Yeah, Veronica Explains is great. She seems to do things in good faith, and not a money grab. She just really loves this stuff. I think she’s trying to do youtube full time, and I hope she’s successful.

I do want to try peppermint, but I am concerned that it may still be too “heavy” of a distro for the dell 11. I just run a window manager only (Sway).

Oh, that’s right, I forget about that. But also, I don’t know much about musl and glibc. But of course, Alpine is a distro meant for servers, so some desktop/laptop stuff I’m trying to do may not work so well.

Since Artix is like Arch but without Systemd, I’m hoping it may be comparable to using Alpine. I’m using Artix Linux with Runit on my main desktop, and it’s been great so far.

I was thinking about getting an ARM chromebook to do this, cuz the Pinebook seemed like a good idea, but seemed underpowered. There are some nice ones like the Acer Chromebook 14 with the Kompanio ARM chip, but unfortunately no one is making custom firmware for ARM based chromebooks right now. Hopefully someone will at some point. Would be nice to have a power efficient passively cooled laptop. I think some of AMD laptops with their U series chips are pretty efficient.

I’ve done this with a DELL chromebook similar to the one she has. It worked out great! Shout out to Mrchomebox for his awesome work on custom firmware.

I initially installed Gallium OS since it was supposed to be a lightweight distro. My chromebook was fairly low spec with duo core intel at 2.0ghz with 4GB RAM. Gallium OS worked much better than chrome OS for this machine. Later on, I learned about Arch, and thought that would be better cuz it’s barebones and lightweight. And yes, Arch made a big difference. And later on, I heard about Alpine Linux, which is even more lightweight than Arch. Shoutout to Trafotin for his video on using Alpine as a desktop OS. Alpine was even better for this machine than Arch. It is noticeable since, it’s such a low powered machine.

Yes, I’m being a dirty distro hopper. :P

I may jump to Artix Linux since, some things I need don’t seem to work on Alpine. My hypothesis is that Alpine was faster than Arch because Alpine uses OpenRC instead of Systemd. Just a guess.

Yeah, I mean, dealing with issues like this is still better than being on a corporate monarchy like twitter or fb 🤷‍♂️

For me, it’s about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes, using full GUI file manager is overkill, especially for copying just one file, and you know exactly where you want to copy it from and to.

And a TUI file manager like mc, ranger, nnn are a good in between level of ui, and is great for browsing files distraction free from the visual clutter of a full GUI file manager. That may seem like not a big deal, but I think it’s nice to be able to see things simply and straight to the point. For me, it just feels nice and less frustrating.

What I like about Linux is choice. And in this case, choice in file management. Pick the right tool, and you’ll get things done more efficiently, and with less annoyance.