this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Atomic desktops enforce immutability, the core system is literally a ROM almost like stock Android. It's not always bad, I can easily imagine cases when it is perfect, but it's not what I'm currently seeking from Linux. As far as I could figure out, secureblue imposes slightly less restrictions.
Yeah well I knew about Arch circlejerk, but these KDE guys are something. I would probably get same reaction asking an Arch community about how to purge pacman.
NixOS is worth testing indeed. However, AFAIK it is not lightweight enough for my setup. Pretty same as Gentoo, I guess. It is kind of ironical that the most controllable and efficiency-oriented distros aren't actually good for mediocre setups (but well, I believe nothing stops from building a system on Gentoo with a powerful setup but with flags targeting a low-end device and then flashing the result to the latter). Unfortunately I have no experience with programming, so my learning curve will be fairly steep. But one day I'll just have the required skill level even for managing NixOS. And probably I will even learn programming, who knows.
This is a purely technical association. And in case with Atomic Desktops, it is just an option at last.
Yeah I probably would be able running NixOS, but I think it will take a lot of time to compile big packages in Gentoo. And if I don't compile the largest parts of the system by myself with appropriate flags for efficiency, Gentoo doesn't make that much sense compared to Arch or Artix. I have 5.7GB of RAM (the rest is reserved by system and GPU), and I've seen a guy with 128GB RAM on youtube, who still used a lot of binaries because of long compilation and the inefficiency (hah) of portage. He has been running Gentoo for more than a year. I wish I knew C so I could rewrite portage to C.
Oh, by the way I've heard of CachyOS, it is Arch based to I'll have some of the advantages of Arch, and it is said to be optimized well. Have you ever heard of how Cachy performs?
Compiling Firefox alone for speed may not grant a big performance boost. But all together, all the self-compiled things with ~1-2% performance boost each result in a really serious benefit all together. I also don't know if the guy you mentioned used all the flags he could. I know there are some flags you're recommended to stick with, but I would learn to take the maximum benefit of them, even if it is tedious to learn, bcuz mistakes in use flags cause trouble.
That was not plenty for me when I was into music production. Really limiting tbf. I want to take away some reserved RAM from the GPU, cuz I'm not gaming or mining crypto anyway. And I really want to use VMs.
Compilation is of course taking some time always, but I believe that with my current skill level and hardware it is not worth it yet.
I actually want a system that is fast, optimized and controlled. I wish it also wasn't asking for extensive maintenance, but it is not trivial to accomplish that with Gentoo or Arch. But still possible, with some trade-offs, but those are not very relevant for me. And yeah, I want a system that I know and understand, that doesn't keep any secrets from me. And I want powerful hardware, yeah.
Alpine is a good one, but it doesn't seem to suit for casual usage. I would use it, but as a server. That's what it was actually made for, I believe. Void is also great, but it has the problem of package availability. XBPS is not common, so one still runs into compiling things when using Void as a daily driver. However, I recently consider installing a custom Void flavor on my low-end netbook, which isn't snappy even with Debian Xfce. I'm going to install a minimal Void, and then add XLibre and LXQt, that'd be perfect for my netbook, and almost all the software I'd need there, will highly likely be present in the repos.
And for the main laptop, I guess I'm staying on Fedora KDE, unless I need my FL Studio and flash Windows back. I'll be figuring out where performance sucks, some bottlenecks, and fix them.