alma VS rua

Check out ALMA for creating a bootable USB with preset files for custom packages.

I'm a big fan of this project for managing portable arch installs: https://github.com/r-darwish/alma

This above wiki led me to ALMA https://github.com/r-darwish/alma

Something like this would work to setup a portable USB install: https://github.com/r-darwish/alma. You can install whichever DE you want on top of that.

I'd recommend Arch Linux for developers.

It takes a little bit of set-up / learning at the start. But you can easily try it out with a tool like ALMA - https://github.com/r-darwish/alma

See my preset files here - https://github.com/jamesmcm/arch-i3-usb

But PopOS is probably the closest to the previous beginner Ubuntu experience now.

As a bonus for the only thing I can possibly think your trying to do, here is ALMA, the lazy man's Arch Linux Mobile Appliance(usb) creator.

I've used alma to make portable Arch installs for a couple of years with good results. Maybe give that a try if you can't sort the issues with your current portable install.

You can use ALMA to create a persistent USB disk - https://github.com/r-darwish/alma

I'd recommend checking out ALMA for creating pre-configured, persistent USB installations. Here is my collection of preset files.

Although I like the project and look forward to testing it (and possibly switching over), I really don't like that Alma already is the name of a linux distro (https://github.com/r-darwish/alma).

> While I find projects in those other languages to also have too many dependencies, it's no where near what happens in JS apps. I'm thinking of projects I've recently worked on in Rust, PHP, and Java.

My experience with these new languages is such that this feels a bit unfair. It's like insisting that a disaster with 1000 fatalities is "much worse" than one with "only". It's ... true ... I guess, but there's something uncomfortable about making the comparison. Something has gone badly wrong if the comparison even needs to happen in the first place.

What I'm getting at is that e.g. Rust has an enormous problem in this area. It's not uncommon for me to see Node projects with over a thousand transitive dependencies, but on the other hand, I very frequently see Rust projects with over a hundred. And the Node projects tend to be more complicated than the Rust ones; they do more.

Take the last Rust program I tried to use, tealdeer. [1] If you don't know, tldr is a project that provides alternative simplified man pages for commonly used programs that consist entirely of easy to understand examples for the program. [2] What a tldr client needs to do is simply to check a local cache for each lookup, and if necessary update the cache online. It's a trivial problem that can be, and has been! [3], solved in a few hundred lines of shell (if you're being extremely verbose). How many recursive dependencies would you guess tealdeer uses? Depends on how you count, of course, but as of today the answer is ~133 deduplicated dependencies! For a program that's a glorified wrapper around curl!

Or another Rust program I looked at recently, rua [4]. In Arch Linux, the AUR is a repository of user maintained scripts for building and installing software as native Arch packages. Official tools for the building and installing software already exist for Arch, but it is common for users to use a wrapper around these tools that makes fetching and updating the software from the AUR easier. It's a relatively simple task that (once again) can be done with shell scripts. rua is such a wrapper. As of today it uses 137 deduplicated dependencies!

These Rust programs are simple terminal tools to do tasks that are almost trivial in nature. And yet they require hundreds of constantly updating dependencies! The situation may well be better than what you'll find for Node, but it's undeniably disastrous compared to either simpler languages without a built in package manager (like C) or more complicated batteries-included languages where best practices continue to prevail (like Python).

[1] https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer

[2] https://tldr.sh/

[3] https://github.com/raylee/tldr-sh-client/blob/main/tldr

[4] https://github.com/vn971/rua

I gotta dig into rua too, seems cool!

Rua can do local patches (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helper#Comparison_tables)

https://github.com/vn971/rua#install-the-aur-way