These tentacular megacorporations are a problem. Amazon is OK as a merchant, MS as an OS developer, Google as a search engine... If they do vertical integration the market is corrupted.

This is useful for proprietary software.

You're following the Unix philosophy.

I don't use KDE but I suppose the click is detected on button release, not during the press. It should adress all these questions.

This is unrealistic. Read everything represents too much work.

I installed Arch on a disk without erasing the /home partition that cames from a previous distro. It saves me some config work, and a bit of disk life expectancy I guess.

Some differences can be explained. Pacman was created after the Debian package manager (I guess that because Debian is older than Arch) . It is justified because Pacman is faster than Apt. But its too much work to replace Apt by Pacman comparing to the benefits.

But in some cases I don't know why. As instance I wonder why a distro, such as Void, created its own package manager instead of using the Alpine one. If Alpine is younger than Void, invert the sentence of course.

The Gimp Tool Kit !

The PS3 is not crazy, but has an exotic hardware that optionnally runs Linux.

How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.

15 years ago I would have been surprised to hear that Thinkpads are cheap laptops !

Vivarium

Please don't blame the lack of popularity, Vivarium works and its feature complete. The dev answers to the recent github issues.

i3-like WMs are underfeatured and Hyprland is less minimal than Vivarium.

"Linux" is owned by Linus Torvalds. Can he ask this foundation to change its name ?

Is Guix a cleaner base for a NixOS alternative ?

If you want stability you can choose Xfce. You'll don't need extensions because of easy configurability.

In all distro I tried, I always found Vi.

The logo is cool. Also it is not driven by Google which is a web company and a browser developer at the same, thats dangerous.

For a desktop user I don't see any significant benefits to replace systemd. But also no-systemd distros works fine. I was impressed during my try on Alpine Linux, that uses openrc instead. The text printing during OS startup is so short that the terminal didn't scroll. The bluetooth worked flawlessly. But it is a small community distro, and Alpine is limited by other things than the init system. The init system is a problem for people that have to deal with services.

On political aspects, IMO FOSS works easier with small and focused components that can survive with spare time developers. I can't make critisicms on technical aspect, I'm not a good programmer, I just notice systemd seems to works fine. Red hat has man-power and capable of large contributions to Linux distros so they leads the innovations. All big distros switched to systemd, now its hard to avoid.

I would like to support smaller FOSS-friendly systems but I use Arch because I need recent versions and the anti-systemd arch-forks are harder to use. I'm a weak guy.

In short, as an user you should be fine by keeping normal Debian. If for political reasons you want a no systemd distro, the easiest is to use MX Linux with the default init.

Android uses a Linux kernel but the Android layer is not as transparent as Linux PC distros. As instance I have hard time to remove the bloat.

I customize the shell prompt in the PS1 variable. Its unpleasant to work with that unreadable language, but I do that once for years and I reuse it across distros.

There is a pacman command that prints the list of all packages installed by users. I don't remenber the command sorry but you'll find that here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks

Its probably "pacman -Qe".

Then it should be easy to create a script that install all that automaticcally. If your are cautious you should have a backup of your home anyway on some storage device .

I tried Alpine for a desktop installation. The package manager has surprisingly decent package set. And the performance is the best I found, for some reason applications starts faster. But I had to stop the experience because websites thats includes widevine didn't work. Its sad to say, but many softwares relies on non-standard glibc shit. With glibc instead of musl Alpine can be simply the best distro. If musl is not faster that glibc I don't think glibc will make Alpine slower.

4 month ago is not that bad for such a small project. Eww looks more active, but I don't have the patience to learn how to create a menu. Its way too DIY for me.

I frequently use Howl

Distraction free, command autocompletion, Vim-like control is optional. I learned most of the commands by just opening the mini buffer (alt-x) then tab to watch the autocompletion list.

Maybe MX attracts people who just want to use their computer easily. They are not interested in talking about their OS on the web.

Xfce reminds me how bad are modern softwares.

Xfce keeps an old design and the result is more flexible and fast than modern DEs. Whats wrong with nowadays developers ?

Is it possible to make it working on a today machine ? Even with a virtual machine ? Sorry for my ignorance.

Xfce is the Linux I appreciate. Its not made heavy for some opinionated features addition and setups are exposed to users.

There is also a place for DEs that are more opinionated and polished out of the box, its fine. But I'm glad composable things such as Xfce still exists.

For me the main config difficulty is from the statusbar. Polybar, Eww, are harder to config comparing to the WM. I solved that with Tint2 bar. It can be configured from an GUI, for the basics. The only code I added to config is simple.

execp_command = xdotool getwindowfocus getwindowname

It prints the window name on the bar. It is useful for bspwm windows.

Mint works and you can recommend it, but it is a mess with its two versions. The "normal" version is based on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is already an user friendly distro. Mint also has LMDE version, it makes more sense because directly based on a "rough" Debian, but it seems less popular.

My OS, shipped with the PC, became slow.

Flakes is still experimental. NixOS devs takes a bunch of time to release that. So most experienced users have enabled Flakes since years. Two different systems are available, which does not help ease of learning.

I can't use something else than bspwm.

UEFI looks like another over-complicated proprietary shit that make PC more and more locked.

The Alpine simplicity is attractive, but I failed to install it while keeping my /home partition. Setting this manually is beyond my skills.

Alpine was the most interesting for me. It goes against the tendency of complicating the systems. I have to use Arch because everything can work on that distro.

I'm not recommending non-systemd inits, but in a desktop usage, I never wrote a single script with MX Linux and Alpine. Their init system just works.

There is an option to display all widgets into a single window.

Everything audio needs Alsa including Pipewire.

I don't know the Windows state currently, but at the time I switched, I liked the following.

• Linux is just a kernel. The user can choose between different components. You'll see some hot discussions because of that. But user friendly distributions can do these choices for you.
• Linux is transparent. As an open source software its harder to harm user privacy.