I just put appimage files in my $PATH. what else does this do?

Could have also not voted for the clown and that would have saved the world and the us a lot of bother.

Backups, backups, backups and backups. You will nuke your system drive by accident at some point. You will nuke your data storage by accident at some point.

I used a pi4 for a while and found storage speed was too slow as the usb c speed is too poor. I also found nextcloud too heavy for it to handle. Immich was great when I disabled ml, when I enabled it, it was ok. I moved to a mini pc and kept my pi4 as a 2nd server running just a few lightweight services and to ping wake on Lan signals to my mini pc in the event of a power cut.

Regards actual security, I can’t comment on your path as I chose the nginx reverse proxy option with my server fully exposed to the big scary www. I have 3 ports open on my firewall (ISP provided router) and on my server firewall with ufw for 80, 443 and a randomly selected high numbered ssh port. I have all unused ports closed, and I have fail2ban running very strict to block ips after failed login attempts. The way I say it is if nginx or ssh get compromised, then the world is gonna burn, and I will be 1 in a billion+ affected.

I use steam with no issues with runit on void. Plays all the games just as performantly as my previous arch build did.

After over a decade using systemd in arch and Debian, I never had any direct issues with it. However, I never truly got my head around it or got comfortable with how it functioned. I recently swapped arch for void which uses runit, and after over a month using it I to an amazed both how clean and simple it is, how everything just works, how easy to interact and use runit is and am blown away by boot and shutdown times. My arch / systemd setup was heavily optimised for boot, and I thought was quick, but runit starts in about 4 seconds and shutdown is about 2 seconds.

Radicale on my server and davx5 on my android to sync contacts and calendar.

You don’t need separate disks for this to work. I have my main distro and a recovery one all in the same disk in different partitions, and no grub. It is called efi stub and it’s really easy to set up and use. You can have as many boot options as you want.

I don’t think there is a problem with it. It’s a piece of software that people can choose to use if it fits their specific use case. It has a long list of features and abilities, and lots of people find it sufficient for what they want.

There are also a lot of people that don’t find it suitable for what they want and they can choose to not use systemd and use some other options.

I personally don’t use systemd. I have used it for a while, originally I used sys v for a long time, then arch adopted systemd, I tried to get used to it and understand it but never felt comfortable with it, so I moved to void Linux which uses runit plus other items to replace systemd, and I feel a lot more comfortable and happy with this.

You do your research and testing and find what fits your use case.

I’ve setup dufs to provide WebDAV file server, and then OpenOffice connected directly to it.

If I didn’t get the down votes, id feel left out as almost every comment has at least 1.

Thanks for the info on the installer 👍

That’s so clever yet so simple, keep all the scripts in folder that’s in PATH. I will deffo use that idea instead of a dedicated folder called scripts in my home folder.

Every machine I own has a scripts folder in the users home. It contains anything and everything, from starting and stopping services to changing settings, updating my boot order, literally anything I don’t use often enough to alias, but know I will use at some point.

I’ve been using Linux 20+ years as my main os. Most of that time I’ve been an arch user. I moved to void Linux 2 weeks ago. I’m very much a start from scratch and build to my liking sort of person, so I just extracted the rootfs base system to a fresh partition, configured everything through a chroot, and booted the new system. Took me 2 days to get to a point I was happy with. I really like void Linux. It boots faster, the init system is much simpler and I feel I understand it better than systemd already. The package manager is really good, and easy to use. I have no complaints.

For yourself, void Linux offers an xfce ready made live version, so everything is already configured and you can test it out in a live setup first with no permanent install. I didn’t test the installer as did a manual install, however it is not a gui installer.

That’s why after almost 20 years on arch Linux I just moved to void Linux, mostly for the idea of a proper init, and nice simple and much faster booting.

I’ve heard of nobara, rocky and slackware, never used any of them, never even heard of the other ones you have mentioned.

I started using Linux around 2006, did lots of hopping from the first attempt and eventually landed on arch Linux which ran on my main pc laptop until march 2026 when I decided to switch to void Linux. I also have a 2nd laptop which is more just for family and retro gaming, which is Debian. I also have a raspberry pi4 with Debian based raspberry pi os, as well as a mini pc server running Debian.

As you can tell, I don’t like derivatives. I am really fussy with my setup and prefer to build my own system from scratch to some extent, even if I end up with something more similar to one of the derivatives.

Nobody can really give you advice what to use though, it’s a very personal thing. All the distros offer different features and solutions for different use cases and problems. For people to recommend a distro, you would have to outline everything you want and expect from the distro, what you like and don’t like etc.

cool, i use sway / wayland. really happy with how it all runs, although only been on it a couple of weeks after over a decade on arch.

i should have been clearer, there is no distro major release. packages have major release sure, but no large distro upgrade.

Good read. Although I recently moved to void Linux as I prefer rolling release instead of a major upgrade every few years.

The more bare bones, simple and customisable, the better. I will compromise if the only option is an all in one, but it’s never my first choice as nothing is ever perfect.

I have 4 startech usb3 to SATA cables connected to a powered atolla usb3 hub, running on Debian. Had no problems at all with them over the last 12 months. My setup is is using lvm and raid1 with 2tb ssd’s.