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.
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.
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.
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 had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can’t handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.
When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, “why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now.” The answer is always “nothing important,” so I stick with Ubuntu.
I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren’t quite to the point of “just works” yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.
Every day is something of an exaggeration, but if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break. And this gets to be a problem, especially if I don’t keep a computer always on, or if I keep postponing updates because my laptop is not connected to the Internet at the schedule time. There are a dozens reasons why I miss regular updates, but the point is, it should not bork my system if I do miss updates for a while.
if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break.
Those are packaging bugs then. With proper packaging everything updates seamslessly. Outside of SteamOS I’m not a user of Arch-derived distributions but I am a user of openSUSE TW which is a rolling release and I have one old notebook for a specific task I need to do maybe twice a year and updating was never a problem and installing a package triggers updating all affected dependencies.
Yeah, I have definitely run across lots of Arch packaging bugs. They seem to give up making packages backward compatible after some length of time, that or their testing procedures are not as thorough as that of openSUSE. It is understandable, making a rolling release backward compatible for long periods of time can be fairly challenging. Although Nix OS and Guix OS have solved this problem.
Why do you think you need to update packages on Arch every single day?
It was just a bit of hyperbole regarding the amount of mental effort it takes to keep your system up to date, I don’t actually mean every single day. I mean if you don’t keep Arch up-to-date on a regular basis, packages tend to break, and then you need to re-install the OS or jump through a few hoops to repair the broken packages and their dependencies. Diligent regular updates is not a terrible mental burden, but a burden none-the-less, so using point release OS like Mint or Ubuntu are just easier.
I get it. It does have a learning curve. This being said, I would argue that without selinux Linux can’t really be meaningfully secure. It’s worth learning. Seljnux exits elsewhere too. I deploy Debian with selinux and it works well there as well.
The problem with SELinux is that everyone rushed to push it out, alongside packages affected by it without support for it. So it was a crapshoot whether or not you’d have something working each time. That is better now, but was initially a colossal pain in the ass for about five years or so.
Fair. But audit2allow makes it really easy to add support for apps without policies. For custom in-house apps I use this to spit out some nice policies that can be rolled out.
What put me off selinux is that the officially documented way of generating a new policy is to run a service unconfined, and then generating the policy from its behaviour. This is backwards on so many levels… In contrast policy-based admission control in kubernetes is a delight to use, and creating new policies is actually doable outside of a lab.
You could preemptively write the policy if you know the context and policies you want to apply. I just don’t think it’s worth the time when you can generate a policy with two commands.
Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn’t update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I’m liking that a lot more so far…
Manjaro ships with a LTS kernel, which is marked “recommended” in the kernel selection tool. By default you don’t have to do anything, don’t ever need to use the kernel selection, and you won’t experience any problems, it works like any other distro.
The issues you described are caused by selecting one of the non-recommended kernel versions. It’s assumed you know what you’re doing if you do that.
Exactly I really don’t get the argument there. Manjaro’s handling of kernel selection is brilliant. Multiple LTS kernels, a recommended one, bleeding hedge and experimental ones. There’s something for everyone and it’s super easy to use.
It’s not so much an argument, it’s my personal experience. My experience was just not great. Maybe I did something wrong, but I’ve had a way better experience with Antergos, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I’d rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor
I can also recommend the book the TS mentioned, it is very good and after reading it you will understand regular expressions. It’s fine to use a cheat sheet if you want, cause if you don’t do it regularly the knowledge can sag, but the understanding is what matters. Also depending on the context, different implementations can have slightly different syntax or modifiers to be aware of.
I lent out the book to my brother once and he somehow lost it, so I never got it back. Don’t lend out book guys.
And remember not everything can be solved using a regular expression: xkcd.com/1171/
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