why does it seem like it’s a requirement for such projects?!

this comic will forever make me flinch. lol

back around 2010, i did IT at a place that got a new isilon cluster to alleviate storage space woes with our netapps and the software engineers used this comic to make fun of the work we did when it caused a bottleneck over the network. lol

websphere

all configuration management languages do this and have forums where people share their code so that you copy/paste and then tweak them to your own needs. ansible galaxy comes to mind.

if you want pure linux, there’s also kickstart or preseed.

I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate.

i did devops between 2015 & 2025 and got used to the cadence of waiting between 15 & 180 minutes for testing/production pipelines to finish vetting the work i submitted to them.

i went back to doing IT last year and setup similar pipelines to update the code base my predecessor left behind and my new boss expressed the same consternation about waiting for your changes to iterate.

i’m thankful for it because it gives me 30-ish minute windows to browse and annoy people on lemmy throughout the day. lol

yes, their LTS trims mimic the same behavior that debian has with their releases and that cachyos recommendation is probably as different as you can get without going into bsd. lol

it’s a safe assumption that he didn’t given his track record of drama.

once you pass the 4 gig of ram mark, all of the distros become usable for you, so – in your shoes – i would decide what’s the most important things you need.

for me, it’s a distro that doesn’t require to me to upgrade beyond the using package/kernel updates and that’s something like debian where i can stick is a release for a really long time w/o having to reinstall when the next version is released.

most distros seem to a have a migration path, but it’s rare to find one that doesn’t have any hiccups.

you can tell these are better because they’re shorter than the original. lol

i came here to post this and of course someone beat me to it. lol

depends on where you draw the line.

in the past, i’ve been mildly dissapointed by the drama-queen-esque antics of the kernel developers; but i most recently DEEPLY disappointed by how thoroughly the kernel developers to caved to the us gov’t’s demand to kick out russian developers instead of complying maliciously like others do.

both are separate from linux, but linux can’t exist without them.

When I set up Linux on my wife’s MacBook it took two hours to find all the instructions on how to do it AND the files needed to do it. Had to use 4 different instruction sets because all 4 left out some steps.

same here w my macbooks almost 10 years ago.

now deepseek will give you copy/paste-able instructions in a few seconds; the future is now. lol

yeah, it doesn’t take to make yourself exotic. lol

I need to replace those, but they’re fine and working for now, and in this economy…

that’s why i haven’t bought any parts to rebuilt my everything home server. lol

and the more “exotic” your setup is – and use the word exotic very loosely here – the more time you have to spend thinking of how exotic it is compared to the plain-jane systems exist out there and compensate for it.

for example: most computers have a permanent drives, so if any of your drives are not permanent; your system automatically becomes exotic.

not using hdmi, vga, display port or hdmi; youi’re also exotic.

is your keyboard not the normal 104 key; you’re also exotic.

using pata & sata together; you’re also exotic.

…

there’s likely at least 3: one for the bootloader; one for the display manager; and one for your screen wallpaper.

it’s the same w windows

why does your pocket need any experience?

there are multiple ways to change how your keyboard behaves in linux and others in this post have already shared w you what the most common methods are.

i want to share w you the lessons i’ve learned from almost 15 years of trying to make mac keyboards act like mac keyboards on linux on my mac computers:

1. there’s no single unifying keyboard schema that will work with mac keyboards across all apps in linux, you will have to implement tweaks for every single thing you use beyond your x-server utilities/apps and you’re out of luck if you’re a firefox user).

2. even if you’re successful in getting your mac keyboard to work exactly as a mac keyboard, an update somewhere will break something and it’s almost always a kernel or x-windows update.

3. distros maintainers who build w mac in mind will be ones to help the most. it was yellow dog linux when i did it, so i would try with Asahi guys before trying anything else.

and i hope that you have better luck than i did.

gnome and kde have always been the most dramatically resource hungry of the whole linux/foss eco system; both were almost unusable back in the early aughts.

It’s such a bear to run your own Frankenstein; I could never remember the customizations and I ended up having to rebuild every single time I did a apt-get upgrade.

But the experience pays off – or at least it did for me – I would be a factory worker or doing landscaping like my father, uncles, cousins and brother if I hadn’t learned how to recompile the linux kernel.

if your grub timeout is set to zero, you’re almost never going to see the bootloader screen.