Interesting, how are you dealing with pacnew/pacsave files? From your explanation it seems that they would go into the read only filesystem and would need to be resolved manually and preserved there until some old version cleanup is ran.

And while I find the idea of a writable overlay filesystem for the /etc fascinating, I think that could have issues with some rollbacks and backwards incompatible config changes.

At the end of the day seems like a fascinating project, but I wonder if Arch+snapper wouldn’t be better overall.

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That’s an interesting idea, but if you make Arch’s root read only you’re leaving behind pacman/AUR (and to a good extent the Arch wiki) which are usually the main advantages of Arch based distros.

SteamOS solves the stability issue by providing runtimes for games, I didn’t read anything there about anything similar on your distro. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you’re not solving the stability issue, or in other words you will still be unstable as this will be a rolling release. In short I don’t see what would be the advantage of this over base Arch + Snapper (or timeshift).

In that regard, how is this different from Bazzite? I know it will be a different kernel and package versions but in principle the philosophy seems to be exactly the same, and I don’t expect the kernel/packages to be that different either.

What makes you think Google knows who you are? Just because it recommends videos you’re interested? Have you considered your interests might be average?

If you’re not logged in, using a system where you never logged in, connecting through Tor as you said google has no way of tracking you, so either one of those is a lie or you think it’s tracking you when it isn’t.

What do you mean? If you login the site has to know who you are, if you don’t then it won’t. What makes you think it knows who you are?

It comes pre installed, the question should be the other way around: why change the system? And I don’t think those two are sufficiently different to justify it unless you want to use the deck mainly as a PC.

That’s good, didn’t knew that but that’s a very smart move from them. Even so, that’s IF they know about that, also it only fixes the immediate issue of broken system, not the fact that you need to know what to do to not break it.

Cachy works great, it’s essentially a preconfigured Arch, but Arch issues for new users was never the installation process.

I’m very weary of recommending Arch distros to new users, Arch expects you to read the news and breaks stuff. 99% of the time for experienced users it’s fine, but new users tend to touch random configs when exploring which prevents pacman from upgrading them, and they won’t read the news to know about possible issues.

And before someone says Cachy is not Arch, it is, for this purpose it is, it suffers from the same thing by reason of being a rolling release that uses the same package manager. Just because YOU haven’t experienced a problem doesn’t mean it’s not there, I also have never experienced a similar problem with over a decade of Arch as my main distro, but it happens and you have to be blind to say otherwise.

Some tips for you:

• Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so

• Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it’s usable, but if you’re starting fresh 100% AMD.

• Don’t fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you’ll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I’ve heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have / and /home be different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that.

• Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that’s okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.

Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.

How much RAM does this use? And how is it different from Tinyauth or even Authelia?

Really? Never heard of that, which games did Valve did that?

Simple, look at what they invest the money in. Valve pays Proton developers and Linux support, GoG makes some ads about no DRM and invests something on preservation of games, Epic invests money on suing other companies and getting exclusives. Decide which of those is more important to you and spend money there.

Yeah, Gentoo is really good, but I dropped it the day I needed to edit a system, so I installed GIMP (there was no binary for it at the time), a few hours later I tried to open the image and realized I had forgotten to add the libpng (or similar) flag so didn’t had the support for the image type. Took me less time to install Arch than it would have taken me to recompile Gimp.

Why do you want to expose them? This might limit the solutions.

The way I do this is in 2 different ways:

1. Tailscale, my server connects to tailscale so all I have to do is connect to it from my phone and I can access things remotely easily. This is the best for most things, but has the downside that others can’t access it as easily

2. I have a VPS (two actually at the moment as I’m switching providers from Vultr to IONOS) that also connects to tailscale so it can access my home server through it, then using Caddy I expose the services on a subdomain of the VPS. This is what I do for things that others might want to access, or things I don’t want to have to connect to tailscale to access.

If you’re going down the second route do consider that you will need to:

• Add something like fail2ban or crowdsec to the VPS as attacks will happen.
• Same reason you should add a dedicated authentication on front of most things. While I don’t expect the auth on services to be weak, it might be more vulnerable than a dedicated authentication service. You should look into Authelia, Authentik, or similar to put on front of your services so any attacker would first have to pass that to even get to your services.

I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.

What sort of file manager crashes were you having?

Pacman doesn’t fetch from the AUR.

I’m not a law expert, but I think even in Germany you would need to prove a pattern not a one off banned a black/trans person to accuse of discrimination. Otherwise any negative repercussion to a black/trans person would generate a discrimination lawsuit, and that just seems absurd.

I assume that if codeberg forces this it will do so with the most egregious offenders, because like you have pointed out it’s impossible to differentiate good code written with AI tools from good code written without them, but bad code written with AI tools is sometimes very differentiable from bad code written without them. And at the end of the day they’re trying to safe-guard against lawsuits over it (as the person uploading the code is not the owner) and becoming a slop repository.

But also, here’s the thing, they’re not making money of you hosting your code there, so it’s much harder to force them to take someone’s data. You could force Google to host your photos if you were unjustly banned, you can’t force me to do so if you found a loophole to use my server for that.

How would it be legally challengeable? No one can be legally forced to host someone else’s data against their will, that sounds ludicrous, otherwise people could sue YouTube for removing their videos before they were legally required to.

The TOS are essentially a way to let you know what they will consider, but legally they can remove your repo without any reason, they’re not legally required to host your data.

Yeah, I can see that. But I don’t think that knowing Ansible will teach you that difference. OP seems to know enough about Linux to be comfortable so I would expect him to be able to distinguish between those.

I agree that Nix has a steep learning curve and it’s not for everyone, but OP specifically asked for a way to declare their system, and Ansible doesn’t work for something you’ll setup now to use in 6 months when you decide to reinstall the system, because the best case scenario is you get your system as it was 6 months ago, but more realistically it doesn’t work and you have to spend time fixing it or doing it manually.

Don’t get me wrong, Ansible is great, I manage my home server with it, but if I go a while without running the pipeline when I do it rolls back several changes I made manually to test and forgot to consolidate. Nix is annoying because it forces you to declare everything every time, but you’re guaranteed to get the same result you have now, which is very important for the case OP asked about.

You should have a look at NixOS. It’s a Linux distro where you declare the whole system in configuration like files, in a language called Nix (hence NixOS), then you run a command and that gets resolved into your system.

It takes a long time to setup the first time, but it’s a breeze when you need to reinstall, and you will never need to reinstall as every boot is a fresh copy of the system you declared.

There’s also a thing called home-manager which uses the Nix language to declare your home configuration. That part can be used in any other Linux by installing the home-manager package.

You can declare your OS in a way that the home part is portable for machines running other systems. I do that, then my machines are very easy to declare, and with some groups for things like Base (Terminal, prompt, some things I expect to have on every system like Python, nvim fully configured, etc), Gaming (Steam mostly), UI (Sway, many GUI things I use like browser with extensions, etc) I can add configs for a new machine in instants depending on what I expected for it, and if I ever want to convert my “Steam machine” into a desktop it’s just a couple line changes, regenerate the config and it’s exactly the same as my laptop.

Honestly I don’t think Nix is for everyone, but it’s a very niche thing that works extremely well for what it sets up to do, and if you’re in the target audience it’s a game changer.