[lifeisstillgood]

For years I lived in FreeBSD world - servers and laptops. I was fighting the good fight and rationalised that having to only remember one location for network services was a win.

Then I took a second look. I realised that I was spending waaayy too much time getting the laptop usable (usually wifi) and not going enough using it

I bailed for ubuntu and I cannot remember where the network confit is and hate the GUI but I have stopped caring and I just do my work

Sometimes I feel dirty.

[gbmor]

I switched from Linux to OpenBSD, then to FreeBSD as my primary OS on my laptop, which involved a bit more set-up time than I was accustomed to with Linux, previously. Eventually I grew tired of the manual setup for so many things and bailed for Debian Sid.

It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I still get to tinker and scratch that itch.

[munmaek]

I went the same route. Arch -> Void -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian Stretch (no desktop, just xorg + i3).

I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc.

I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with random bugs :-)

[gbmor]

That is exactly how I feel.

[loxs]

Did the same, but for me the transition was from Linux (various flavours) to Mac OS. Feel even dirtier :(

[fulafel]

You can use the server cli/conffile driven networking tools, ifupdown (pre-18) / netplan (18.04+) even if you are on a laptop and running GUI. Just uninstall NetworkManager.

[commandersaki]

You know what shits me? Restarting networking remotely and realising you also need to restart the routing to install your routes. Whoops, many many many times over.

[rthomas6]

Arch Linux is calling you

[brokenkebab]

And what really stopped you from having your laptop finally configured?

[lifeisstillgood]

Frankly there was just too much to learn - I remember being totally chuffed I had found a slimline xdm replacement with no dependency on Gnome / KDE and yeah it is good and it is lightweight and I knew where the source code was but ... even if I found a slim lightweight version of every thing on a modern desktop - well I could not even list all the components.

There is a some unix replacement project trying to rewrite major parts "simply". But in the end you just don't understand 90% of what is going on or you have a tiny tiny server.

It's like everything these days is npm - install one thing and suddenly you find there are 900 packages installed including left-pad-0.3.4

[h1d]

What's so dirty bypassing that isn't productive for you?

[z3phyr]

What does productive mean? The thing that get you satisfaction or money?

[munmaek]

Being able to Just Do Things without mucking around in config files, building a, b, c things from source and dealing with random missing dependencies d, e, f. Then having to search online to fix Random Obscure Errors g, h i, etc, and so on. Or in the case of bsd-likes, maybe needing to write ports and adapt makefiles, etc.

I've gone Arch -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian for my main pc, and osx for my laptop. I used to like manually tweaking and configuring everything but these days I just want to turn on the computer and get into a workflow with as few headaches as possible.