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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • That’s pretty much it. Systemd goes against the philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well” by doing a whole lot of things and being integrated to an extent that makes it pretty much impossible to use only an arbitrary subset of its components while replacing the rest with alternatives. I understand where the critics are coming from, but I honestly don’t care either way.









  • I’d make a shortlist of phones based on price and hardware, then check the XDA forums to see which of the models on that list have good AOSP-based custom ROMs available. Generally, you’ll have better luck with flagship models, but there are custom ROMs available for many, many smartphones - some even get updates for longer than the official firmware.

    Another option is to use adb to uninstall bloat and crapware from the official images, which can be done with varying success depending on the phone’s make and model. For example, I have a Samsung Galaxy A53 and was able to uninstall or disable most of the several useless or redundant apps it came with, but several I could not get rid of without breaking needed functionality (that shouldn’t depend on them, but does for some obscure and probably illegal reason).




  • I know that my personal case is only one data point, but I currently manage one EndeavourOS system and one Arch Linux system and except for hardware-specific issues and things I only tried to do in one machine and not the other, I have only ever had identical problems in both. And few of those, too. EndeavourOS… endeavours… (sorry) to be as faithful to the original Arch installation process as possible, except automated and optionally also installing a graphical environment.



  • I agree. The average user can’t be expected to read all of the documentation, but when you run into a problem, odds are you aren’t the first. So instead of immediately going to ask for help, maybe Google the issue for a while, at least skim the man page or try fixing it yourself before asking.

    And ask well. There’s a huge difference between “I have problem X with package Y. I tried solution Z and it didn’t work. Here is some information I think could be relevant. Thanks.” and “HELP program Y isn’t worknig I dunno what to do???”.



  • I second this comment, though I’d like to point out that the Arch community isn’t as toxic as people make it seem. Yes, there are a few very problematic people who think you should read the entire source code for every package possibly involved in your problem before asking for help, but there are a lot of helpful people too. They just have low tolerance for help vampires.



  • Any Arch-based distro because of the rolling release model, the excellent pacman package manager and the AUR.

    Especially EndeavourOS. It’s Arch Linux with a Calamares installer. Not that the Arch Linux setup process is hard, but it’s a pain. I did it once and never again. EndeavourOS uses the Arch repos plus its own tiny repo with stuff like the Welcome screen, some themes and yay, so it’s pretty much Arch with different branding.