throwawayish

It has been my pleasure! I’m curious on what you’ll end up doing. So please consider to report back if it isn’t too much to ask :blush: !

Going to try the penguins-eggs method you posted. I would love to be able to turn a virtual box environment into an installable medium to make my own version of debian with all my gnome tweaks.

Good choice! The “penguins-eggs method” should fit the bill ;) !

I would also love a solution that doesn’t require booting into the OS first. So that I can take a root dir and turn it into a bootable iso.

Few questions :P :

1. If I understood you correctly, you mean that all of the files that will make up the bootable iso are contained -presumably under FHS- within a root dir of another distro? Or did you mean it as a partition? Or did you mean any tool that can build your iso from within another system based on (declarative) instructions?
2. Are we still talking about Debian with all your GNOME tweaks?
3. Is Debian a hard requirement? Or would you be open to say something like Fedora?
4. Is Live USB a hard requirement?
5. Might seem random, but what’s your stance on declarative distros?

I tried a bunch of old tutorials for making a boot.iso and linking it into mkisofs with -b but it never worked.

Small nitpick; I generally recommend using xorriso over mkisofs, the latter is only packaged in most distros as part of xorriso anyways*. While genisoimage does ‘provide’ mksisofs as well, genisoimage is unmaintained and should therefore not be used.

Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they’ve had their heydays, but it’s time to move on.

Thanks for answering! Now I’ve got a better picture of what you’re trying to achieve. However, unfortunately, I’ve yet to dabble into LFS. So I’m afraid that I might not be that helpful 😭. Wish you the best of luck though!

The official manual page for xorriso is probably the best place to start. Unfortunately it mostly glosses over how it’s compatible with mkisofs and doesn’t further delve too much into what mkisofs does and thus how to engage with the -b flag. Fortunately, that information can be found on the related manual page for xorrisofs.

Please feel free to notify me if I can be of further help :blush: !

• uBlock Origin: On medium mode. Honestly, the internet mostly sucks without this excellent extension.
• Dark Reader: Easy on your eyes and prolongs battery life on OLED displays.
• Redirector: This allows you to be in full control of which sites/urls you redirect and to where. As it allows the use of regex, you’re even able to create your own ‘bangs’. For example I used !x as a bang to redirect me to my favorite SearXNG instance. Kinda neat.

Yeah lol 🤣 . Consider reporting back after testing your findings. Thanks in advance!

I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?

As other have already alluded to, any distro with a lightweight desktop environment should work on that laptop. However, we don’t know if it would work out for you; simply for the fact that you haven’t given any other information.

Unfortunately, we live in the reality in which an affordable laptop with open source (yet modern) hardware simply doesn’t exist. While the likes of Insurgo, NitroPad, NovaCustom, Purism, Star Labs, System76 and Tuxedo do commendable work on the software side of things; they still leave a lot to be desired as there is currently no laptop counterpart to what Raptor Computing Systems is able to achieve on the desktop.

Obviously I applaud Framework for what they’ve achieved for the “right to repair” and hope they’ll at least pave the way for what’s possible within the realm of open source hardware on laptops. Unfortunately, I’m a bit pessimistic as the way they’ve handled coreboot up till now has been far from desirable. But I’d love to be mistaken on this.