Not a great solution, but my custom set of functions that synchronize the (dot)files just copy them over into a directory preserving their paths within it e.g. cp /etc/hosts ~/.sysbackups/$(hostname)/etc/hosts
My script rewrites the paths to –etc–hosts and so on. Avoids creating a giant tree of mostly empty directories. Wish distros came with a default out-of-the-box solution for all this.
right, for system files I do the minimal approach only select a handful that I wish to keep, so the tree is easy to search into. A system equivalent to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME would be nice though.
Debian and Void (and Void is iffy. The TTY installer is easy enough though, and it’s basically good to go out of the box if you get the glibc iso with Xfce). None of the other base distros are super user-friendly in terms of installation, though I’d add Endeavour OS as an honorary member of the group since it’s essentially Arch with a good installer, a friendly community, and nice defaults.
Kind of two parts to this question: Linux for low spec hardware? And beginner Linux?
When I got started with Linux in 2017, I started listening to a lot of Linux related podcasts which was really helpful to get my head around a lot of terminology and Linux technologies. A friend of mine runs Arch so I knew I wanted to get there eventually, but for the first couple of years I ran Linux Mint, then Ubuntu, and for the last year or so I’ve been on Arch.
Regarding the low spec hardware thing: I have an ASUS net-top with a Celeron CPU & 1GB ram & spinning disk HDD. I’ve run mint xfce on it with a lot of success. Tiny core Linux is extremely performant on really old gear, but it’s very old school & different to popular distros
Been using it a while and I genuinely cant find anything to complain about. xbps is the best pkg manager, runit is quick and gets out the way and all my architectures are supported
I used Void for a while and I loved it! I had to move off because I kept having to make packages for the esoteric programs I kept using (cc65, Zoom, etc.). but I loved every bit of it. Even making the packages was pleasant, and it’s the first distro I ever contributed packages to.
Also, at the time I was using musl, and it was good, but not perfect. I’d recommend the glibc version for 0 headaches, but the musl version was very fun.
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