@toyha @matrix gentoo

@coyote @matrix haven't actively used gentoo, so can't say how it compares to arch post-install, especially package availability wise, package installation time and more, arch sounds less friction by a gut feeling overall, esp. because of AUR

@toyha @matrix I was kinda joking (the meme of course) but I use Gentoo personally. For me I am glad I switched (arch to gentoo). But anyway what I prefer with Gentoo is that external repos are officially supported and encouraged. the AUR is sort of officially unsupported by arch and AUR helpers aren't in the official package list for a reason. Other than that I feel package availability has a lot of overlap and everything that can be dome on Arch can be done on Gentoo, but with Gentoo you have a possibility of using configurations not supported by Arch, or even experimental configurations not intented for Gentoo either. I have heard of people using OpenBSDs kernel with Gentoo, or running MUSL. Plus OpenRC is officially supported same as systemd (which I'm trying to avoid). Also, something else I liked: running an update tells you if manual intervention is needed with the update (can be seen with `eselect news read`)

@coyote @matrix I figured it was either a meme and or you were using it yourself :) this all reminded me though of something somebody told me recently about gentoo - latest firefox being unstable and not recommended, compared to ESR? is that still true or true to begin with?

`eselect news read` truly sounds like a great feature though, considering when I was on arch, I had to religiously check their rss and other forums, to make sure the update I'm about to do won't break all sorts of things for me

eventually I settled on btrfs, being able to quickly snapshot back in time, until others have ironed things out - at least it's not manjaro though, where it's the ultimate wild west of what will break because of arbitrary package withholding and frankenstein packages.

@toyha @matrix :) Firefox is okay with me, but I use the pre-compiled one on my boxes and ALSA, not pulse. I don't do misc or random browsing though, really just fedi and the same 10 sites x) I have heard good things about btrfs, like file dedup too, that's killer.

What made me switch is (systemd and pulse and) one final pacman -Syu that ended it all hah.. Never looked back because it's been fairly stable for me. And yeah that news feature is killer, I really saw arch as needing something like that when my system broke three times in a row with manual intervention I never did... anyway I ramble lmao

@coyote @toyha @matrix alpine with a custom jiggled install on top of btrfs here.

@icedquinn @coyote @matrix I've tried countless times to get alpine as my desktop but always failed on package availabity, though I could've built from source I suppose, only my CPU wasn't the absolute best to stomp some of those needed compiles.

Just recently tried to replicate a bootleg qubes os setup, by having tiny alpine desktop VMs I'd put stuff I don't want on my host, but ended up just going with bunsenlabs as it was easier inside the VM to get going, due to virtual box drivers / kernel modules not loading in no matter what I do, which was crucial to be able to resize the guest to sane size for browsing and what not.

Love alpine inside containers and as lightweight VM / host though, extremely nifty.

@toyha @coyote @matrix for desktops you need to upgrade to Edge and enable community and testing repos. this will get you most of the software (it even has like, ardour, although not all the lv2 stuff.)

@coyote @matrix just to make sure - you are using latest Firefox not the recommended esr nightly stuff?

btrfs can be both a blessing and a curse, fedora for example has fast forwarded and ignored voting recently to move to defaulting to btrfs in next release instead of the usual ext4+lvm, with mostly the same argument of "bitrot!! it can creep into backups!!" - which to me is an inane argument, as if you use the usual at home pattern of 7 days, 4 weeks, 12 months, 1 year backup, it would take significant amount to reach your backups to an unrestorable point. (unless you're somehow extremely unlucky)

haha so that syu I assume broke some stuff? also I don't mind the rambling, I like hearing from daily driver users of OS or other tech stacks, philomath at heart. :)

@toyha @matrix I Think So™ but I just finished my update after like 20 days so I will report back, it’s called “firefox-bin” based off the same version that is built from source in Gentoo’s official repos… I think™

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced bit rot, and I have drives from the early 00s still kicking. The drive will die before the bits start flipping I am pretty sure.

Yeah it broke PAM, and GRUB and.. something else IIRC, which was doubly irritating because each time it took my system down in some way and it was a system crucial package that needed manual stuff done to it or — oops, I broke my system :p three updates in a row :3

hah! Awesome, just don’t wanna drone on about nothing bahaha

@toyha @coyote @matrix In terms of package freshness: Arch (with AUR), NixOS, FreeBSD, and anything using current pkgsrc lead the pack. If you're willing to compile from source and/or use third-party repositories: Ubuntu/derivatives tend to have a wide availability of fresh packages and software compatibility as well. If you're interested in any of this: I would highly recommend checking out the repology index at https://repology.org/

(disclaimer: I use Linux Mint 20 as my main distro (Ubuntu 20.04 derivative) mostly because I'm extremely used to the apt ecosystem and because a lot of software I use tends to provide binary packages only for Ubuntu and not any other distro)

@allison @toyha @coyote @matrix
> mint
You mean debian after several layers of abstraction?

@allison @coyote @matrix the last point about apt/deb hits home.

I've started with ubuntu back in the day and now recently came back to linux full time (with some inbetweening with ubuntu on my laptops), only to eventually switch over to fedora for some ubuntu issues

mainly some games being broken or some nvidia / nvidia-settings not persisting, randomly resetting contrast, ..

in terms of packages, I didn't feel much issues on ubuntu based systems, however debian was so far behind I was constantly fighting my system over things being "patched in the latest version", it used to be much better, but now it's been split miles apart between ubuntu and debian up-to-date'ness