Hibby

Slackware may not be huge, but it is the base distro for Unraid.

Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian “Red Hat is actually good” train.

Bobbi Flekman confronted the sexism in the Spinal Tap album “Smell the Glove” back when she worked artist relations for Polymer Records in 1982. She has known for years that “Money talks, and bullshit walks”

While Arch does allow a user to do a lot, including breaking their system, I would note that it’s not a herculean task to build and run a stable machine. I broke my Arch system a few times by going against best-practices and it did teach me about some risks, but I knew exactly what I did and why it broke every time. It taught me how to quickly recover, which is good to know for any OS.

I’d call myself an intermediate enthusiast and I don’t have a career that uses Linux, but I have never found Arch “hard”. It just takes some reading and a little patience. The Arch Wiki has a majority of the answers, but if you have tried and failed to find the answer you need, the community is extremely savvy and are there to help you. They just prefer you to dig into the wiki and try for yourself before asking for help.

For desktop Linux, I use Arch. It’s a community driven base distribution, so the needs of the community are what drives development and there are no financial decisions of a company that get priority, which is refreshing. It also has access to the latest and greatest that Linux has to offer.

They have a philosophy of expecting basic effort from users and to have a tinkering mindset. Historically, Arch devs and users have a reputation of being grumpy greybeards, but many of the rough edges have been rounded off in the last few years. If you are willing to do a bit of reading or watching some YouTube videos, it’s not really that hard.

You can really build a lean and powerful machine that has just the software you want on the system with Arch. All it takes is a little effort and willingness to ask for help from the community after you have tried and failed to solve problems yourself. It’s really not the badge of elitism to use Arch in 2023. It’s never been easier to use and doesn’t blow up on you nearly as often as the reputation implies. Just use good hygiene and make snapshots so if you blow it up, it’s only a 5 minute recovery.

If all else fails with others’ comments, try your public library. Seriously.