Andy

• Siduction
• openSUSE

It's unmatched for some of the things it does and sites it supports, but I think it's a nightmare for any distro or package maintainer. It wants to manage its own installation and updates, at the user level, pulling in who knows what code or binaries.

I think that makes it mechanically hard to handle, verify, or trust.

There are many advantages relative to bash, especially much better array handling, and comprehensive globbing and expansion expressions. You can reduce your reliance on external tools, which may have multiple alternative implementations (a source of unpredictability).

Some defenses are written up at

https://www.arp242.net/why-zsh.html

(not my post)

For me, fish's differences from older shells count against it without offering any compelling benefits.

Newer shells like nushell and oils/ysh are exciting and have a lot going on, but are not mature or familiar.

For Alpine Linux:

• support a different process supervisor
  • dinit, or
  • s6 with some high level sugar
• add something like the AUR

For Arch, you may like a project called aconfmgr.

For Arch Linux:

• support a different process supervisor
  • dinit, or
  • s6 with some high level sugar
• don't use Bash anywhere
  • port down to POSIX, and
  • port up to Zsh
  • port minimal launchers to execline
• replace PKGBUILD format, maybe with
  • nearly identical but Zsh
  • NestedText containing Zsh snippets
    • use this to render Zsh based on templates
      • my favorite template engine: wheezy.template
• build packages with more optimizations, like the CachyOS repos
• include or endorse something like aconfmgr
• port conf files to NestedText

A good live recovery distro that can mount bcachefs is one thing I've been waiting for before using that filesystem for a new install.

That this will have Arch tools (including arch-chroot, probably) makes this even better.

Plasma may not ever implement window shading for Wayland, but I'm hopeful. That's probably my last blocker.

I don't think apk would check multiple files for the world. But you could maintain them outside the apk mechanisms, just concatenating them into a single file, with tup/make/sh/whatever.

FWIW, Alpine Linux has a nice world file, too. And I am continually impressed by the selection of up to date packages in their Edge repos.

In 2020 I paid a one time fee for a lifetime of Pro. Is that definitely not still an option?

I'm not really recommending it over Arch, but my favorite rolling Debian distro is Siduction.