You know how some people compete to see who can get Doom to run on the craziest platforms, like a calculator?
Installing Arch with the fewest packages is like that. There's something oddly satisfying about stripping everything back to the most basic level - to make things work for you within the most constrictive environment you enforce for yourself.
It's like eating a spicy shellfish dinner and super gluing your asshole closed.
Started playing with arch this week for the first time. Got a pretty good laugh when I realized that I forgot to install a dhcp client and had to boot the install media again to add networking.
I appreciate what they’re doing and I’m going to keep poking at it, but my first impression is that philosophy is driving and the utility is in the back seat.
> Install NixOS
> Learn about Nix
> Organise your dotfiles
> Learn about flakes
> Organise your dotfiles
> Learn about modularisation
> Organise your dotfiles
> ...
Flatpaks have helped me a lot reducing bloat, avoiding dependency hell.
That said, probably there's some overlapping dependencies that, if installed in a different way I could save some space, but it's not worth it in my opinion.
I'm also using rootless podman+systemd for certain services, but that's been a mixed bag compared with plain old docker or LXC.