Evidently I’m similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.

Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn’t eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.

Depends on what you’re beginning.

The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.

There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.

It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.

I did this for awhile…

https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next

If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.

Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.

You’re just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us…

Its the same problem as standardized Unix systems in the 90s. There’s more ideas on how to implement hardware than there are hands to integrate driver software.

When it comes together it’ll be because we either make the manufacturers warp around something like POSIX, or provide a common target on phones like the steam deck.

Otherwise every hardware generation will get the undescribable misery of supporting the last one, from the one they’re on, while writing the next one. The problem tends to compound.

K, teachable moment maybe.

How complicated do you think a web browser is? Out of the box there is support for 30 years of web and file systems, support for socket types that will never be commissioned again and a pipeline to every native media format.

It’s complicated, it’s essentially an OS. with perfect backward compatability. (Mostly)

I have an increasing amount of bile for the Mozilla Corp, but if you’re on Lemmy you probably noticed corporations don’t make the best decisions for you… My question is how many of the options do you see in about:config do you think chrome and safari don’t show you?

Mostly to their benefit I’d add, except if they set them maliciously you’ll never know.

Zypper is very solid, and I can’t say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn’t the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.

They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.

Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.

All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it’s great!

On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I’ve had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.

I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn’t keep up on how that turned out.

I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.

Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.

Honestly unless you’re going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years… But I don’t want to set it up again. Not again.

It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the “core” (that stays the same everywhere and you don’t have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It’s big and complicated because you’re replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don’t like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.