Changeling Or The End Of?
Not only the title of an excellent song by the Doors, but also a nice descriptor of my mindset. After a month in the woods it's time for an update.
When it comes to Linux and its flavours, I've been changing a lot over the years. Part of the New Shiny Thing Syndrome, and also part of The Learning Experience. Curiosity didn't kill this cat and I've explored a lot during those times. And I'm very fortunate my job enables me to work with Linux on a daily basis.
Let's abbreviate 8 years: Mint-Arch-OpenSuse-Nix-Gentoo-Slackware, just to call out the main pillars. Yes, there's been a number of immutables, a tiny bit of Debian, a bit more of Void and some small steps into the BSD's. But I always came back to those roots.
And it has become more about community over the years. After ArchLabs and it's wonderful group of nutters I valued that a Linux or BSD needs some decent conversations and techie tips and encouragement, at least for me. I gotta gel with it, and what that is differs for everyone.
If you look for encouragement I gotta call out both the Nix as well as the FreeBSD communities. Might be a bit too much for some, but the enthusiasm is palpable. The small group of Slackware contributors I'm connected with is great also, and I wouldn't use it if it wasn't for them (I mean, a 13Gb base install goes against all my rules ;-)
So, where are we now?
Chimera Linux is the longest lasting newcomer so far; I really appreciate the small, well curated package set and some of their other features. Not for everyone, but definitely for me. I currently run their KDE, 3 weeks in it has been a pleasure.
There's always some Slackware, coupled with Jay Lanagan's projects. Started years ago with nwg-shell and hyprland, used his KDE for 2 years straight and now I'm in Slackware Tilers territory: mango, river and hyprland. Always bleeding edge and a great character to be connected with.
Then I'm also still into immutable's, with my NixOS configs and lately my own curated UBlue bootc image with Cosmic desktop. Atomics are always seen as blocking, closed off etc., but this tech allows you to make your own image, just how you want it. It empowers more than anything else, only NixOS comes close to that. Caveat is the CI/CD on GitHub, which I don't particularly like.
Because all this shiny stuff needs to be counter-balanced I recently installed just Slackware Current with dwm on a laptop. Over the years I've played around with dwm and it is just so goddamn good. And gives all power to you, the user. My dwm is like no one else's and I can just pick it up and install anywhere. I've mostly ran it on Gentoo, but Slackware is of course just as solid.
Last, but not least I've got that spare Nuc for the BSD's. I need to delve into hyprland on FreeBSD, I've used mango and river over there already and had tremendous feedback on my how-to's for installation of KDE on Wayland and the base install of FreeBSD. Absolutely an area to explore further!
The end of? I wouldn't say so. I might stick with this setup, ask me next year. Linux and the BSD's are still evolving and there are many very interesting and exciting things happening. Discussions and exchanges in my part of those woods still remain decent and respectful, the noise is staggering at times.
Nevertheless, curiosity will keep this bugger going. See y'all around!