I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…

And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.

So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?

  • @[email protected]
    22•3 months ago

    I daily drive Slackware.
    What drove me to it was curiosity. “How the fuck does a distro without dependency resolution even work? And why are people still using it?” As it turns out, it’s working very well actually. And I am now one of those people.
    I like to tinker and solve puzzles. Installing the most old-fashioned distro on a modern convertible laptop, then bashing it till it looks and feels modern was a fun puzzle.
    And it turned out to be a system I can daily drive on any device. Cause contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to hunt down dependencies manually every time you install something, that would be dumb. Once it’s set up, it’s actually very low maintenance and the knowledge I gained about its quirks will likely still be applicable in 10 years.

      • @[email protected]
        7•3 months ago

        For Slackware itself, you install all available software up front. That way, all dependencies are resolved.
        You then just hide the stuff you don’t need from your DE using its menu editor, or ignore it.
        During an update, the package manager updates all installed packages, installs all packages that were added to the repo and removes all packages that are obsolete.

        For additional software, there is a semi-official repo that’s very similar to Arch’s AUR.
        And like the AUR, it offers several helper scripts and additional package managers that do dependency resolution.
        Or you use Flatpaks.

        • @[email protected]
          8•3 months ago

          you install all available software up front.

          That’s unnecessary and inefficient, you can install a small subset and go from there.

          • @[email protected]
            4•3 months ago

            Until you start installing stuff from Slackpackages, whose dependency info assumes everything in the default install is there and doesn’t need mentioning.
            Or new packages are added to the repo which depend on something you didn’t install.

        • @[email protected]
          3•3 months ago

          How long do software updates take then, if you’re updating the entire software stack? I can imagine the answer being anywhere from “hours” to “same as the incremental software updates on other distros”

          • @[email protected]
            7•3 months ago

            There are very few updates. It’s more stable than Debian. And the repo isn’t huge, maybe twice the size of other distros default installed size.