>>2102 (OP)
>What is your favorite operating system?
Linux, I guess. Been using it for most of the last 20 years. Mostly Gentoo and Void, but I'm trying Artix this week and finding it pretty ok, except for elogind, which is retarded. I was having a good time not installing x11 for awhile, sitting in the TTY with TMUX, Irssi, CMUS, w3m. I had figured out how to play videos in /dev/fb0, but not audio. As I discovered, you need to install SDL2 to build FFplay along with FFmpeg, and that pulls in some useless dependencies. MPV is worse, of course, and then MPlayer hilariously demands its own vendored FFmpeg.
I tried "antiX" a couple months ago— it's a distro designed to run from a USB drive. And it does. It's poorly documented, so you'll read about a dozen different ways to make this amnesiac-by-design OS remember things between boots, but for me it was a matter of luck to realize that once you're on a snapshot that isn't configured to do these things, the persistence options won't work, and the system won't tell you why.
I wanted to see what "user experience" it had to offer (via IceWM and such) so I allowed the Desktop Environment to stay, and holy shit I finally understand what linux haters hate so much about linux. Every GUI has something wrong with it. There's a "wallpaper" program with different scaling methods that all distort whatever image you give it to 16:9. There is no way to make it respect aspect ratio. You can't even use xwallpaper to set the wallpaper because that makes all the windows disappear, lol.
Is this the experience presented to the user who doesn't log into his TTY, and run xinit with instructions to run a tiling WM?
I wish that DE shit actually worked, because I nurse various notions about how software interfaces should work. I like, for example, the idea of an Oberon-like system where you have a text-based environment, but you can execute commands by clicking on them. Kind of like windows' shortcuts or the .desktop files, but further: text and code should be somewhat (totally?) idempotent.
In fact, I just spent the evening patching Suckless Terminal so that I can not only click on links, but select arbitrary words to make certain things happen. So far it's just if executable, offer to show the manpage but obviously you should be able to click and drag on a file and xdg-open it, open a directory in a new terminal, or maybe even look words up in the dictionary. And it doesn't need to be hare-brained, bloated, or half stuck in the '90s to do it! What a concept.
I also like the idea of the old Lisp Machines, where whenever something goes wrong you get a debugger screen pointing at the source where the problem occurred. No reason at all that Linux, despite being mostly C, couldn't also do most of that. You need sourcecode and debugging flags, which implies something like Gentoo...
I guess my favorite OS is actually Emacs, since that has had these features for decades.
>>2110
OBSD took a couple tries for me to start liking it. The install process includes making the discovery that there are no drivers for your wifi chip after having destroyed your partition table or whatever.
The notion of inadequate documentation being a bug is great, though. I learned how to make my own kernel while offline because of man section 8.