Skye

Yeah the “tech tips” distro feels vaguely abusive and toxic

I agree. I think that’s why nix-os is getting so popular these days.

I love the idea of declarative system builds even beyond just reproducability. The idea that you can essentially make your own distro without much difficulty is really cool.

Plus all the benefits of roll backs, light backups, etc.

Plus if you can dig deep enough you can craft a system that never breaks by pinning certain versions.

One of these days I want to check it out. As well as LFS. Oh but for the want of time.

Yeah, you will invariably remove something crucial haha. The nice thing with arch is that usually you can fix it without too much fuss.

Me learning to use Linux was like teaching a child that can’t feel pain to not touch fire.

I don’t know if that’s a widely recognized term.

Pacman used to be really bad at removing unneeded dependencies. I think pretty much every package manager has this facility now. For instant apt auto remove.

Suppose you installed gnome to try it out, gnome installs like 1000000 packages. The thing about some of those dependencies is that they’re really useful. It’s not uncommon for another package you have installed to use it as an optional dependency. In that case it doesn’t get flagged for autoremoval when you uninstall gnome.

When you apply this logic a couple layers deep they start to compound.

Also libraries and random python scripts tend to just exist forever in your system long after you used it lol.

I started developing the habit of checking what dependencies are being installed and to uninstall immediately when I realize I don’t need it.

This logic applies to language specific managers like cargo or pip too.

They all have really good tooling to figure out leaves, orphaned nodes etc. I just didn’t start using those until I got into the arch hype.

Arch breaking grub has happened to me twice. Second time I couldn’t even recover the install.

You learn a lot of good practices by using arch, eg a separate home partitjon, git repositories for your config files, maintaining a clean package tree etc. Installing Arch is also really useful for noobs like me to learn some Linux basics.

I use Fedora, btw.

Sounds like a skill issue. Some people just don’t know how to use Arch.

Signed,

Someone who has spent more days reinstalling Arch than using it.

I’m Indian. I’m willing to bet a bunch of kids who just built their first pc didn’t realize windows was paid just google free OS and installed Linux lol

(This is a sarcastic whit at the frugality of my people. Truth is a lot of Indians my age are extremely tech savvy and care about privacy)

Eeeeemaaaaacs