@qbi Curious, that's almost a best-of list for me (I'd swap out ubuntu, at least since about 14.04, for #Gentoo, or even #exherbo). Maybe one of those I find non-attractive is right for you? #Mint, #Fedora, or #Nix, for example?

I might’ve already posted about this, but someone just reminded me of my achieving Linux enlightenment moment. Many years ago I was fascinated with more and more “advanced” distros and as one does at some point installed Arch Linux and I was talking to my father (IT-saur) about how it doesn’t do anything by default unless you tell it to and it’s so cool to set up my system exactly how I want relatively from scratch even if it sometimes takes some time and effort.

He responded that it seems kinda backwards, and that he remembers when some version of bash installer came out and if ran normally it would automatically detect everything and set up with sane defaults without any need for further tinkering. You run the installer, you get functional bash. And I suddenly realised he’s right; that was the future and I believe it’s still the way now, I’m all for customising my system as much as I want, but I’d like my software to install with sane defaults and presumptions and not require me to understand its inner workings and connections to other parts of the system just to be able to use it. Software should work for me and save me time and effort if I so desire.

This is something that Gentoo, Exherbo and especially NixOS do much better.

#linux #arch #gentoo #exherbo #nixos

@thelinuxcast #exherbo ?

Posting my #introduction as I am new to #fosstodon instance: I'm an enthusiastic user and supporter of #Linux since 1996, using #suselinux (daily driver) and #exherbo (for learning and programming).
I'm living in the southern part of Germany 🇩🇪, working in the automotive industry as a mechatronics engineer for 20 years. Besides my interest in all kinds of technology, I like to play classical guitar (beginner level) and like different cultures and food, as I like cooking as well.

I never actually wrote an #introduction on here. Mostly because I hate writing about myself like this. But here goes.

I'm a programmer and #freesoftware enthusiast. I've been using #linux as my main desktop and #emacs as my... everything... since 2008. I started off with a lot of distro hopping, my journey took me through #ubuntu, #fedora, #zenwalk, #gentoo, and #exherbo before settling on #archlinux, now with #guix on top.

@TheFake_VIP I’d like to have my #Exherbo and something like Ubuntu or Mint alongside each other so that for everyday use and geek stuff I can use Exherbo, and when I want to play Steam games or am struggling with something on Exherbo I can just switch to the “just works” system that every linux software supports. The problem is that using the same homedir introduces a bunch of problems with synchronising user IDs etc. Homed solves that.

Now if only btrfs driver for windows was production ready, I’d have all three systems for dealing with stubborn applications able to use the same filesystem to store shared stuff. Sadly, after it massacred my main data storage partition about a year ago I’m not ready to trust it.

@danyspin97 Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought #exherbo grew out of #gentoo? So is it completely separate now?

@danyspin97 That sound great, and part of what I didn't like about #gentoo. If it has a completely different way of distributing packages, then what is the *same* in #exherbo and #gentoo?

(I've come to think about a linux distro mainly as a package manager or package format, and a set of packages.)

@danyspin97 Maybe I was a bit too extreme. But the reason most programming languages have their own package managers is that conventional ones like apt/dpkg aren't flexible enough to keep up. What's different in #exherbo compared to #gentoo?