From Gentoo to Arch
A while ago I came to realise that I spend way too much time updating my systems.
Doing emerge --sync etc way too often, especially for a command that takes so much time to complete.
After that it was usually emerge --depclean and then revdep-rebuild to get that rock solid system I wanted.
Simply a bad habit doing it so often instead of scripting.
I have also spent alot of time doing all sorts of configuration of mysql and postgre, apache, postfix and many other services.
Compiling linux many, many times and trying to make it as small and lean as possible.
In retrospective the work has been quite repetitive and more of the type of trying to figure out how somebody else has written a piece of software that one needs to figure out how it works and what it expects and what assumptions have been made.
Sometimes it is easy depending on how well documented it has been.
Other times it is very time consuming.
What I learned over these years was that it has not been as rewarding. I am spending less and less time with these things the last few years. Using Arch linux as my first choice has helped. I am a little less fond of the now almost ubiquitous systemd. I find it is awkward to use in comparison I don’t think binary logs are the better choice. I can certainly understand disto maintainers since the amount of packages you need is reduced by quite a bit. Now I use apper to keep my workstation updated. When I find the time I might try and find a similar thing for the server machine. One that does not pull in so many dependencies.