I think with inflation a picture is only worth 700 words.
I use mint, btw.
(…Not really but it fits the joke the best. I have used it and it’s an excellent distro whether you are a beginner or just want something stable and full featured. )
Mint is such a pragmatic distro. Honestly I admire people who are just happy with their Mint and don’t feel the need to distro hop to ever more esoteric package ecosystems just to feel alive
Why would one unuse Arch btw?
Arch is only the larval stage. When a Linuxite consumes enough CLI, they metamorphose into one of two adult forms: a Void user, or a NixOS user. As these two adult forms are incompatible, this is a rare case of species divergence within a life cycle. Even more oddly, like the axolotl, many Arch users never leave the larval stage, and continue living comfortably in their ecological niche.
Wow, this is so well explained, I’m making it my personal copypasta!
Retired form of Linuxite is called Gentoo user
If NixOS and Void are the adult form then what is the form of FreeBSD and OpenBSD? Old form?
Different species. They’re not in the Linuxite clade.
The Linuxite taxa have far higher diversity due to faster mutation rates; the BSD genus has far fewer species, and can’t cross-breed with Linuxites.
They are the alolan forms.
Daamn, I’m a pupa (Arch -> Debian + Nix)
Yeah, that comment leaves out the “I learned a lot from Arch, but don’t have the time to manage evertything anymore” crowd, which goes Ubuntu -> Arch -> Debian/Mint/Fedora
I discovered that EndeavourOS satisfied that for me, without me having to give up Arch. And snapper+btrfs-grub has eliminated any interest in messing about with the new line of immutable systems. The only tempting distro I might spend time in is Chimera Linux (link, b/c of an unfortunate naming conflict) which (a little hilariously) is an attempt to make a Linux distro that’s purely Gnu-free. Chimera also runs dinit instead of systemd, and that’s interesting.
Anyway, there are a couple of options that let a user stay in Arch but make things less… fussy.
I gunked up my system with too much AUR, even with endeavourOS. NixOS might be a bit more suitable for my ADHD brain.
Switching to nixos?
As someone who switched to nixos - eh. So much hacking to make dev stuff work really kills the magic that nixos is supposed to be :|
Yeah, it is a lot of initial work, but once you got your shell.nix or flake.nix in place it is really nice, to not have to deal with different dependencies and versions in different projects.
But you can also archive the same on amy distro with the nix package manager.
except i want my computer to function for my needs without “a lot of initial work”
It’s an investment for the next time you install on a new dev machine. After install, I will literally run a single command to return to the exact state of my dev environment.
Sure but how often do you need to actually change your machine?
I’m actually building a new work station right now.
i dunno wanting an os that actually just works without a lot of setup?
The whole point is the setup 😒.
artix my beloved
I’ve used arch on one machine now, am a total noob to it, and I really like it. I see what people are raving about and I see no reason to shit on it. I don’t really care if 6 years ago some people were annoying about it
Arch is good, no doubt 👍.
Void is better 😁.
How?
Faster, more stable, no systemd, supports musl and architectures not usually supported by most distros. It’s probably the most stable rolling release distro out there.
What is the benefit of no systemd?
It’s too popular and it works too well.
Not true, doesn’t work well at all. It’s bloated and full of bugs.
With the price of energy being what it is, people need the systemd flame wars to keep them warm!
No, I just don’t like systemd. It’s bloated and full of bugs. Just because almost every distro out there uses it, doesn’t mean it’s good.
I’m feeling warmer already, thanks!
Boasting, mainly.
I have no horse in this race, I don’t have strong feelings about it either way as long as it works. But I can’t help but notice that OP skipped replying to me.
Oh great so now i have to unlearn systemd again?
Runit is even easier than doing things in systemd.
It really is that easy. Runit is probably the simplest init/service manager there is out there.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/PRpcqj9QR68
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Gonna give it a try one day
Many programs aren’t packaged for Void though
Repackaging is easy though with xbps-src.
Tell me more about it. Let’s say I have an Arch (AUR) package that I want to repackage for Void, how do I do it?
The syntax is a bit different, but everything else, more or less the same. In fact, if you just wanna repackage a deb or an rpm, it’s even easier than in Arch, xbps-src can handle deb and rpm automatically, it detects dependencies and does repackaging on it’s own. You basically just have to feed it the deb/rpm file in a one liner, that’s it.
