Update: Thank you all for your kind and quick responses! I installed Void and antiX and cruised around in them a little. I ended up defaulting back to Artix in the end. The hardware issues with the NIC seem to have gotten resolved. Whatever toxicity and bigotry is present among their larger demographic, I’m going to spread as much light and love as possible. That is, until I switch OS again. 🤣

I have literally never whined about distros before. I went through some Debian based ones, some Arch based one and also installed a base version of Gentoo.

I am most fond of Arch, but after trying Artix, I found that I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

In addition to the latest Artix making my NIC unrecognized by the OS, the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia. This is as good as any opportunity for me to finally ask the question to the world wide web:

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T480 on which I want to use mpv to play video. What Linux flavor do you recommend for a non desktop setup? I looked briefly at Slackware, but it seemed somewhat prepackaged, as opposed to configured by me.

  • dragospirvu75@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 hours ago

    If you want a Free Software Foundation recommend distro, I would say Trisquel or PureOS (if you don’t need wi-fi). Or Linux Mint. Or Debian with Mate or Cinnamon desktop environment.

  • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Update: Thank you all for your kind and quick responses! I installed Void and antiX and cruised around in them a little. I ended up defaulting back to Artix in the end. The hardware issues with the NIC seem to have gotten resolved. Whatever toxicity and bigotry is present among their larger demographic, I’m going to spread as much light and love as possible. That is, until I switch OS again. 🤣

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.ml
    4·
    11 hours ago

    AntiX is “proudly antifascist,” so unlikely to allow transphobia on their forums. It offers runit, sysVinit, dinit, s6-rc and s6-66 as its init systems. AntiX-core is the stripped-down system that lets you start from pretty close to scratch, so you get to mostly configure it yourself. It’s based on Debian, and the sister distro of MXLinux, so it’s guaranteed to work on older hardware. It’s super lightweight and doesn’t tax my Flex 2 (which isn’t exactly powerful hardware)

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    2·
    10 hours ago

    Alpine seems to tick your boxes. Or maybe AntiX?
    Except if you want to experiment/develop on there too, then maybe Void, if you’re fed up with Artix/Arch.

  • FukOui@lemmy.zip
    2·
    10 hours ago

    I see this question a lot. The old me would’ve used whatever Stallman / the FSF recommends.

    My take now is just use whatever gets the job done. Ubuntu, fedora, debian, etc. I would recommend stable bleeding edge distros like fedora

  • f3nyx@lemmy.ml
    3·
    17 hours ago

    hey printf. just wanted to drop in and say its been really cool to follow your Linux journey. I don’t have suggestions for you, but please keep it up.

    can I ask: what is it about OpenRC that you like? I personally haven’t tried artix yet (for personal use i’m on arch) so I’m not familiar with the differences.

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Thank you so much for your kind comment! It made me smile!😊 Never realized that my Linux journey is being “watched”, so I’m kind of blushing from unexpected self-consciousness 🤣

      I have no knowledge of the inner workings of OpenRC, but what I like from just having used it a few months is the fact that I understand the “architecture”? How there are system scripts and user scripts, how they belong to run levels. Also, this of course depends heavily on one’s specific setup, but I have a smaller pstree on a fresh install with OpenRC than what I had with systemd.

      With that said, I am going to look into “simply” switching to OpenRC on Arch down the road, since I have been on Arch for many years now.

  • throwaway403@programming.dev
    9·
    1 day ago

    I am most fond of Arch

    But what is it that you like about Arch in the first place?

    I found that I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

    Like, do you want to limit your options to distros that are well supported by OpenRC? Or, is this simply a preference kind of thing?

    the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia

    Do you want to engage in distro-specific forums or was your engagement in there mostly out of necessity?

    as opposed to configured by me.

    Excellent, so you’re a builder/tinkerer that prefers a clean slate to work from.

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      But what is it that you like about Arch in the first place? The ability to keep it small and customize from there. Going basically kernel + base (which includes some packages I remove afterwards anyway).

