Because if you are into minimalism there’s no eye candy. I use river as well and decided to ditch the status bar. There’s literally nothing to see on my screen except for my terminal. It might have neovim but again, i went super stock on my neovim config: https://erock-git-dotfiles.pgs.sh/tree/main/item/dot_config/nvim/init.lua.html
There’s really nothing to see
There’s also archinstall which comes with the latest os image which is just like any other installer and holds your hand through the process.
It’s really very simple to get arch installed
I have a simple bash script that manages folders and files with a way to route them to whatever location. Then I run the script and it does all the symlinking for me. This is what I do for systemd unit files and my own dotfiles
It seems like there might be exceptions to the “no partial upgrades” which has not been discussed: you can pin your version of the kernel primarily to give time for packages like zfs to catch up to the latest kernel
I’ve never used bcachefs and only recently read about some of the drama. I wish the project the best but at this point it is hard to beat zfs
Here’s my journey from arch to proxmox back to arch: https://bower.sh/homelab
I was in your shoes and decided to simplify my system. It’s really hard to beat arch and I missed having full control over the system. Proxmox is awesome but it felt overkill for my use cases. If I want to experiment with new distros I would probably just run distrobox or qemu directly. Proxmox does a lot but it ended up just being a gui on top of qemu with some built in backup systems. But if you end up using zfs anyway … what’s the benefit?
I’ve been slowly working on a set of decoupled services that could replace some aspects of GitHub.
https://pr.pico.sh/ — a pastebin supercharged for git collaboration.
https://pgit.pico.sh/ — static site generator for git repos.
Both are still WIP but I think they are pretty handy
I didn’t use any of the terms you used in your post. I’m not using those products in part for the reasons I discussed but also I don’t see it particularly useful beyond a cult of personality building it.
This was a really great read. The numbers don’t lie: 7 companies each independently invested 100 bn in AI and have seen little revenue in return (relatively speaking). When overlaying that on top of its impact on the us stock market as a whole, once the veil has been lifted that this is not leading to super intelligence, a bubble will burst and the entire economy will feel it.
That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”
It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers’ lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.
This is the part that is overlooked when discussing anti-ai hype: these tools are very useful, but they appear only useful to the skilled laborer wielding them, instead of the investor claim that they will be replaced.
Librefox has been awesome. Once you get the hang of enabling cookies for specific sites it mostly just works. Although Fastmail keeps logging me out for some reason
It is being rewritten using swift
This is absolutely not true in my org. LLM use is ramping up where every SWE is using it to some capacity
I’m of mixed views about this. Omarchy is popular purely because of DHH. I don’t see anything of benefit beyond the notoriety of a famous dev.
There’s also some dissenting opinion about DHH in general that taints the project: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Being based on hyprland also has some potential social issues.
I don’t get why cloudflare didn’t donate to arch instead.
For something super lightweight you can try https://pr.pico.sh/
I agree. For everyone’s sake they should rip Rust out and put all that effort into RedoxOS. There is way too much misalignment for this to be constructive.
The asahi project shouldn’t even exit with Apples purse, this is their job as far as I care. To be honest I would never use asahi for that reason.
I don’t really understand the question. All you have to do is run archinstall and then add a desktop environment like KDE and that’s like 80% what other distros do.
I think arch used to be hard to get started but not anymore. That’s reserved for gentoo now