On corporative dependency
Nowadays, I think it gets hard to avoid the current design of some market strategies—at least I feel comfortable stating that I lack the will to fight it constantly. Considering the amount of subscription-based services, planned obsolescence devices, constant new roll-out features, and the curse of modern advertisement (thus, a barely-symbiotic, barely-consensual relinquishment of privacy1), it is hard to feel independence and autonomy.
We delegate the duty to understand and to own in order to receive substantial relief, which at times it pays off as simplicity, but at times it can come as a nagging constraint. This all entails a whole discussion into autonomy I might not get into right now.
(Pseudo)technocrats
All of this to say that I do own old hardware, and that had a very interesting life. At some point (during my undergraduate studies) I was “forced” into the Linux ecosystem, under the argument that coding in C on Windows would not be “fun”.
Later on, I required working more on coding projects, from MATLAB and OCTAVE towards more Pythonic code. During my doctoral studies, I decided to make a complete change, and it has been mostly great.
This reinforced a DIY mindset when it was about figuring out what was going on with my computer. With time and practice, I started to get (barely) better into it.
Opinions are for the opinionated ones
Recently, on my old computer, I decided to relinquish it’s old Windows OS due to the high booting up times it had. As a stereotypical newbie, I have tried different flavors of Linux. I have explored Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, Arch, and even Kali; I have struggled with bash, zsh, and fish included; and I still try to make a case for which distro or which package manager is better. Truth is, it will always depends on what you want.
As I have been learning to mess up—a skill one must never forget it, always relearn it, and own it to their best extent—I have decided to stick with Arch, as it allows wide customization, rolling releases, and a very minimal starting point (which is very annoying, in virtue of the introduction presented here). But I wanted to do something different.
At one period of time, I successfully installed Arch and the fancy things you’d like it to have (I am looking at you, Hyprland). Then I switched to Manjaro, aiming for simplicity, and I regard that as a mistake, because I would have to do more work to undo the things the OS installation did for me.
Opinions are for the brave ones who state them
So I decided to explore something more!
I saw this video and I was curious. I knew about LFS, but I did not want to invest the time on it (yet), and I was not really interested in learning GoboLinux, despite proposing a very interesting way to organize the file tree system.
So I kept that in mind, and I decided to hijack my Arch installation with Bedrock Linux—a metadistribution that abstracts the components from different distributions into strata, that you can fetch. They co-exists in your computer, and you can tweak the operating system in unique ways—there is room to explore with Arch’s rolling release updates, and at the same time, deal with Gentoo’s portage manager.
The idea is enticing, and it is simple enough to take a glance at the different
distributions.
The package manager manager pmm is great, fairly easy to configure in one go.
I hope to get more into it soon as I can bring new updates.
Footnotes
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This, at times (and without much thought), seems as a consequence of the gap between the abstraction and the material realization of it. In this particular example, the different between the hardware and the software imply a dissolving of the notion of ownership of something immaterial, despite being realizable in very concrete objects. E.g., identity is immaterial, though phenotypical characteristics, identification documents, and your grocery list are quite more concrete; a more ad hoc example is online privacy, expressible in datatables and queries that other entities (persons, companies) perform on your available data. ↩