I’dv deleted the default, it’s never come back.

Except Alpine & those based on it, which uses Linux but not GNU libc or GNU coreutils or GNU BASH… Just musl libc & Busybox. I.e. the entire subject of this thread is one of the non-GNU Linuxes.

Yes, I listed sysvinit for that reason. And Musl instead of glibc. GNU is optional in a Linux distro, except for the kernel’s use of a GNU license.

Sure, I should have gone further.

Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/GNU BASH/Linux/X11//GTK/GNOME
Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/GNU BASH/Linux/X11/GTK/LXDE
Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/Zsh/Linux/X11/GTK/GNOME
Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/Zsh/Linux/X11/GTK/LXDE
SysVInit/musl/Busybox/tcsh/Linux/csh
Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/Zsh/Linux/Wayland/QT/KDE Plasma
Systemd/GNU libc/GNU Coreutils/Zsh/Linux/Wayland/QT/LXQT

etc, etc.

There are thousands of combinations of the possible layers needed to make an OS.

Systemd/GNU/Linux/GTK or Systemd/GNU/Linux/QT, really…

Used it for the last few years. X just doesn’t work right with multiple monitors of different resolution.

You mean SNI, not ESNI. ESNI is the Encrypted Server Name Indication that gets around that, though the newer ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) is better in many ways. Not all sites support either though.

NixOS + Home Manager user here.

I run in an opt-in state config. / is tmpfs. /home is tmpfs. /boot and /nix are real filesystems. At boot, the EFI loader reads the configuration from /nix/persist/etc/nixos/flake.nix, symlinks all the programs and configs into / and /home, and startup proceeds as normal.

That means nothing persists across boots unless I add it to my config. Cruft doesn’t accumulate in hidden areas, it’s all in my config. That keeps things fast, makes management easier, and makes troubleshooting easier.

Yep, it’s just Murphy’s Law of data: everything you regret posting will be in public archives forever, everything you want to preserve will have gotten deleted the next time you try to find it.