If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

Well I tried Aeon for a month and it has been the least reliable system I’ve used since, well actually probably anything, like maybe vista I guess.

The thing is a mess and it brings nothing to the table over A/B snapshots.

The scales must be different for enterprise use because I’d never go near another immutable OS again after this terrible experience.

Maybe it’s just flatpak that’s unreliable on Aeon, I found moving electron apps into podman containers was a lot better. But on void it was fine, clearly a lot more work to do the flesh it out I goes.

Tbf SB had far less issues than Aeon.

I appreciate this is more asking about nicks, but I’ll offer some feedback on my experience with immutable distributions more generally.

I took an adventure into silver blue and micro OS recently and I was completely unimpressed. It’s a novel idea from a good place, but it was the most incoherent and buggy experience I’ve ever had on Linux distribution in the past 10 years. Nothing walked reliably, and everything broke, I also found that trying to use anything other than the default gnome desktop was an exercise in futility.

I need to clarify, I think it’s a great idea. In practice though, Both implementations, silver blue and micro OS, are really over engineered.

I have adapted the ideas into my current install and I achieve the same thing with A/B Snapshots And a script that takes me from a base snapshot to my daily driver. Everything else exists in containers So bootstrapping up only involves half a dozen packages (iwd, node, nvim etc. ).

I’ve had this before, try a different kernel, like an LTS, if that fixes it, there’s likely a kernel parameter somewhere to fiddle with.

So Ubuntu, Ubuntu and unstable arch… here let me have a go:

1. Fedora
2. Tumbleweed
3. Endeavour OS

• easy install arch with extra repos, zfs and and dracut

4. Bonus for the curious

• void
• Redcore Gentoo

I though the interlinking worked for org but not md?

Try bare git repos over chemo, I’ve been much happier with that over chezmoi

Foss I suspect.

I avoid obsidian for the same reason, instead I use org mode and MediaWiki (see also dokuwiki)

Just use anything and set up a good workflow with snapshots.

Have a “current” snapshot, rollback to it before using and then re-snapshot over it.

Now your system is immutable in practice but you can still edit /etc to debug.

I couldn’t agree more with this, projects like artix are undermined by all the hard dependencies on systemd and Bash.

Void attracted me because of the support for posix, runit and musl (plus good zfs support). It’s unfortunate that Arch doesn’t have that greater portability.

This sounds a lot like Luet which is used in Moccacino (formerly Sabayon).

The manual is OK, much of it’s out dated and often outright wrong. It is still a great document.

Edits to the wiki are often knocked back if they weren’t made by the inner circle, discussions on the back page are often closed and frankly the TUs are mostly wankers. The forum policy on necro-bumping leaves half answers everywhere but the notion of “put it in the wiki” is undermined by the toxic community among inner party members.

Arch is a great middle ground between Fedora and Gentoo, but I had to walk away because the community was so toxic and childish.

I’m using void and Gentoo now and I’m pretty happy, anything that doesn’t run works in a container anyway.

TL;DR: community behaviour is much more important to me than technical use.

Just use flatpak and podman, in a punch you can proot into a different system / zfs data set / btrfs sublime

Re your update.

My framework has been great, I’ve had no issues with it and I’m quite happy. Make sure to go with the matte screen though.

In saying that, I think I was happier with my thinkpad, but I have no good scientific reason for that, I suspect the nipple and keyboard are a big part of it.

Framework and ThinkPad have both been a really positive experience.

Also, if it’s just the DE, install sway / i3 and try that for a week. If you liked that it’s on literally every Linux distribution, even the BSDs.

Go with EndeavourOS. It won’t “just work”, but it will be the best compromise between confusing abstraction and low level frustrations.

Fedora is good but it abstracts a little too much away, this is great when you understand how software works, but it’s very confusing when you’re new to Linux and programming.

Arch is good, but you won’t be able to hid the ground running, you’d have to sacrifice a weekend to learn.

Go:

0. [Optional] Fedora
1. Endeavour
2. Arch
3. Learning

• Ghost BSD
• Void
• Gentoo

Tinkering with those in that order, after about 6 months, you’ll start to feel at home.

Worth mentioning that one can use bubblewrap directly over chroot to get similar behaviour as well.

It’s often simpler to use distrobox but being able to rsync chroot a between devices can be very convenient.

Cachy is a great live usb because it has zfs.

I enjoyed arch for how straight forward the install was.

Gentoo however, every time I do that from scratch it’s with X, Westland is NetworkManager that give up (my recommendation is oddlamma installer)