bitmap via Talk said on Sat, 29 Nov 2025 10:05:56 -0500
Its a big pain in the ass writing shell scripts or workflows on one then trying to use on the other, finding that I am relying on features added last year so not available on debian and its broken.
Yeah, sometimes I want to wring every distro's neck. Each has its own way of doing essentially simple things. Void Linux has less of that than most, but I don't recommend Void to you for the reason you don't like Arch: Difficult to weed out non-free. Me, I'm personally not as concerned about that as many, so I've loved Void for 10 years. But you shouldn't use Void in my opinion, for the reasons you state about Arch. You mentioned shellscripts and workflows. I assume by workflows you mean the sequence that you as a human perform in order to accomplish a task. I've pretty much defined my workflows, with shellscripts, dmenu and UMENU2, to use lowest common denominator features in order to be pretty much WM/DE and distro agnostic. This strategy paid off in 2014, when in a matter of 1 year I moved from Ubuntu to Debian, and then Debian to Void, and almost all my shellscripts and workflows followed me, keystroke for keystroke, with zero or few adjustments. If you want I can be more descriptive of this in a later email. I consider depending on the capabilities of any one WM/DE to be the highway to heartache. For me, personally, if the WM/DE is capable of letting me configure it to run my desired shellscript when a certain hotkey is pressed, and if those hotkeys can be modified by the Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Windows modifier keys, I can do the rest. Also, I need a way to have at least 6 workspaces, and a way to navigate between them. And of course, I need it to be either Linux or BSD. Given these few requirements, I can make that machine walk and talk, regardless of distro. Another technique of mine is to pay abso-lutely no attention to this XDG stuff or its parent, FreeDesktop.Org. That stuff is designed specifically to add friction to the DIY process, so the user will give up creating his own workflows and do the XDG foxtrot. The FreeDesktop.Org motto is "My way or the highway", so I'm walking. FreeDesktop.Org also assumes the user is braindead stupid, which certainly doesn't apply to ANY of us. Listen, I'm no fan of Debian. I think the project is rotten to the core. But my advice to you is to stick with Debian, even if the software is old. Take control of your shellscipts and workflows so they'll work on pretty much any distro, including Debian and Arch. Or if you're like me and don't like systemd, you can switch to Devuan and leave systemd behind. I'm pretty sure Devuan has almost every non-systemd package that Debian has, and their community is much, much nicer. But either way, I think every distro is going to have the problem of abandoned and old packages, so your only choice is to get your shellscripts and workflows to accommodate the lowest common denominator. HTH, SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com