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.

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.

I use Arch and Debian. More issues on Debian for sure. Both have way fewer problems than Ubuntu. The myths around this really bug me.

Wayland runs great on the four 10+ year old machines that I have tried it on. Oldest is 2009.

A lot of the non-GNOME GTK desktops have elected to stick with GTK3. They even maintain a suite of applications (Xapps) that many of them share.

GTK 4 and higher are increasingly GNOME only (not that you cannot run them elsewhere—they just won’t fit in).

Arcan is a cool idea but you mostly hear about it from people complaining that Wayland is not ready. Of course, Wayland is already used by more than half of Linux users and Arcan does not really exist yet.

By the time GTK5 appears, a vanishingly small percentage of Linux users will need X11.

I run Wayland on 2009 hardware now.

As toolkits abandon X11, it is going to pressure other operating systems to move to Wayland as well.

FreeBSD is already moving. Even Haiku has Wayland support. So we are talking about the smaller BSDs and the Solaris derivatives. Or ancient operating systems on original hardware I guess. In which case, they can run the older apps which is likely all they can run anyway.

Worst, worst case, you can run Wayland on x11. If there is something you absolutely need, I guess you can run Wayland apps on x11 that way.

Q4OS with Trinity is a great pick for this user. Alpine is great but MUSL may cause problems. And I say this as a MUSL use (Chimera Linux). You are not going to find 32 but Flatpaks and Distrobox may be too complicated. So, I would stay away from MUSL based distros with 32 bit Linux on a 2 GB system.

MX and Antix are also Debian based and have 32 bit versions.

A 32 bit distro will make a BIG difference with that much RAM.

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.

Yhab

Rust is already dramatically more popular and widespread than ADA ever was ( outside the US military ). Devs that use Rust say they love it. I do not believe that is the rule for ADA.

Rust is also very well suited to extending existing C and C++ code bases. I do not know enough about ADA to compare but it is my sense that it is not as strong there.

There is no ADA in the Linux or Windows kernels.

BSD is well designed and cohesive but has many more missing bits and contraints than Linux. So, if you are in its sweet spot, it is awesome and maybe better than Linux. However, outside that it can be totally unusable.

For me, the biggest issue is the lack of software. There is both a mountain of it as it is of course an POSIX compatible OS and at the same time it is trivial to need important software that is missing.

As a desktop, it therefore feels very nice and also very limiting.

I love that it is actually real UNIX with an unbroken history back to the beginning. I find that really compelling. At the same time, I always get “bored” using it because it inevitably does not support what I want to do.

I am still hoping Chimera Linux finds a sweet spot that melds the two worlds in a nice way.