This is where im at so far. Went with a headless devuan install and I just installed the dependencies for dwm and st and compiled those.
Just do artix. Most of the other options besides void suck. Specifically void with glibc. Don't waste your time on anything with musl if you want things to just work.
openbsd has issues on my hardware so thats a nonstarter. i tried it out today ran into too many hardware related issues
If you don't care about arch repos, and you want a slower release cycle. That would be when I would use void. The only pain point I've ran into with void was from them not packaging things I needed. Everything else has worked pretty well for me with void. And its been very stable.
Is the reason for wanting a slower release cycle the fact that Arch will just randomly push packages with breaking changes that you need to manually edit config files to sort out? If that's the only reason, you should be just fine to switch to Devuan testing or 'unstable' if you need newer software, because while that may be normal for Arch, it isn't normal.
yeah basically that. i may go unstable or testing but for this laptop devuan stable is probably fine
If you want things to Just Work(tm), PipeWire's your bet. Gets you rid of PulseAudio, but isn't that much better.
yeah i ended up with poopwire. i asked some other people this too and they said with browsers and audio you can only go so far.
I GOT THE BOOTLOADER(in embedded words this means the BIOS) semi running in QEMU.
idk if it hits your minimalist criteria but OpenMandriva may fit the bill. The devs are focused on avoiding the recent variants of retardation.
I've gotten so lazy that I update my Artix install only when
pacman -S starts throwing 404s because of how out-of-sync my local DB is. About once a month or two, approximately. Every update still goes smoothly, no conflicts or transaction failures.
The GNU crowd won't be fond of this but it's a good indicator that the distro has an active enough community to commit to weird engineering choices, which is pretty important in the Age of ChurnOpenMandriva homepage said:
i had that installed right before this and its kinda ok but one user was right i was actually looking for nonsystemd.
ive tried guix in the past its definitely not for me
sounds like it wasn't set up to use the right card. You need to have an a sound file that tells the system to use the one your system actually uses. by default it uses the 0 card. if that doesn't work, then it's probably the one that comes up as 1. But it depends on your hardware setup.
If you're going for a minimal install, definitely do iwd. It's the only one of those with a decent cli as far as I'm concerned. The only thing that makes connmancli (or whatever it's called) at least partially usable is it at least has tab completion so you don't have to hand type the entire long as string of numbers by hand that you need to input to connect to a network.
[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true
[Network]
NameResolvingService=resolvconf$ iwctl
[iwd] station wlan scan
[iwd] station wlan get-networks
[iwd] station wlan connect Your-network-name-here
It will prompt for your password at this point.
[iwd] exit
docker-compose is helpful insofar as giving me my first taste of "declarative" anything, but there's one critical issue with your recommendation: I haven't yet graduated from "Doom Emacs 101." If I'm gonna do anything in Guile Scheme, I'd ideally like to internalise the fundamentals instead of just treating Guile Scheme like Nix's in-house declarative language... or worse, using ChatGPT or Perplexity to give me the answers without imparting unto me the fundamentals. If you have any recommendations for Guile Scheme learning material, I'll gleefully take you up on your offer. That said: Guix System is probably gonna be firmly within the realm of QEMU if I ever give it a fair shake in the foreseeable future.