I’m wondering if a distro like the one I’m looking for even exists:

  • simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
  • fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)

So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don’t know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?

Or are there other distros out there that I’m not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I’ve heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.

  • z3bra
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    8 months ago
    % pm -i | wc -l
    55
    

    That’s how many software I packaged myself. They are installed to /usr/local using an alternative package manager because I couldn’t be bothered with making an appropriate .deb.

    And as to explain how this alternate workflow is less complex, here’s how I go about installing a program:

    % git clone git://git.z3bra.org/human ~/code/human
    Cloning into '/home/z3bra/code/human'...
    remote: Enumerating objects: 53, done.
    remote: Counting objects: 100% (53/53), done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (53/53), done.
    remote: Total 53 (delta 28), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    Receiving objects: 100% (53/53), 9.35 KiB | 195.00 KiB/s, done.
    Resolving deltas: 100% (28/28), done.
    % cd $_
    % pack
    CC human.c
    LD human
    install -D -m 0755 human /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/bin/human
    install -D -m 0644 human.1 /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/man/man1/human.1
    
            > /tmp/human@0.3.tbz
    
    installed human (0.3)
    % pm -i human
    usr/
    usr/local/
    usr/local/bin/
    usr/local/bin/human
    usr/local/man/
    usr/local/man/man1/
    usr/local/man/man1/human.1