Use Slackware to Linux like it is 1993. Nothing wrong with that.

Ya. Ok. But pacman does not let you use the AUR. Using the AUR is one did the primary reasons to choose Arch.

So, if you want to use the AUR, you need to use something like yay or paru. And, if you do, you no longer need to use pacman.

To be clear to the newbies, pacman -Syu updates your entire system ( except packages from the AUR ). yay -Syu updates your entire system, including packages from the AUR.

If you just ran yay -Syu, running pacman -Syu will report that there is “nothing to do” since your system will already be up to date.

The same is true if you sub paru for yay above.

Paru is a yay alternative. You can use either one. Just pointing this out since yay is mentioned in a lot of the other comments. I am not saying not to use paru. I am just pointing out that it is not something different. You can use paru instead of hay in any of the other comments in this thread. Or use yay instead of paru in this one.

You are better off using -Ss with yay than pacman. If you use pacman, it only searches the Arch repos. If you use yay, it also searches the AUR.

The only thing I have ever installed using Flatpak on Arch is pgAdmin. Inkscape from the repos works fine for me.

If you go the EOS route, yay is already installed.

With my IISP, the base package comes with 4 TB of bandwidth and I pay and extra $20 a month for “unlimited”.

I am not sure of “unlimited” has a limit. It may. It is not in the small print though. I may just be rate limited ( 3 Gpbs ).

I think anywhere outside the US or Australia will do.

I have 3 Gbps home Internet ( up and down ). I get over 300 Megabytes per second.

Can they not torrent a bunch of that bandwidth?

We have this guy saying we cannot build all the Alpine packages once to share with all Alpine users. Unsustainable!

On the other hand, we have the Gentoo crowd advocating for rebuilding everything from source for every single machine.

In the middle, we have CachyOS building the same x86-64 packages multiple times for machines with tiny differences in the CPU flags they support.

The problem is distribution more than building anyway I would think. You could probably create enough infrastructure to support building Alpine for everybody on the free tier of Oracle Cloud. But you are not going to have enough bandwidth for everybody to download it from there.

But Flatpak does not solve the bandwidth problem any better (it just moves the problem to somebody else).

Then again, there are probably more Apline bits being downloaded from Docker Hub than anywhere else.

Even though I was joking above, I kind of mean it. The article says they have two CI/CD “servers” and one dev box. This is 2025. Those can all be containers or virtual machines. I am not even joking that the free tier of Oracle Cloud ( or wherever ) would do it. To quote the web, “you can run a 4-core, 24GB machine with a 200GB disk 24/7 and it should not cost you anything. Or you can split those limits into 2 or 4 machines if you want.”

For distribution, why not Torrent? Look for somebody to provide “high-performance” servers for downloads I guess but, in the meantime, you really do not need any infrastructure these days just to distribute things like ISO images to people.

/s This was a Snap trap and you walked right into it!! You are right, Flatpaks are great bit you cannot use them for everything. We all need to switch to Snaps so we can build our base packages in them!

Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.

Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.

I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.