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@gamma, @ibaniento: paradoxically, I just tried FreeBSD for a couple of months. While I loved the minimalism, I gave up because it was just too hard to use it as my main machine. Connecting to WIFI, attaching backup drives, dealing with ZFS (which I theoretically like but never again), and an incompatible-with-linux set of kernel calls and ABIs made it just too painful and I went back to Xubuntu, and then noticed this fucklery.
So I think I want to stick with Linux for now, but a minimal one.
Jan 20 · 2 months ago
Ah, OK. Definitely look into Alpine, or perhaps Void. Alpine is extremely lightweight (it was originally designed for servers) but has a good desktop experience via community contributions. I don't have much experience with Void but it seems to be well-liked among its users and is also known to be lightweight.
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 20 at 22:17:
@gamma: thanks. I am also curious about Manjaro - although it's a rolling distro, the strength of the Arch community is tempting...
Manjaro is a solid distro if you want things to "just work" but I wouldn't call it lightweight. Generally speaking, distros that are built on top of others (like Manjaro or Ubuntu) are going to include "extras" that distinguish them from the base distro. These "extras" often end up being unnecessary bloat.
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 21 at 03:33:
@gamma, when you say bloat do you mean just extra software taking up disk space (not a dealbreaker) or running processes, polluted file system, and impossible-to-reason-about initialization?
Both. Manjaro uses systemd (same as Arch). The default install also includes a lot of stuff that you might want to remove. In my opinion the installer should ask before installing things like cups, audio servers, avahi, etc. I understand the "user friendly" argument behind including that stuff by default, but I get tired of uninstalling things after a fresh install.
I do want to emphasize that I'm an atypical user though in terms of minimalism. Manjaro is a decent distro, especially for beginners who want to experiment with an Arch-based distro or people who just need a functioning distro to quickly slap onto some supported hardware for whatever reason.
Ubuntu Pro: WTF? — I've been using XUbuntu for over a decade now, I think... Mostly OK, my main complaint was that it's getting bigger than I am comfortable with - way too many processes running that I cannot explain, etc... But it appears that it is hoding back released updates of opensource software unless I pay them, or at least register (why?) as an individual. I think it's time for me to go to a simpler distro that is not collecting personal information.