I should probably give an example. Here is the template file (they’re called templates in Void) for Viber. You basically just feed it the deb, do a
vcopy
(copy operation specific to xbps-src) and that’s it, everything else regarding the repackaging is done automatically by xbps-src.
Interesting. I will have to try it some time. I just know on my raspberry pi 5, out of the few OSes I could get to run on it, Arch was the fastest and smoothest running, and gets updates all the time. All this, even though rpi5 is not even officially supported yet!
Void runs even faster, I’ve tried (on an older RPi, but still).
Does it support glibc while it supports musl?
Yes, there are basically 2 builds for every architecture. One is glibc, the other is musl. I haven’t used the musl builds that much, just toyed with them a few times (mainly because of lack of software), but if you only use open source software that doesn’t specifically depend on the GNU toolchain, yes, you can daily drive it, no doubt there. And yes, it is faster than the glibc builds.
Yes. From their website:
C library diversity
Void Linux supports both the musl and GNU libc implementations, patching incompatible software when necessary and working with upstream developers to improve the correctness and portability of their projects.
“Patching incompatible software”
What does that mean? If glibc is supported why there is a portability issueand requirement of patches?
They are likely referring to musl. Patches might be needed for some programs to work with musl.
Presumably so it can work with either libc implementation.
It’s a bit tounge in cheek, nobody actually got mad at the arch namedropping. More like “I’m a platinum level player in LoL”. Lol.
I always got the impression that it was more of an “Oh god one of THESE insufferable people”. I’m just saying from my experience – they have a point. Arch is pretty nice.
What’s so good about it?
The existence of ArchWiki and the Arch User Respository (AUR). And rolling releases, if that’s your thing.
Basically just the fact that it’s very lightweight, I was able to install it on an rpi5 (not officially supported), install only what I needed, and was able to resolve all the issues I had for my niche use-case.
There is a quite noticeable difference in how snappy it feels versus the official rpi OS. Arch runs way zippier on it. Those devices are a little limited hardware-wise so it makes a big difference in what it feels like to use that system.
I also like knowing that the updates flowing in so quickly, I get the latest fixes and new features before I would on any of the other distros I’ve used. I have always been a little scared of rolling releases but over the last couple months I haven’t seen any breakages yet so fingers crossed! A lot of people have tried to tell me rolling release can be solid, but I was skeptical.
snappy it feels versus the official rpi OS
I blame the desktop manager. Once I ditched the default von on the pi, and replaced it with standard gnome, the pi became almost as snappy as my regular notebook.
in general: standard debian should be exactly as light-weight as arch.
Oh I misread what you wrote in the first paragraph. Yeah I actually did try that route too, installing Gnome on PI OS lite. I used this guide: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=276512
It actually was pretty slow for me for some reason. I had some weird crashes and things too, so I abandoned that.
for me it was on a pi5. maybe the amd64 was what made it work for me? idk.
Good to know. Yeah, I actually did try to install debian iirc but I didn’t have any luck.
What dist to you use btw?
I use BTW btw
Is that the one from the Korean boy band?
No, that’s the Bangladesh Toilet Service
Became straight
I don’t use Arch, btw
No longer* xD
I used to run Arch, btw
I couldn’t figure out how to make the wifi on my Debian machine reliable so I replaced the default wifi manager front-end and backend with iwctl, the same thing Arch uses by default. It seems to be working but now I have an unholy abomination of Debian spliced with Arch DNA.
Every distro is an unholy abomination made by plugging the maintainers’ favorite parts together
Lol, that’s normal in Arch, Void, Gentoo, LFS.
Almost every proprietery software there is out there has only Debian/Ubuntu packages, yet we run them in Arch, Void, Gentoo… as long as the dependencies are there, it doesn’t matter what distro you run the software on.
A simple fix is to replace the rest of Debian with Arch.
It’s perfectly fine to use different ways to do things in Debian, just don’t mix incompatible repos.
https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#IWCtl
Friendship ended with Arch. Now Void is my best friend!
I was asked what I think of the distro “Arch btw” since everyone recommends it. Gold.
Tips Fedora.
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We get it, you used arch. You don’t need to write a thousand words telling us.