If this is in the wrong community let me know, but I have been away from linux for a little while now, and I have decided to come back to it. I am trying to figure out what Distro and Desktop environment I should use.
I used to use Ubuntu and, Ubuntu based Distributions, though for various reasons I had bad experiences with the ones based down stream of Ubuntu, I have also heard that Ubuntu is no longer nearly as good as they where before. As for desktop Experences, I never really liked Gnome. That being said from what I can tell there has been quite a bit that has changed sense I left, and any recommendations would be much appreciated.
over the years, i went from ububtu/debian stuff too arch to gentoo and now i use alpine for the musl-libc benefit vs. glibc
for a wm, have stuck to i3-gaps/rofi setup for quite a while, with no bar and no dm. simple and resource efficient custom setup
i did check out a lot of other os’s at some point, just poking around distrowatch, theres some cool new stuff
theres been a lot of development surrounding nixos and especially nixshell that is being used for a lot. can use nixshell and its benefits outside of nixos as well
if you are interested in declarative configuartion like nixos, guix is doing very cool stuff with the guile scheme language. very cool how it comes together, very much like emacs
Do you run Alpine on bare metal or in a VM?
its a hand-me-down laptop i got from someone like ten years ago
Do you use it for anything graphical, or just for the terminal?
xorg runs on it fine enough on its own. the laptop struggles with anything more intensive tho, like ff or even just running a gba emulator. can’t play anything past a gba game. use the terminal for as much as i can (urxvt ftw!)
(ff?) I wonder how much of that is due to missing drivers (etc.) for Alpine and how much is just the hardware being old
modern browsers are super resource intensive, they just got so bloated, and do so much. just dont have enough ram or cpu clock speed to do better. there’s no driver issues with alpine, drivers are a standard outside of any os thats really simple to bring in. the laptop is from, like, 2007 (?), it was a windows vista oem laptop
They really are incredibly bloated. Even the less popular graphical ones still have to use a massive browser engine like WebKit to support modern websites
(also, just realized that “ff” meant Firefox)
what do you think is the benefit of libc over glibc? Genuine question, since that’s not something I consider.
link to musl-libc website, the about page goes over why a little more clearly
tldr: musl-libc aims to be safer, more correct, and more efficient. there are criticisms of glibc that it has become bloated and not properly managed, leading to classes of exploits and inefficiencies which are really difficult to address due to regression/compatibility/r&d resources available to the project.
the down side of using a musl-libc system is that most applications are only really built for glibc, and much software require patching. the alpine dev team has put in a lot of work to get things like firefox into the repositories. there is also slightly less software available. makes it difficult to explore new projects on your own that require glibc because you will have to gain a higher level understanding of the difference in the toolchain, and how to patch things on your own. then there’s no convenience to use tools with proprietary blobs, like, if you need zoom software for some reason.
with that being said, i have been using alpine for almost a year now (about?), and i really love it. if a type of malware is compiled with glibc toolchain, it won’t work on this system :). it’s been fun to explore, and i learned some cool things from it