I’ve installed arch Linux and liked it, but lfs and Gentoo would be too time consuming compiling everything and not doing anything during and after install. Are there any distros like arch that don’t have me compiling everything?
NixOS or GNU Guix are your best options for advanced distributions. Guix is a much newer project so theres a lot of ways you can contribute.
Guix isn’t a Linux distro but it’s definitely unique and probably for advanced users! :)
They mean ‘Guix System’. Just like there is ‘Nix’ the package manager and ‘NixOS’ the distro, there is ‘Guix’ the package manager and ‘Guix System’ the distro.
A linux distro is a linux distro. It’s you, who invests the time to experiment and understand, who unlocks advanced features. There’s no shortcuts to learning Linux than to use it and read about it and install it many many times.
Exactly. You can use Ubuntu in a noobish way, or you can do crazy things with it. It’s not the tools, but the craftsman that makes the difference.
That said, distros each have a niche, so find the one that’s closest to the types of problems you want to solve. For example, if you’re making a kiosk, you’re probably better off pushing out your own images, so a distro that’s designed to build small images is probably desired over one that seeks to pack in every library and application under the sun.
If you don’t know what you want, pick something well supported and dig in to whatever interests you. Want to learn systemd? Pick a distro that uses it and write your own service files (e.g. maybe a Minecraft server, or perhaps synching). Want to learn to build software yourself? Grab a tarball from the project’s page instead of installing through the package manager. And so on. If you start from something unfamiliar, you’ll have to learn a lot of irrelevant things, which may not be what you want.
Have you at least tried to install Gentoo? Everyone has to think they can, and fail, at least once in their lives.
My personal journey was Arch > Void > Gentoo > Arch > Nix > Void again > realizing there’s nothing really like Arch and going back for good. Hope this helps!
Similar to arch in what way? What about arch don’t you like, you can look at other arch-based distros.
Most distributions have binary package managers anyways, so you won’t struggle to find some.
There isn’t anything about arch I specifically don’t like, I’d just like to see if there’s anything that’s better in a certain criteria I don’t yet know of.
You could always try NixOS.
Arch may not be particularly easy to use, but it’s a simple system, in that you can build a mental model of your entire setup with a fraction of the effort and time that you’d need to expend with other systems. It gives you the standard Linux experience without fuss, or handholding.
Nix, however, gives you several capabilities that other systems won’t, but you’re paying for that through its learning curve.
