I feel like a crack dealer right now, but, have you heard of Linux from Scratch?
I get what you mean with build it yourself, but Arch is more or less like a lego kit. LFS is the material manifestation of the concept of madness. I did it once, it was fun, it was crazy, I don’t want to ever do it again. Afterwards I immediately switched my main machine from Arch to Mint. I have a deeper understanding of how an OS works under the hood now, and a strong appreciation for the work put forth by distro maintainers. All I want now is a system that works straight away. I no longer want to build myself anything. Tinkering is a hobby, I need a working tool. Today I use Bazzite and all my tinkering is devoted to how can I make rare old games run on Linux. It’s the difference between buying a chair and taking up carpentry as a hobby.
I have learned of Linux from Scratch. I love the idea of it. I have sunk my teeth into learning a bit about it. I have dabbled; but never made huge progress on it.
Oh absolutely, Arch was my entry way to a deeper understanding. While I can and do compile packages myself, and pick and choose different parts of my system; it isn’t the same as doing it from scratch.
I have tried a few Atomic Distros, and they just aren’t my thing. Even my steam deck I switched to cachyos because I didn’t want to change my behavior in how I interact with my OS.
Luckily as far as something just working; my Arch install is set and forget. I just update regularly and everything continues to work. I have not had to troubleshoot really anything.
For my usecase, I am running Arch with Limine on a luks encrypted btrfs drive with snapper and tools to sync snapshots to limine. Add in a few other tweaks, probably more I have forgotten about. And I have my perfect system.
But eventually I will delve further into LFS.
And that is just my desktop. I also have a separate arch install for my laptop. Then I have multiple servers I run various distros on. Fedora Server, Raspberry Pi OS. And I even have a test machine I use to test drive other distros and use to install packages I want to test before implementing into my current system.
Atomic and immutable is a game changer for IT. It is essentially bulletproof, everything is containerized, packages run very little risk of breaking the system. But, it is still just as customizable and flexible in the ways that matter, the user experience. It is fine to be opinionated about particular modules and pieces on your own system, but that means turning into a sys admin, I was a sys admin when I was paid to do it, it left me with no desire to do sys admin. Now I just let it rip, but still have the knowledge to tinker when and if I want to, it’s no longer mandatory. Really appreciate that nowadays.
For example, a recent Bazzite update was busted in a particular way such that my laptop wouldn’t boot. No problem, rollback fearlessly to a previous system image, and wait with a perfectly working machine. Two weeks later, someone else figured it out, fixed it, pushed it into stable, and now the laptop updates and boots the new image without issues. No need to meddle with snapper or limine myself. The OS itself is its own snapshot system already built-in, with minimal down time and zero risk of data loss.
Every once in a while I get the itch to tinker with something, but it is aimed at clear and specific projects in my homelab and not at just running a basic functional desktop.
Oh there are absolutely benefits to using an Atomi distro. However, for someone such as myself where I am constantly modifying my systems it doesn’t make a lot of sense. For an end user that I would deploy an OS for it would make for easier support of their system. Like, if I were to get my mother to use Linux, I would choose an Atomic distro. And make it painless for me to support. She wouldn’t do much customization that would require the same level of flexibility I would need for myself.
By trade I am a sys admin. So it’s an easy thing for me to do for myself. I do sys admin work by day, and by night. The difference between the two is that for work I am shackled to the likes of Microsoft products. And by night, I am admin over a system that I love. So it’s easily separatable for me. But I get it, you do something all day, you may not want to do it all night too.
Which, all this discussion brings to me one of my favorite thing about Linux. It can be built and used for such a wide variety of use cases, wants and needs. Not being locked into one way of using it is beautiful.
I built a LFS system in the 1990s. It was cool and informative but I decided to switch to Gentoo to ease my compilation pain. Eventually I switched to Debian after waiting a day for KDE and Star Office to build in on day. 😅
I feel like a crack dealer right now, but, have you heard of Linux from Scratch?
I get what you mean with build it yourself, but Arch is more or less like a lego kit. LFS is the material manifestation of the concept of madness. I did it once, it was fun, it was crazy, I don’t want to ever do it again. Afterwards I immediately switched my main machine from Arch to Mint. I have a deeper understanding of how an OS works under the hood now, and a strong appreciation for the work put forth by distro maintainers. All I want now is a system that works straight away. I no longer want to build myself anything. Tinkering is a hobby, I need a working tool. Today I use Bazzite and all my tinkering is devoted to how can I make rare old games run on Linux. It’s the difference between buying a chair and taking up carpentry as a hobby.
I have learned of Linux from Scratch. I love the idea of it. I have sunk my teeth into learning a bit about it. I have dabbled; but never made huge progress on it.
Oh absolutely, Arch was my entry way to a deeper understanding. While I can and do compile packages myself, and pick and choose different parts of my system; it isn’t the same as doing it from scratch.
I have tried a few Atomic Distros, and they just aren’t my thing. Even my steam deck I switched to cachyos because I didn’t want to change my behavior in how I interact with my OS.
Luckily as far as something just working; my Arch install is set and forget. I just update regularly and everything continues to work. I have not had to troubleshoot really anything.
For my usecase, I am running Arch with Limine on a luks encrypted btrfs drive with snapper and tools to sync snapshots to limine. Add in a few other tweaks, probably more I have forgotten about. And I have my perfect system.
But eventually I will delve further into LFS.
And that is just my desktop. I also have a separate arch install for my laptop. Then I have multiple servers I run various distros on. Fedora Server, Raspberry Pi OS. And I even have a test machine I use to test drive other distros and use to install packages I want to test before implementing into my current system.
Atomic and immutable is a game changer for IT. It is essentially bulletproof, everything is containerized, packages run very little risk of breaking the system. But, it is still just as customizable and flexible in the ways that matter, the user experience. It is fine to be opinionated about particular modules and pieces on your own system, but that means turning into a sys admin, I was a sys admin when I was paid to do it, it left me with no desire to do sys admin. Now I just let it rip, but still have the knowledge to tinker when and if I want to, it’s no longer mandatory. Really appreciate that nowadays.
For example, a recent Bazzite update was busted in a particular way such that my laptop wouldn’t boot. No problem, rollback fearlessly to a previous system image, and wait with a perfectly working machine. Two weeks later, someone else figured it out, fixed it, pushed it into stable, and now the laptop updates and boots the new image without issues. No need to meddle with snapper or limine myself. The OS itself is its own snapshot system already built-in, with minimal down time and zero risk of data loss.
Every once in a while I get the itch to tinker with something, but it is aimed at clear and specific projects in my homelab and not at just running a basic functional desktop.
Oh there are absolutely benefits to using an Atomi distro. However, for someone such as myself where I am constantly modifying my systems it doesn’t make a lot of sense. For an end user that I would deploy an OS for it would make for easier support of their system. Like, if I were to get my mother to use Linux, I would choose an Atomic distro. And make it painless for me to support. She wouldn’t do much customization that would require the same level of flexibility I would need for myself.
By trade I am a sys admin. So it’s an easy thing for me to do for myself. I do sys admin work by day, and by night. The difference between the two is that for work I am shackled to the likes of Microsoft products. And by night, I am admin over a system that I love. So it’s easily separatable for me. But I get it, you do something all day, you may not want to do it all night too.
Which, all this discussion brings to me one of my favorite thing about Linux. It can be built and used for such a wide variety of use cases, wants and needs. Not being locked into one way of using it is beautiful.
I built a LFS system in the 1990s. It was cool and informative but I decided to switch to Gentoo to ease my compilation pain. Eventually I switched to Debian after waiting a day for KDE and Star Office to build in on day. 😅