throwawayish @ throwawayish @lemmy.ml

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?

Yeah lol 🤣 . Consider reporting back after testing your findings. Thanks in advance!

• uBlock Origin: On medium mode. Honestly, the internet mostly sucks without this excellent extension.
• Dark Reader: Easy on your eyes and prolongs battery life on OLED displays.
• Redirector: This allows you to be in full control of which sites/urls you redirect and to where. As it allows the use of regex, you're even able to create your own 'bangs'. For example I used !x as a bang to redirect me to my favorite SearXNG instance. Kinda neat.

I'm a simple man; I like to use GNOME so any terminal that feels at home on GNOME suits me. Currently, I've been in a phase in which I primarily use GNOME Console because of how GNOME Terminal doesn't play nice with tiling managers. Though Black Box is definitely tempting me.

The official manual page for xorriso is probably the best place to start. Unfortunately it mostly glosses over how it's compatible with mkisofs and doesn't further delve too much into what mkisofs does and thus how to engage with the -b flag. Fortunately, that information can be found on the related manual page for xorrisofs.

Please feel free to notify me if I can be of further help :blush: !

"By default, most new installations of Endless OS 4, and systems upgraded from older versions of Endless OS, will automatically update to Endless OS 5, and beyond as further versions are released. Systems must be specifically configured to remain on Endless OS 4"

As it even does major updates automatically, it's almost as handsfree as it gets.

That's unfortunate indeed. Currently I gravitate towards installing something like Endless OS for either elderly people or children. Automatic atomic updates from the get go on an immutable distro based on Debian Stable; just good stuff. FWIW, it allows updates between major versions as well 😉.

Is the guy who called everyone thieves if they didn’t donate enough before downloading still part of Elementary?

Assuming you're referring to this article; I don't know. Was it even ever revealed who the author was? Honestly I don't even think that it matters, as publicating the blogpost means that the team -at least to some degree- endorsed the idea.

Thanks for answering! Now I've got a better picture of what you're trying to achieve. However, unfortunately, I've yet to dabble into LFS. So I'm afraid that I might not be that helpful 😭. Wish you the best of luck though!

They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:

Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.

While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch; archinstall exists. And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.

That is most likely an Arch-thing rather than a Manjaro-thing.

Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.

'Spins' on Fedora Silverblue had -for some time- been following a naming scheme that involved picking the name of a blue mineral that ended on "ite". We see this in for example its KDE-spin Fedora Kinoite -which (inadvertently) happens to be the one starting this trend- and the unofficial spins of Vauxite (Xfce), Sodalite (Pantheon) and thus Bazzite (Gaming/Steam Deck). However, the official Sway-spin (Fedora Sericea) and the upcoming Budgie-spin (Fedora Onyx) don't quite follow this naming scheme 😅.

Yes, ideally a naming scheme that's a lot more descriptive would be awesome; like say Fedora Atomic GNOME or Fedora Atomic KDE etc.

Going to try the penguins-eggs method you posted. I would love to be able to turn a virtual box environment into an installable medium to make my own version of debian with all my gnome tweaks.

Good choice! The "penguins-eggs method" should fit the bill ;) !

I would also love a solution that doesn’t require booting into the OS first. So that I can take a root dir and turn it into a bootable iso.

Few questions :P :

1. If I understood you correctly, you mean that all of the files that will make up the bootable iso are contained -presumably under FHS- within a root dir of another distro? Or did you mean it as a partition? Or did you mean any tool that can build your iso from within another system based on (declarative) instructions?
2. Are we still talking about Debian with all your GNOME tweaks?
3. Is Debian a hard requirement? Or would you be open to say something like Fedora?
4. Is Live USB a hard requirement?
5. Might seem random, but what's your stance on declarative distros?

I tried a bunch of old tutorials for making a boot.iso and linking it into mkisofs with -b but it never worked.

Small nitpick; I generally recommend using xorriso over mkisofs, the latter is only packaged in most distros as part of xorriso anyways. While genisoimage does 'provide' mksisofs as well, genisoimage is unmaintained and should therefore not be used.

It has been my pleasure! I'm curious on what you'll end up doing. So please consider to report back if it isn't too much to ask :blush: !

Good questions!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task?

I actually don't know if penguins-eggs allows persistent environments 🤔 . Though, other tools might be better fit for the job. Personally I'd recommend you to follow this guide for openSUSE Leap. A similarly good guide/documentation for Debian is absent, and openSUSE Leap is likewise a good fit due to it being supported over a longer time period as well. The steps outlined in the guide might be a bit more involved, but the team behind openSUSE have done a wonderful job to ensure accessibility.

I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

With the method outlined in my previous comment, you only have to repeat the process from scratch if you didn't save the Debian install some way or another. If you did keep the Debian install around, then you could just; open it up, apply some updates/changes or (un)install additional packages and make yet another live image out of it. Granted, the openSUSE Leap persistent Live USB that has been previously mentioned in this comment is easier to change later down the line regardless.

Btw, -to my knowledge- the persistent Live USB environment is also possible on other distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. So arguably it's best to first look at which distro satisfies your needs in regards to package availability. After which, in my opinion, LTS/Stable releases ought to be preferred over the others.

So taking your other comment into consideration as well, I suppose the following would be the easiest good setup:

1. Install Debian Stable using the image for a minimal network install onto a secondary device or onto a partition of your main device (multi-boot). Make sure to only include the stuff you think you'd need.
2. Install all of your favorite tools within that Debian Stable installation.
3. Use the excellent penguins-eggs package to make a live image out of it.
4. Install the live image onto your favorite USB with whichever tool you like; personally I enjoy using ventoy.
5. Profit :P .

If my proposed solution doesn't quite fit your needs, then please feel free to correct me!

Somehow it looks veiny, black and kinda nsfw...

Would you be fine with some tooling that enables one to make their own custom iso from an existing distro? This path still allows for a substantial amount of freedom, though it's not a blank slate by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes up for it with how relatively easy and painless it can be.

Or would you instead like to get into the nitty-gritty of things and want all the freedom you'd want? This increased freedom does come with a substantial cost in convenience and labour.

Pick your poison :P . I'll be waiting ;) .

without using special tools like respin and archiso

What do you exactly mean with this?

• Can we suggest any package/tool that you have to install?
• Did you intend to convey a solution that's independent of an existing distro?
• Do you want the custom distro/iso to only do its thing until installation? Or are you perhaps interested in something more declarative that can continue to exist and be (one of) the primary means to config your system?
• Could you explain to us how your envisioned solution looks like?

Sorry for asking these questions, but it was either this or a very very long post satisfying all kinds of different criteria. Thanks you in advance for answering any of the questions!