I’ve installed arch Linux and liked it, but lfs and Gentoo would be too time consuming compiling everything and not doing anything during and after install. Are there any distros like arch that don’t have me compiling everything?
A linux distro is a linux distro. It’s you, who invests the time to experiment and understand, who unlocks advanced features. There’s no shortcuts to learning Linux than to use it and read about it and install it many many times.
Exactly. You can use Ubuntu in a noobish way, or you can do crazy things with it. It’s not the tools, but the craftsman that makes the difference.
That said, distros each have a niche, so find the one that’s closest to the types of problems you want to solve. For example, if you’re making a kiosk, you’re probably better off pushing out your own images, so a distro that’s designed to build small images is probably desired over one that seeks to pack in every library and application under the sun.
If you don’t know what you want, pick something well supported and dig in to whatever interests you. Want to learn systemd? Pick a distro that uses it and write your own service files (e.g. maybe a Minecraft server, or perhaps synching). Want to learn to build software yourself? Grab a tarball from the project’s page instead of installing through the package manager. And so on. If you start from something unfamiliar, you’ll have to learn a lot of irrelevant things, which may not be what you want.
Define “advanced”.
Otherwise, just go with Debian, or Linux Mint
I like Alpine Linux. You could also try OpenBSD if you want a Unix that just works without as much struggle. NetBSD and FreeBSD are also around and have Linux binary compatibility.
Try Void
maybe nix with no de?
My personal journey was Arch > Void > Gentoo > Arch > Nix > Void again > realizing there’s nothing really like Arch and going back for good. Hope this helps!
nixos is a personal love of mine.
But it’s source-based (with a binary cache)
It takes like 10 seconds to install a package. Get benefits of Source based distros while still being fast af + No dependency hell
That binary cache means you don’t have to compile anything the distro provides. Same as any binary distro.
but with a simple
--substitute falseyou can make it compile on install. I love nixYes, or if you override something you’ll compile that thing and anything depending on it. If you override glibc, you’ll recompile pretty much the entire system!
true,
--substitute falsewill compile all dependencies, down to the compiler itself, but a simple (/s)nix-build " " [package] --checkwill compile just the chosen package, skipping dependencies, and compare it against the cached binary in the repo to ensure they’re equivalent.
I could have gotten that nix-build command slightly off as I’m typing this from memory. I am also saying most of this in jest as they aren’t really solutions to anything mentioned above and I moreso find them interesting features.
NixOS or GNU Guix are your best options for advanced distributions. Guix is a much newer project so theres a lot of ways you can contribute.
What’s the purpose? Which application do you have running on Linux that you think you need to compile everything, configure everything, and that will only run on an “advanced” distro?
Is it some high specialized clustered distributed high performance, high availability computing application where you need your own kernel tweaks in?
Or are you just a distro hopper, tinkering just for the sake of it and for imaginary bragging rights? If it’s for learning, try to establish a specific real goal and learn how to reach it.
Similar to arch in what way? What about arch don’t you like, you can look at other arch-based distros.
Most distributions have binary package managers anyways, so you won’t struggle to find some.
There isn’t anything about arch I specifically don’t like, I’d just like to see if there’s anything that’s better in a certain criteria I don’t yet know of.
Just enable flatpaks or install Pop_OS! and use only flatpaks.
What do you mean? Arch doesn’t have you “compiling everything”. It’s a mostly binary distribution. The Arch repositories are binary, and more than a few of the packages in the AUR are binary as well.
I’m also not following “not doing anything during and after install” - what do you mean by after install in that sentence?
I’d love to help, but I can’t figure out what your issue is. If you’re looking for something like Arch, but faster and easier to set up, try Endeavor - it’s basically Arch with a graphical installer and some neat extra tools.
I’d also suggest looking in to Void, since you don’t appear to be afraid of the command line. You’ll find it similar in approach to Arch, but everything is binary packages; there’s no compiling unless you grab dev tools and pull the source from Github or Codeberg or whatever yourself.
I’m also not following “not doing anything during and after install” - what do you mean by after install in that sentence?
I made the mistake of trying to pacman -S librewolf not realizing it was going to compile from source. An hour later (on my Ryzen 7 5800X) it wasn’t finished, so I killed it and installed librewolf-bin.
librewolf is not an official arch package it is in AUR. So you couldn’t have just typed pacman -S librewolf to compile it; and if you really wanted it without compiling libreworlf-bin.
You’re right, I used
yay. I usedpacmanto illustrate the point.
