voidlinux: gave me much better battery life - I assume because it starts as a minimal system and one adds only the essentials to do the job - compared to the soup-to-nuts distros that pile everything in so that newbies are acccomodated. Of course, the voidlinux approach needs more linux skills - but it’s not that hard and the doco is great.

Also, I love the back to basics runit init system and runsv service runner (I’m old so I like that stuff) and the ultra fast xbps packaging system.

Thanks (to all the authors) for your hard work and contributions.

BTW - thanks for Mistral. Another tool in the box!

Quite right!

You need to take it all (AI or internet searches) with a huge pinch of salt. Even ye olde text books were not infallible and often out of date, so sodium chloride was also required even then.

The code either works or it doesn’t - it’s all in the testing. If you deploy AI suggestions without thought you deserve the consequences.

so just use chatgpt or gemini - pretty sure they sucked in all of reddit to form their KB

So he’s a journalist </s> Thanks for the warning, saved me a read.

Another approach entirely is to use pam_mount(8) which can automatically mount a disc on login. I use it to mount /home/$USER (obviously this couldn’t be used to mount the root fs !!)

virt-manager for the win!

“64-128mb ram” is hardly “low memory”!

You can’t avoid IBM/RedHat - they contribute to the kernel and many, many other parts of Linux eg systemd. I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

That said, voidlinux is an independent distro without systemd or snaps based on runit for init and xbps for package management. It’s also a STABLE rolling release.

waybar is good

scrcpy for android connectivity; syncthing to get files to and fro android (and any other linux system)

clipman for clipboard manager

wallpaper - whatever for? with a TWM you rarely see the background

emacs - because it’s life (I jest)

Can’t believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It’s very tasty.

I daresay there’s a way to do something like this with fzf

Maybe check here: https://linux-hardware.org/

waypipe - yes. But also wayvnc - I’ve been using wayvnc for a couple of years to export a headless wayland session from a file server. FOr my sins I use vncviewer on XWayland to consume it as it still seems to be the fastest.

To imply that systemd is merely an init system is ingenuous at best and dishonest at worst - systemd is so much more than an init system, as that article mentioned. Since the article was written in 2014 systemd has grown massively in scope, even more than the author feared.

It manages DNS, home directories, system services, seat managment, cron, system logging, booting… the list is ever growing. As such many people fear it is becoming too dominant through making more and more software dependent on it. It is not atomic - it is very difficult to have just one piece of systemd as its parts are tightly integrated and inter-dependent.

One could even claim that systemd failed in it’s original remit - to make startup as fast as macOS by running tasks in parallel and by deferring service startup until they are actually needed. The result has been a not very performant init system - many init systems are faster eg runit, dinit. The systemd people now claim that speed is not a design goal.

It is, however, open source and very widely adopted. Most people don’t care - they just want to run their browser and word processor.

What for? Even if they have improvements in some areas, the original POSIX standard utilities will continue to be needed for script compatibility. You’re not going to swap them out - at best you can add them and then you just have an additional code base to support with additional attack surface to protect.

I vote for voidlinux - I have no idea why, but I get almost double the battery life compared to fedora. No doubt it’s something stupid I’ve done on fedora but - I just love void.

voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I’m used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I’d have bought an Apple.

The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can’t explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.

The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I’m happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it’s no biggie.

I’ve left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).

Link for the video?

As a general rule of thumb, I’ve been told that anything less than a 50% performance boost is hardly noticeable.

I’ve also heard (but ready to stand corrected) that mitigation costs only about 10% CPU (depending on the CPU).

I don’t get out of bed for a 10% performance boost.