ArcaOS, KolibriOS, AROS, FreeDOS, Plan 9, TempleOS, or even just an older version of Windows or Linux.

What’s your use case? How’s your experience?

  • I do! I daily drive SourceMage Linux. I found it while I was spelunking distrowatch (along with its brother, lunar linux - they both branched from sorceror back in the day) I ended up having so much fun tinkering with it I ended up writing some spells (packages) for it and ended up getting pulled on as a spell maintainer :) I don’t really have a use-case for it; Before it, I was hopping between arch and void linux. I do really enjoy the freedom I have though with SMGL - it’s a source-based distro, so it’s similar to Gentoo in a sense. Plus I just enjoy having a deeper look into things! I break stuff often and sometimes spells don’t install correctly/have problems but solving those issues just makes it that much more fun :) I do highly recommend it for anyone looking into trying out a source-based distro and Gentoo doesn’t interest them. (we’re #sourcemage on libre.chat IRC, come say hi if you’d like, or if you need help installing, i’ll happily walk anyone through the process!)

    • I haven’t touched SourceMage in over a decade, but I loved how the terminology made it feel like you’re a wizard casting spells to build up everything.

      I could never get it working 100% but if I can find a good burner laptop I might just have to give it a go again.

      • Yeah it’s honestly hard to get set up - we haven’t had a new ISO in a solid decade so the only way to install currently is via tarball. Our installation guide though is pretty good, and we’re always happy to help people getting it up-and-running :) I’m in the IRC 24/7 for the most part so i’m always available to assist. If you decide to, i’ll see you in there! As for a burner laptop - you can install SMGL on just about any device (we have 32-bit support still!) I have SMGL installed on a few of my netbooks ;) … compile times are less than savory though lol, 1+ day for glibc compilation, the misery…

        (I will note though that the only huge downside to SMGL is that we don’t have multilib support - 64-bit is 64-bit only, which means no native things like Steam that require 32-bit libs)

        (( we have workarounds though, i’ve added flatpak to SMGL and steam runs perfect in it!))