02/07/2024 - The unbirth of my distrohop era

CW: Talk of fascism and the military industrial complex

For those of you who didn't bother with my about page, I'm currently running EndeavourOS. That's to say Arch with a graphical installer. Rather than dealing with console commands to install your system (something I'm actually more capable of doing than I thought but can't be assed to do), you instead get to use the ever dependable Calamares installer to install your system and a desktop environment of your choice. This also lets you skip over the other tough initial step of Arch (my ultimate footgun), configuring your system and installing essential packages (and a GUI) post install.

I don't have a problem with EndeavourOS. It's worked great for me and any problems I've had have been entirely due to me messing with something I'm not remotely qualified to mess with (damn you, GRUB...). However, I am immensely curious, often to a fault, and because of that I've been harbouring a repressed urge to distrohop for a while. Recently, that urge has been on the cusp of bursting out, but it got stopped prematurely by major problems with all three distros that piqued my interest. Let's count the ways:

GENTOO

Gentoo is a classic of the Linux world. Giving users an incredible degree of control over their system through the power of building packages locally with customisation flags, it's quite the stalwart, and it's this promise of godhood that got me interested in what Gentoo had to offer.

Unfortunately, despite being a rolling release distribution, Gentoo is conservative with upgrades. Sure, even Arch has a testing branch, but you generally don't see things being held up there for too long. Unfortunately for my Gentoo aspirations, my beloved KDE Plasma 6 has been languishing in testing for a good few months, with no confirmed date for when it'll finally graduate to stable. I get that some people don't like Wayland, but come on.

Of course, there's the nuclear option of grabbing packages from testing, but that'd lead to me spending way more time compiling than I'm comfortable with. You could argue that using Gentoo at all would lead to me spending more time compiling than I'm comfortable with, but I'm running on the assumption that a distro with a compilation-oriented package manager would have a better compiling experience than the AUR. The AUR is not a place of honour.

ARTIX

With Gentoo a write off, my next stop was Artix. Arch without systemd. That's all it is, and that, for me, is its greatest appeal and its biggest problem.

Artix has a lot going for it. Rather than the ever controversial systemd, it offers a choice of other programs to run in PID1, including Gentoo's own OpenRC, Runit (which I've heard nothing but good things about), and S6. While I can tolerate systemd (for now), choice is always a good thing, and that's what Artix provides. The other cool thing about Artix is that it has a graphical installer. You can grab the minimal base ISO and do things vanilla, but most users and myself will most likely spring for the graphical ISOs which give you Calamares while also locking you into a given init and desktop environment.

And that's where the problems begin, and they're two massive ones.

First off, Artix has no online installation process whatsoever. You're locked to whatever's on the ISO, and since the latest stable ISOs are more than 6 months old, that means a beefy sudo pacman -Syu is your first step after booting into your brand new Artix. And, yet again, this means KDE Plasma 6 is locked behind installing an outdated Plasma and waiting an age for Artix to install, and then upgrade everything it just installed, and then praying nothing broke during your several hundred megabyte better-half-of-a-year overdue mass upgrade.

The second thing is within Artix's very heart as an idea. It's Arch without systemd, and that's more or less its only trait. Its website spends a lot of its text space talking shit about systemd, saying that Artix uses "real init systems" (failing to realise that OpenRC isn't actually an init system but a wrapper for one), and then there's this:

...you know, if they had just said yes I would have respected it. systemd's got a lot to hate.

Artix Linux is a spite project. And spite projects tend to leave a noxious aura around them. That's not something I want in my life, and because of that Artix ultimately left my radar.

NIXOS

Last but most certainly not least was NixOS. NixOS (the Linux distribution) revolves around Nix (the package manager) which makes installing and removing software as simple as making a few declarations in Nix (the programming language) in a config file. Up to and including desktop environments and if you're especially crazy even the KERNEL. The promise of, essentially, power so absolute that it renders the untouchable root file system all but meaningless slapped NixOS (the Linux distribution) dead center on my radar. And it's got a graphical installer AND KDE Plasma 6 in stable (as the latest fixed version dropped around a month ago).

With all my boxes ticked, I threw an ISO into Ventoy, beamed with joy that it recognised I was on a Framework and tossed me a special boot screen, realised that I accidentally got the ISO with GNOME on it, saw that the installer let you choose a desktop regardless so that didn't matter in the slightest, and was ready to seriously consider the switch... then I remembered the things I had heard from little birdies and this. Things about an ego running rampant, cahoots with the military industrial complex, and a lot of humanity's worst dregs. As in the kind of people who want my kind of people dead. And, to my despair, little had changed. Eelco was out, the MIC was seemingly out, but the fascism seemingly remained, and the community was beginning to collapse in the power vacuum Eelco left in his absence. Nix's (all of it) community is, tragically, just as repugnant as I recall, and with no one willing to do anything to stop it, I began to seriously question if this was a rabbit hole I wanted to let myself fall into.

And ultimately, my answer was "no".

IN CONCLUSION

And so, my distrohopping adventure was stillborn. What did I learn from this? ...was there anything to learn to begin with? Will I now keep using EndeavourOS til the end of time? Who knows. Maybe I'll give regular old Arch another shot some day. Maybe the NixOS (the Linux distribution) community will clean up their act (god, I hope so). For now, however, I shall remain where I am.

Check the sidebar for previous articles. This was my first serious attempt at writing one of these, so if it seems clunky, that's probably why.