• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • I don’t think Arch is the distro I would go for if I just wanted speed. I suppose it depends on speed of what—generally systemd Linux will boot noticeably faster than Windows, and non-systemd Linux boots noticeably faster than systemd Linux—but once you’re booted up, I don’t think there’s a significant performance difference. Arch is a Linux distro that uses systemd so it’d be the middle option if you’re wanting fast boots. There are other minimalist distros too, some of which end up in arguably faster systems, but Arch is probably the easiest of the minimalist distros due to being well-documented and supported. But the reason for going for a minimalist distro is usually customisability, not performance. On modern hardware the performance difference is negligible. On very old hardware, you should be looking for another distro made specifically for old hardware (I don’t think Arch even supports 32-bit).










  • I would not say that reading a book is the way to go about it. At least the way I learned was just through using my computer like normal, and naturally I ended up using the terminal for some things e.g. updating packages, doing simple operations like moving files around, etc. I don’t think it’s a good idea to specifically try to “learn the command line” as a directed/targeted goal, because like you said you could end up learning a bunch of stuff you never use.



  • I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.

    You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.

    Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.



  • Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.


  • I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.



  • As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

    For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.


  • Outdated how? I use it for my daily driver and it works fine for me. It’s a fairly simple program and the 0.3.x river protocol is fairly stable so I would doubt it’s become outdated, but if it is, you should be able to patch it yourself given the simplicity of the program.


  • Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

    Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.