Linux Appreciation Thread

[Skygazer]

i've been using gentoo since march of this year and i really really like it even got a PR fixing a broken package accepted into their repo! i used arch for a while though and it will always have a special place in my heart.

i dont really care for desktop environments so i use sway (a window manager, it's sort of an i3 clone for wayland) with wofi and waybar. 95% of the time im just using firefox and a terminal emulator anyways. might post screenshots later.

anyways arch and gentoo kind of got me stoked to use computers again. i think the problem was i'm just too much of a control freak for windows.

[Skygazer]

FWIW I have never had any stability issues with Arch or Gentoo that weren't self-induced. That being said, it is kind of easy to self induce stuff especially when you're starting out. I would say in terms of time sink, there's a ton to get it up and running (more so for Gentoo) but the official install guides for both are pretty comprehensive. I've found maintenence to be pretty straightforward and quick once I was up to speed on things (granted, compiling in Gentoo is not quick, but easy to have run in the background). They both have you living in the terminal a lot (at least while installing) which may or not be your thing. They both offer an extreme amount of customization and start you with a very minimal system that you can add extra stuff to as you please. They're both great for learning how things tick behind the scenes. In my opinion both of their package managers are better than apt. If any of that interests you, I would highly recommend checking out Arch. Gentoo I wouldn't really recommend to Linux newcomers unless they already have a handle on bash/zsh/something similar. Some might say the same about Arch, but I actually learned zsh through Arch.

I've never tried Manjaro outside of 5 minutes in a VM. Easy to install but from what I understand it's much more unstable than Arch. And the people who make it don't seem like a very professional outfit (lack of testing, and they've accidentally DDOS'd (or took down in some other manner) the Arch repo at least once iirc). But that's just one person's take.

Debian is cool, I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu personally (I'm big into free software, and I dislike Canonical's approach to things). I would describe Debian as relatively easy to install. I support a couple of Ubuntu users at my work and they seemed to get the hang of it really easily so I wouldn't discount it for anything other than idealogical reasons. If you want a computer just to "do things" without having to think about it as much, these would be the way to go. And let's be honest, most people are going to be in that camp.

[Skygazer]

I think part of the fun for me is the work haha. If you don't think you'll like it you probably won't!

[Skygazer]

Anyways here are a couple of screenshots I posted on the Gentoo subreddit after a week or two of breaking it in! It still looks pretty much the same now. If you think the theming is bad it's because I did most of it myself :

P

Spoiler: image

[Skygazer]

yeah the more think on it, using arch/gentoo has definitely been more of a hobby rather than just a means to an end, which is how i imagine most people want to use their computers lol

eventually i want to attempt a linux from scratch install but i probably wouldn't use that as my daily driver, i'll probably just have it as a lil project on one of the old laptops my job let me borrow