Ok, this requires some explanation:
I was at a party quite recently, and there was a girl reading the “demonic” tarot to the people there. Now, I don’t believe in any of that, but just for laughs, I asked which linux distro I’d be installing this year, to which she pulled the “Lucifer” card. This should be “Death” in the traditional version. She told me it’s related to new beginnings or something like that.
So, I’ve got time to kill, I’m willing to try something new and I’d like to turn this into a self fullfilling prophecy.
Now, I’d like your interpretation. What would this distro be? Because this is a Linux sub-lemmy I’d give preference to linux distros; however I’m also open to any other UNIX-based operating systems if you insist.
It also has to be something new to me. So, no Artix, Debian, Fedora, Mint or Arch btw.
[UPDATE] The results are in:
I decided to post my update as a comment because I don’t think it’s that important. This post gained quite a few down-votes (understandable), and I wouldn’t like to be a bother anymore.
Now, the first “distro” I thought about when I saw the card was definitely Linux From Scratch. I felt validated when I saw your comments, however I shall explain a bit more further down. Another one I thought about was Gentoo Linux. To my surprise it wasn’t mentioned. Lastly, while I was writing this post I definitely had FreeBSD in mind, so I included the “UNIX-based” requirement.
I just wanted to read your opinions and in the end I’m really happy I did.
Now, you commented, you voted, and the top 5 distros that you recommended were:
The obvious winner is FreeBSD.
Now, I found this to be incredibly hilarious and immediately downloaded the iso image into my Ventoy. I went through the whole installation process and even got myself a minimal KDE plasma Desktop Environment. However, I was unable to use the touchpad on my Thinkbook laptop (work-issued) and that completely killed my joy. I tried a couple of fixes but I realized this wouldn’t be as straight-forward as I had hoped, which would mean a lot more time invested trying to learn and fix it, and immediately dropped the towel. I will be back to FreeBSD, this isn’t over!
However, for the time being I moved on to the next item on my list: Linux From Scratch.
After reading the LFS Book for a while, I came to the realization that this would be a huge undertaking and that I’d need a lot of prep-work and further reading. I’m not giving up quite yet on the LFS, but It’ll have to wait. I said I had time, but not that kind of time.
(The fact that I even considered LFS after a silly little defect from FreeBSD makes you wonder if I’m mentally stable, but yet again, I’m choosing my new distro based on a tarot card I got two weeks ago at a party while I was piss-drunk, so, uh)
For the time being I’m sticking with NixOS. Upon reading this particular comment section I can tell it’s got a lot of dedicated users (and preachers), which is very exciting. I did some reading about Nix and it sounds fascinating. I have now installed NixOS on my Laptop and got everything working fine. Now it’s just a matter of learning how to properly use it. In the future I’d like to carry on with the LFS installation and bring the Nix package manager along, I believe it’d be really cool. Right now I must learn more, so I would appreciate any advice and resources.
I would say NixOS fits well the description of the “Death” card on tarot because it represents a new beginning and a completely different mind-set. So yay! Thanks guys and gals. I appreciate your recommendations.
Honourable mentions (Distro recommendations I found hilarious):
You might think I’m a bit of a chicken for not following through with the top winners, and you are most definitely right, but I still have to learn more and I need that laptop for work on Monday, so, uh, sorry