probably could have figured out how to set everything up with bare PipeWire, but it’s basically the same story for everything: it just requires way more work. My VPN (Mullvad) isn’t compiled for musl, nor was the Nextcloud client, and many things I use every day. Those are just the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head, and it may not have only been musl that was the problem, but it’s very likely it was.
If you’re having this much fun digging into distros, I have to recommend* Gentoo and Funtoo :3 I think you could have some fun with those toohehehehehehehehe
*(re-commend, not recco-mend! … Now I wonder if “recommend” at some point commonly/ever sounded like “Riikka mend” 🤔)
I have heard of Gentoo, but not Funtoo. I’m still fumbling my way through Arch but I will definitely make some VMs one day to see what it’s all about. From my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong please) Gentoo is like Arch but even more customization, everything has to be compiled from source.
What is your experience with Gentoo, how would you describe it compared to Arch? Also I’ve seen FreeBSD as well and think it would be super nice for a server but not able to play games without difficulty due to fundamental differences to linux.
I’d say Gentoo is kinda… grittier? It’s less eager to help you out and be nice. Where Arch is like “Oh, you want Foo? Okay, here’s Foo, along with Bar and Baz to go with it” Gentoo is like “'Kay, building Foo.” Then you wonder why Foo doesn’t do Baz-y things and how it’s any good to anycritter without Bar, and it turns out those are compile-time options and you didn’t set the USE flags to include them for Foo so it wasn’t built with them. Your system never downloaded, built, or installed them at all because you didn’t tell it to. It pretty well expects you to know what you want and what you need to do it >:3 … that, and have a nice beefy CPU 😅 I tend to alternate between Arch and Gentoo every few years. Am currently using Arch (bytheway ;P) after switching from Gentoo for some comfy convenience but I kinda love both.
Funtoo is… I don’t entirely remember what it was meant to be, compared to Gentoo 😅 I vaguely recall it was supposed to have some nice features but wanted me to do sensible things like stop using ancient GRUB so I just didn’t get into it. May try that next.
As for BSDs, I’ve kinda wanted to run a BSD for a long time but none of them are what I actually want (despite my nonsensical eagerness to be and do weird wherever possible- er, I mean, despite how good and stable and cool they are!) so I just kinda poke one or two every few years, accomplish nothing, then give up. I do want to like them, though 😅
I appreciate the big response, and definitely have to look into compiling and the build process, using git, more terminal centric applications, etc. I’ve seen that there is a distro to learn Linux that comes in stages, I don’t know what it’s called off the top of my head.
Setting flags does seem very annoying, it’s hard for me to keep track of programs and settings already.
Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don’t want to waste space on flatpaks.
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