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]
    16•3 months ago

    Also on modern firebreathers.

    I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

    I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

    I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

    • @[email protected]
      5•3 months ago

      Slackbuilds are really nice. Sbopkg lets you download queue files for each program, then automatically install necessary dependencies in the correct order, no matter if they’re available as packages or from source. Unfortunately, Slackware is so bare-bones out of the box that there are still pitfalls. For example, LibreOffice depends on avahi. And to successfully install that, you first need to create an avahi user and group, then install avahi, then write an init script that starts the avahi daemon and another one to stop it on shutdown.
      -Current is much too active for my personal taste. I run Slackware because I’m a lazy Slacker.
      The laziest approach to Slacking today is to install the default full install, then do:

      wget https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.2/sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz    #Download the Slackbuilds helper Sbopkg  
slackpkg install sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz                                                  #Install it  
sbopkg -r                                                                                        #Sync its local repository to Slackbuilds   
sqg -a                                                                                           #Build queue files (dependency info) for the repository
sbopkg -i flatpak                                                                                #Install Flatpak and its dependencies  
flatpak remote-add --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo                #Add the Flathub repo