Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.

I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.

As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.

Outdated how? I use it for my daily driver and it works fine for me. It’s a fairly simple program and the 0.3.x river protocol is fairly stable so I would doubt it’s become outdated, but if it is, you should be able to patch it yourself given the simplicity of the program.

Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.

https://gitlab.com/Grazen0/river-shifttags

How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can’t automatically take over the upstream.

I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.

MX Linux, AntiX, Puppy Linux?

What really? I thought the screenshot looked like electron/web app slop but I was like, maybe they’ve just gone for a “modern” gtk/qt theme. It’s actually just a Firefox PWA?

I use catgirl

If you want a gui editor maybe Kate?

This is only because Microsoft’s employees have been relentless in their pressure on their bosses. They’ve been doing occupations of Microsoft buildings, office crashes, etc. They fire the employees who take part but then there are more employees who crop up in their place; there are just too many to fire them all. And Microsoft still provides a lot of support to Israel, so don’t be fooled into thinking that things are over.

Thanks, didn’t realise I could do that!

Most GUI package managers are just wrappers for the package manager CLI.

Nushell looks cool but I prefer to stick with the POSIXes so that I know my scripts will always work and syntax always does what I expect it to. I use zsh as a daily driver, and put up with various bashes, ashes, dashes, that come pre-installed with systems I won’t be using loads (e.g. temporary vms).

A flip phone/dumbphone would sort of be mutually exclusive with my use case. I use my smartphone nearly exclusively as a lightweight mobile computer for web browsing, SSHing into my server, and messaging over internet (not SMS). I rarely use the “phone” features of my phone, i.e. phone calls and SMS. So I’d be losing out over the features I do use, in favour of features I don’t use.

If you’re being distracted by your phone and a dumbphone works for you, good on you. I think most people are like me and use their phones as a small mobile computer rather than a phone though, in which case distractions are best handled with one of the many apps/browser add-ons/etc that block websites or apps.

Markdown is a convention, and then there are Markdown standards in attempts to standardise all the different flavours. I suppose it’s “open source” in the sense that e.g. CommonMark is CC licensed akin to foss software licences, but it’s a specification, not a program with source code.

In any case it has little to do with Linux.

How is a kernel meant to enforce anything about UI?

I think GUI development should favour server-side decorations for consistency’s sake, but this is more of a cultural thing with what application developers are choosing to do, rather than anything “Linux” can do about.

I’d recommend learning either C or Rust. Pretty much every mainstream OS will be written in C. Rust is newer but known for its safety and a much more modern language. There are other systems programming languages but those two are very popular and will have lots of OS dev resources, plus if you are working with existing codebases they will be in C. Other languages may be entirely possible to write an OS in, and for really big ones like C++ and Go I’m sure there’s lots of OS dev resources for them too, I’m just not familiar with the OS dev ecosystem for those languages (and at the very least I hope it’s not controversial to say C++ has been made obsolete by the new systems languages…)