I have a roughly 13 year old install that I’ve moved through the transition to /usr/ and from sysv to systemd. Its my oldest install. I run almost everything except suse as a systems admin.

As a way to run Linux, I find arch one of the nicest. Rolling release, unmodified packages direct from the dev, unopinionated systems management, arch build system for any packages you want to compile, arch Linux archive that can be used for snapshotting or locking your rolling release, and AUR.

It’s a completely different way to manage and build an OS that no one else is really doing. I find team ‘I use arch btw’ to be extremely annoying but at the end of the day, the arch tooling for building a Linux ypunlike to use means that people are naturally going to want to tell you they built something they find enjoyable to use. That’s not really something a lot of people say about most OSs.

I have a range of issues and annoyances with most major OS, ranging from i cant use this to i wish this worked. Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu/deb flavors, redhat/fedora flavors, openwrt, alpine and other busybox flavors, iOS, Android, Graphine. All have things that mostly work but I’m always working around something.

And finding accurate documentation for issues on distros that have different configuration release to release is a pain, deb, Ubuntu and redhat flavors are especially egregious. I don’t really care how to do this on RH6 or Ubuntu 11, lol, I want docs for the current version.

At the time, I think I had uncommon hardware. I was trying to get Linux going on the cheapest little notebook you can imagine. I also got the same retort from support forums at the time, so my problem obviously wasn’t widespread. It was just the most definitive effort into Linux I had made, and I was just getting rebuffed by what I saw as silly little problems.

That was close to a decade ago now, though. After so much faffing around on the Steam Deck I think I’m ready to give Linux another stab.

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ANECDOTE TIME!

When I was in highschool, I got dragged out of the back seat of a car with 5 of my friends, laid face down on the asphalt inches from the lane marker, and they proceeded to rip out EVERYTHING from my friend’s mother’s minivan. When they started pulling people, oen friend sent an SOS text to his parents.

When they found nothing because the only illegal thing anyone was planning to do was underage drinking like 6 hours from then, they proceeded to LITERALLY begin ripping the car to shreds. Broken plastic panels “these are easy to remove, they could be hiding shit in there” and ripped upholstery “that loose seam means they hid it in the seats” and even began removing the bumper.

Then the friends dad, who at the time was a legal aid, now lawyer, pulled up and began theCALMEST dressing-down I’ve ever seen from someone who is seething with rage.

Popped up, got out of the car with his hands out to the side, immediately identified himself as “their legal representative” and began reciting all the laws the cops were breaking, since they never had probable cause to begin with beyond “hey there’s teens in that car” (he had no way of knowing that, for all he knew we got pulled over for legitimate reasons) but he trusted his son.

I’m sure we would all like to pretend they got fired, but nah. They took off the cuffs, said something along the lines of “don’t give us a reason to stop you” which sounded an awful lot like a threat to me, and nothing ever came of any complaints.