Dear Solusians,
I've been running Solus Budgie daily since Sep 2018 (acc. to ls -ld /lost+found) with much joy and pleasure and so on. Before that a mixture of Win 7, OSX and Ubuntu during the last decade or so.
I'm about to hop to a small footprint base distro instead and pull up 'clusters' or 'modules' of apps from a container when needed instead of installing and booting everything under /.
I'll post my Solus and budgie exp/review notes in other threads but first some of the discoveries in this Linux round that led me in that direction are:
1) messing up npm dependencies
and trying in vain to keep them clean with nvm. It seems, relative to which dependencies different programs needs, to be a lost battle, which led me to
2) docker containers for local server builds
web, storage, tests, anything.
Coming from VMs that's been amazing and much leaner, provisioning with vagrant and ansible is a treat as are pre-baked builds from vagrant cloud, docker hub and turnkeylinux.org.
I never managed to get lxd to fly on Solus and didn't attempt podman but will on the next distro (prompted by f.ex. medium.com/@ganeshmani009/replacing-docker-with-podman and opensource.com/article/18/1/history-low-level-container-runtimes)
3) containers for any app really
inspired by wizs like Please Contain Me: Practical LXC on the Desktop (slides and configs at github.com/fghaas) and Jessie Frazelles Container Hacks and Fun Images, but could might as well also be snaps, flatpaks, appimages for some stuff.
4) realtime kernels, compiled for audio and video editing
not much experience with that yet but it's worth a shot on my oldie i5 with RAM to spare.
Main audio/video apps and repos are not Solus ported (yet)(KX Studio in particular in my case)
5) trying i3 and obsessing over DE RAM pull
jumping from 1GB to 200-ishMB at idle somehow just makes me happy and tiling window managers are easier on both eye and workflow. I'm sort of using budgie in the same way already, with 1 or 2 apps on each workspace, budgie menu as a universal launcher and no docks or eye candy to be seen. Not too shy to admit quite a few suckless ftw and Luke Smith talking to his phone in the woods videos opened up that Linux corner for me
6) the hardware independent future proof distro dream
inspired by the classic distro-on-a-stick and (debian) distros like SLAX and antiX/MX where you can split out persistence files (ie. changes and updates) in compressed chunks and boot or load them again as needed.
The base distro is kept small enough to load quickly from any USB port or drive to RAM (or regularly) and lean enough to quickly customize when whatever driver or kernel may be needed if switching host or hardware parts. Or, if anyone asks for a Linux setup on their machine, something I can easily roll on my own from the same base image.
It's also the VNC/VPN/Citrix on stereoids dream, where you could leave a atomic distro and its app containers like that on a server somewhere and access it from a tablet or random laptop (with limited local disk space) and sync to USB disks for offline use if/when needed.
Fedora Silverblue seems to be heading in that direction (docs). Proxmox could also come in handy if I had VT-d compatible hardware.
