The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

I’m case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

Can you be more specific?

Sure.

I’ve had discussions about my impression that Rust’s build chain can be a bit surly compared to other popular languages.

I don’t particularly mean it as a criticism - of course Rust’s security enforcement comes with more warnings and errors.

But the novel part of the interactions, for me, was Rust community members coming at me with ‘well get gud, newbie’.

These interactions are particularly ironic, given my experiences and specialties. I’m an old school veteran software developer. I have spent over half of my career in dedicated Cybersecurity roles.

These conversations converted me from a mildly interested Rust proponent into a casual Rust critic.

I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

Heh.

I do think the worst thing going for Rust, right now, is the Rust community.

It feels like few specific jackasses from the Java community made the jump to Rust, and no one had the sense to slap them with a newspaper.

Spot on. And I’ve found it’s even that bad at small companies too, if the company is more than five years old.

Maybe because I tried to follow MS’s “use your own distro” instructions instead of using something prepackaged?

Not op, and I don’t care about systemd, but…

When I’ve used anything I wanted to substantially modify, I’ve followed the “use your own distro” instructions. In the past I’ve done this because WSL had a strong assumption of exactly one copy of each distro, and I like to abuse it for more.

Overall, I’ve had a better time with the the “bring your own distro” instructions. But some of my experiences with WSL were before they even got the Windows Store installer working correctly.

More recently, I recall Windows Store being fine for stock Ubuntu and for stock Debian. But I didn’t find the “bring your own distro” instructions to be much trouble, either. My perhaps faulty memory is that it took maybe ten minutes, last time I used them.

So why are you advising to change the default install of Debian to include it?

I didn’t advice any such thing. My edit is just to acknowledge someone else who makes it part of their process.

Citation needed.

I shared my personal experience and you turned it into a distro war. Go look up your own damn sources.

Pretty sure this is either personal opinion or anti-canonical, anti-snap ideology.

Fuck yes. It’s both! Snap is a slap in the face to the contributors who brought Canonical this far. I appreciate their partnership so far, and now, speaking as a package maintainer, Canonical can fuck right off.

Targeting WSL users with this rhetoric is ridiculous.

Helping people make an informed decision about their tool chain is rhetoric? Give me a fucking break.

I don’t like Ubuntu. That’s not a secret. Ubuntu is a fine option for total newbies. People using WSL tend not to be total newbies and may well run into real issues (such as the ones that prompted me to switch), thanks to snap.

I mean, I didn’t read terribly closely, because I already made my choice.

My reason is that the benefits of Ubuntu over Debian are most noticeable in the GUI, which WSL doesn’t contain.

In contrast, I find the benefits of Debian over Ubuntu to be most noticeable on the command line, which is all we get in WSL anyway.

To me this is some solid advice that I already knew.

I think there’s also a fair assumption by the author that anyone running WSL isn’t a total Linux newbie. I personally, think of WSL as an intermediate skill level way to run Linux, because WSL is still - frankly - a huge pain in the ass, when contrasted with trying out a bootable USB drive, and then only gives the command line, which is also a very limited way to experience Linux. (I think it will get better, but today WSL is not a way that I recommend to newbies to try out Linux.)

That’s a fair enough reason. I personally never noticed because the “this isn’t running” message is pretty clear to me. But I can see how that’s a potential blocker for newer Linux users.

All the answers are going to assume WSL is using Ubuntu.

Every recipe that I have ever encountered for Ubuntu worked on Debian, except the recipes involving Snaps, which were inevitably much simpler on Debian. And I haven’t seen anything useful under WSL (cli tools) packaged better as a snap anyway.

Why do Linux advocates try so desperately to overcomplicate things?

Computers are complicated. Linux advocates just aren’t being paid to lie about it.

In this case, this is a simple 7 character (edit: plus a (optional) one line command to enable systemd) change that can save a newbie a lot of trouble, and comes with no downside. the downside that systemd isn’t enabled by default. (Edit: a good point made below.)

There’s very few cases where Debian and Ubuntu are different at on the command line (which WSL is). In those very few cases, anyone using WSL is going to have a much better time on Debian, because they’re more likely to find a working recipe.

The exact reasons for this are nuanced, but come down - folks liked me publishing recipes don’t target Ubuntu anymore, because I wasn’t (as a package maintainer) invited to the Snap party. Which is fine. Flatpak does the same job, in an open way.

So for the 98% of recipes that predate Snap, there’s no difference to be had as a user. For the cutting edge 2% of new stuff, newbies are increasingly better off on Debian.

(Edit: In case anyone was wondering, I really, personally, don’t like Ubuntu, because it has Snaps. I’m aware that makes me a meme.

Snaps are bad for the community, and bad for the user.

Some of us understand why, and do our best to mention it politely, every so often, to save our peers a headache or two.

That said, folks who need hand-held through the specifics of why Snap sucks would do better asking elsewhere. I am famously old and irritable.)

“if you’re a Linux expert, this article isn’t for you. You’re probably already using Debian if you use WSL”

As a Linux expert - yep! My distro choice under WSL is Debian, for the same reasons shared in the article.

// portability

Gave me the giggles. I’ve helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

as long as you write it for yourself, you re good. As soon as you want to share it, you have a problem

A perfect summary of the history of computer code!

For many years malicious PDF files had the shameful honor of being the number one way people’s PCs got infected, and it’s because of bullshit like this.

“Surprise, here’s some Java code to execute on your personal computer without asking!” isn’t being done by anyone who is actually your ally.

We’re just discussing how shitty a shitty person has been toward you, at this point. There’s no good pro-social reason to deliver you an app while calling it a document.

Do we think it’s a virus? Probably not, but maybe. So we think there’s a tracker? Certainly. The average organization shitty enough to build or use this technology layer has over 500 separate relationships with companies that track you.

Someone tried to put a tracker in this PDF.

Whether people like me made it too hard for them is up for analysis.

I guarantee you that someone tried.

They’re not good enough at hiding this stuff yet, to feel confident lying about it, so it likely is disclosed in the fine print somewhere, if you’re feeling patient enough to read all of it.

I love it! Thanks for letting me know.

I’ve found that mapping a big dumb button to “Enter” works nicely for adding drama when invoking a big old batch script process.

This is terrific. More folks would be more excited if they realized how much less hassle Podman is than Docker.

That makes sense. Did you also set the path to Nvim in settings.json? I had to do so to clear at least one error.

I also sometimes get that “disconnected” error too, but the have it work fine. I think there’s a race condition and it raises the error right after it starts, but then connects anyway, once everything else is set.

I saw an error like that, too. (Also with the flatpak.)

I want to say I had an error in my init.vim that was the underlying cause, and the error message cleared up once I had that fixed. I also had to make sure both executables were on my path, and I had to correct where the NeoVim plugin was looking for Nvim, as well, in settings.json.

I set that up, once. It went poorly for me. Git behaves much better, for me, when used thoughtfully and manually.

What I now do instead, is work on certain projects on an SSH accessible host. This gives the same benefits of having my last state easily accesses, without causing noise in my development tools such as git.