aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”

once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:

• deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
• switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
• playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
• bypassing the package manager (especially installing with curl | sudo sh)
• changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”

comparing a distro release to a new game release

• pay a LinuxGem each time you open a terminal
• Flatpak is only available as a paid DLC
• use your LinuxGems to purchase randomized LootContainers with a chance of winning a Jellyfin install

(Chris Titus Tech getting blowback last year marking a whole group of distros as “Pointless” when they did nothing more than a reskin or pre-install a couple in-repo packages)

why have menus covering stuff up when you can just use keybinds?

(completely sidetracked here – there’s a reason Dirk Hohndel (and Linus) decided to go with Qt instead of GTK)

still in the setup phase and running LabWC rather than a full desktop – but actually rather enjoying it and have been stumbling across a lot of cases finding out that even with a GUI installed, terminal programs do just as good a job if not better than their graphical counterparts (ex. I don’t think I’ll ever be a full vim/emacs convert, but for basic text editing, nano does just as well as mousepad/leafpad/featherpad/xed/gedit)

doas apk -iU upgrade

don’t really have a favorite – started with Thunderbird a long time ago but switched over to webmail fairly early on

now that I’ve started to build a new system, I started to look around at the various options (and maybe getting off webmail or at least having local storage “backup”) – the standard GUI clients (Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, BlueMail, Mailspring) seem to be … fine – but none of them really stand out

recently stumbled across some nice screenshots of aerc and the idea sounds really appealing, but I’ve never had any contact with terminal email programs and found out they’ve followed a completely different evolutionary path than GUI apps (even terminology has diverged between the two) – GUI apps keep trying to be an all-in-one (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, …) whereas terminal programs almost seem to to favor a “balkanization” of effort – aerc looks like it’s grabbed a middle-ground, you can run it as standalone or go all in with a fully customized setup – problem I’m running into is I can find lots of “how” guides, but very little in the “what” or “why” side of things …

• Alpine Linux: Immutable root with atomic upgrades (wiki article, not an official how-to)
• Alpine Linux: Alpine Local Backup (lbu) (run everything in memory)

nano -m <file> or set mouse in your nanorc

and sometimes you just need a text editor, not an entire thesaurus

as others have mentioned, a window manager is one component of a desktop environment – under ideal conditions, a desktop environment collects and integrates a whole set of packages (both primary and supporting), unifying functional aspects as well as look-and-feel – whereas people starting with a window manager add in tools where working for them takes priority over working with other tools

• minimizing your desktop environment
  • Gnome and KDE
  • Xfce
  • LXDE and LXQt
• tiling extensions to existing desktops
  • Pop Shell, Tiling Shell, PaperWM for Gnome
  • (I know KDE has an equivalent, don’t know what it’s called)
  • can get simple half- and quarter-tiling in Xfce just through hotkeys
• switching out window managers in existing desktop environments
  • LXDE typically used Openbox
  • LXQt is pretty much window manager agnostic – distros commonly add Openbox, KWin or Xfwm – Tsujan seems favorable towards LabWC
  • Regolith packages a Gnome desktop with either i3 (Xorg) or Sway (Wayland) as the window manager
• starting with a window manager
  • can either start straight from tty or rely on a desktop manager
    • supporting apps usually handled by whatever autostart feature the window manager provides
  • stacking/floating – most traditional choice is often Openbox (Xorg) but looks like LabWC (Wayland) is continuing its legacy
  • tiling
    • tiling window managers tend to rely a LOT more on keyboard hotkeys and less on mouse usage
    • Xorg – HUGE selection, all down to how much work you want to put in and how large a community there is to help you out
    • Wayland – currently at the top are Sway (continuing i3’s tradition) and River (trying to grab the Awesome fans)
  • getting a window manager up and running is only one part of the equation
    • obvious next steps include choosing a file manager, an image viewer, a document reader, a video player, a web browser
    • less obvious is the behind-the-scenes apps – seat management, policy kit, clipboard handling, notifications, app launchers, desktop manager

such a weird dichotomy in Windows – secure kernel space and privacy-nightmare user space … “we’re the only ones allowed to steal your data”

NOT a fork of Linux, but Redox is aiming for a Unix-like OS based on Rust – but even with “source compatibility” with Linux/BSD and drivers being in userspace, my guess would be hardware drivers are still going to be a big speed bump

Firefox *might* be *thinking* about bringing back webapps: How can Firefox create the best support for web apps on the desktop?

another vote for Lua – lua5.4 is available for all 8 Alpine architectures, tiny installed size (120–200 kB) (and Alpine package only installs two files)

and not Zilla Slab (which even had an opentype feature to replace “Mozilla” with “Moz://a”)

doesn’t help when you have “Arch BTW” types that like the mystique that myth gives them

Stage 1 Gentoo installs