      Like, do you want to limit your options to distros that are well supported by OpenRC? Or, is this simply a preference kind of thing? I’m not well versed enough in OpenRC to understand what a distro that has “bad” support for it looks like, but I did find it easy to understand it’s layout/directories and the syntax of its scripts.

      Do you want to engage in distro-specific forums or was your engagement in there mostly out of necessity? I was investigating whether a certain thread had been closed to the public, requiring sign-up, or not.

      Excellent, so you’re a builder/tinkerer that prefers a clean slate to work from. Yes. Litterally, give me CLI and I’ll take it from there. xD

      • throwaway403@programming.dev
        6·
        1 day ago

        Alright, excellent. Thank you for the reply!

        So, IIUC, you want a clean slate. Furthermore, you want plenty of tinkerability. And, finally, OpenRC enjoys a preference.

        Still, I want to limit our search (for now) to (relatively) upstream distros on which OpenRC is known to work pretty well. We have to start our search from somewhere and this seems to be the most sensible starting point at this point.

        If you’ve dismissed Artix, that basically leaves us (in alphabetical order) with:

        • Alpine
        • Debian
        • Devuan
        • Gentoo

        IIRC, most (if not all) of these offer very minimal images. So, hopefully you’ll enjoy those.

        Thankfully, these are meaningfully different from eachother (for the most part). So choosing between these shouldn’t be too much to ask.

        FWIW, Gentoo comes undoubtedly with the least amount of defaults and thus behaves the most like a blank slate.

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

    this community is dominated by the systemd fanboys and you will be punished accordingly for your heresy. lol

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      this community is dominated by the systemd fanboys

      Hey now. There’s dozens of us who had that thing force fed for us. I’ve been on Debian for decades, so even if I don’t really like systemd it’s the lesser evil than switching a distro to something without it.

      • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I’m going to go w devuan because of the age verification pre-compliance that systemd is doing

        • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          Meh. As long as it’s a local only field on /etc/passwd or whatever I don’t really care. Actually I’d be for it if browsers and other internet-thingies could send rough idea of users age to the services. Not actual age, but something like child/teen/adult -scale. That would make it super simple to reputable services to block underaged users and parents could set that to their kids accounts as they see fit.

          But obviously the surveillance tool “they” are building is something totally different where the age is actually verified via some online service. For that I’m strictly against and if that becomes mandatory on Debian or whatever distro I’ll start my own with blackjack and hookers if nothing else is available.

  • GooeyGlob@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Since you know Debian, Devuan is there to try it. Given how almost unavoidable systemd is nowadays I basically try all of Devuan, Artix, Void and the first one that works for the task at hand is the one I stick to :)

  • greco@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 day ago

    I know you are asking for Linux, but if you like OpenRC, why not try one of the BSDs, specifically FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

    If you still want Linux, NixOS or an immutable Linux sound fun.

      • provectus@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

        BSD actually heavily inspired crux, arch, and gentoo. The aur and portage were inspired by BSD ports. Now of course, I do not know which BSD did the inspiration.

      • greco@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 day ago

        Both, in the best way. BSDs have strength in that the whole OS is in a single code tree, as opposed to the Linux kernel and GNU toolset being different orgs altogether. This makes the OS feel more tightly integrated with itself. More intentional.

        You end up with a good set of sane defaults, but still the flexibility to chose what components you want to install.

        FreeBSD particularly has the ports tree and good linux compatibility to extend it where needed.

        Both have great documentation that will help you get acclimated to the differences between Linux and BSD.

    • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      1 day ago

      I use Alpine Linux for my two Rasberry Pi servers and for my laptop with Sway. I enjoy it a lot. The setup scripts are quite nice to work with.

      Documentation is decent but I found myself supplementing the Alpine wiki with the Gentoo and Arch wikis.

      Building a system from the minimal starting point felt quite rewarding and I really enjoy tinkering with it still. Learning to script for ash has been quite the experience too.