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2026-10-31 03:16:47 GMT

Some experience with 'minimal' distros (Void, antiX, alpine Linux)
This post will primarily be of interest to those with previous experience (and opinions) about Linux operating systems, though because I am a teacher and due to the way I like to teach I generally try to define terms and help at least give some basic info for those interested but without much previous experience have a map of the territory.
I originally tried out Linux almost two decades ago on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO-1. It came with the Sugar operating system, aimed at children, and I appreciated its goals but I tried out wiping the machine and installing Debian, one of the major Linux distributions.
OLPC image from Aida Ivars Rodríguez cc0
I eventually passed that laptop along as it was a heavy brick and more of a curiousity for me than something that felt very usable, but I credit it for getting me into trying out and learning how to install various Linux distributions and window managers, learning about open source software, and tweaking a computer to my own needs as opposed to a company’s view of what I’d need. I also learned the pleasures and challenges of how to look up and decipher help online, and how to work with the command line.
Several years later I found a discarded PC laptop and an old iMac with a partially-broken screen in my university’s trash. I remembered back to testing out Linux, and I chose to install Arch on the PC (and to try to update OS X on the iMac). It was around this time my grad school professor tipped me off to the book In The Beginning… Was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson. I ate it up. When I got stuck on some thing I contacted a sysadmin at my college who I recognized was using Linux, and they walked me through how to set file permissions correctly. I had one or two catastrophic updates on Arch, as it’s a rolling release distribution that sends out not fully baked software updates fairly frequently. In those few cases I basically just reinstalled the operating and replaced all my files from a backup. When Arch finally stopped updating 32bit packages in 2017, which I needed to update the old laptop, I grew disillusioned and switched back to using a Macbook Air full time.
In the following years I found myself mostly switching back and forth between the command line and the web browser on the mac, and not loving the closed Apple ecosystem of iTunes, etc. So in 2019, as Apple started to artificially stop supporting the OS on my 2014 Macbook I decided to get a new computer, and this time I chose a Dell preinstalled with Debian, which I’ve written about previously. I liked it well enough, but after a year and flaring carpal tunnel in my wrist I decided to switch to a...
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