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2020-09-15
So... It's definitely been a while since I last took a look here, and I was able to catch-up with all of the new posts that interested me in about a couple minutes. Try doing that on the regular web. Ha!
Just look at how long my MOTD stayed the same!
So... I am an avid distro-hopper. If you give me a machine that can run Linux, expect it to go though an average of five distros per month.
Currently I am on my "main" machine, which is a huge beast, and also is the most comfortable setup I have. (Copying dotfiles over to a laptop, for example, just isn't the same)
That's why I'm always reluctant to distro-hop (or even just start fresh with the same distro) on this machine. But just recently my /interesting/ Gentoo USE flag combinations finally broke, and when you have to hold even a single package back for longer than a week, you know something's up.
Originally I planned my next distro to be NixOS, but trying it for a day or so it got me _really_ frustrated, where I would do the exact same thing as shown on every page of documentation, or answer, and it just didn't work. So while the concept is still intriguing to me, I doubt I'll use it any time soon.
So, I decided on using another distro. This time I knew what I was getting into, since I used it every now and then since March or so: KISS Linux
KISS is a quite neat distro. It's source-based like Gentoo, but unlike Gentoo it's _very_ minimal. The initial rootfs tarball is ~30 MBs, compared to Gentoo's ~200 MBs, and when installed you don't get as much as Gentoo (or any Linux distro, for that matter) would give you. You have Busybox, a C toolchain, a package manager, and a couple other tools should you wish to install them. And all of those are getting more and more stripped-down, removing features that result in additional dependencies.
Of course, because it's so minimal, you might want some extra features enabled. In that case, you will have to copy a package and edit the build script to enable it. Or in some other cases simply rebuilding packages with the required dependencies installed will automatically enable said features¹. And since the package manager is a shell script (did I mention the package manager is written in POSIX sh), you can symlink away the unmodified bits of your packages and pass the actual update checking bit to the original package maintainer, and the system will just deal with it.
Just check it out if you're interested. I quite like it.
Did you know, that up until today, I always copy-pasted the subscript number characters (⁰¹²...) by hand whenever I wanted to add a footnote? Well, I figured out that there must be a better way to do this, so I searched it up.
In Vim, you can use `<Ctrl-K> <num><Shift-S>` (in insert mode) to insert a superscript <num>. Remove the <Shift> for subscript.
There's also `<C-K> <Shift-M>y` to write the "µ" symbol I use in the titles of these posts, which I just copy-paste from the previous one anyway as a template of sorts.
Use `:dig` to get a list of every one of them. Now I just need a way to use them outside Vim...
1: And the package manager keeps track of any additional dependencies by ~~black magic~~ checking all binaries with ldd.
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