Well. There are a few places around. The big ones are places like libera.chat, oftc.net, etc. Those are HUGE though (By irc standards) so sometimes it can get overwhelming trying to find somewhere to just hang out and chat. Slightly smaller servers tend to work better as an introduction, at least to me. Things like tilde.chat which has a clearly defined main chat area, and a lot of more niche chats for things you might be interested in.

Generally, if you get started on one server, and make some friends, join a few channels, find some interests, you’ll find your servers expanding. It’s a large enough ecosystem to have a LOT of people, but small enough that you’ll bump in to people you already know if you try multiple servers. Which is nice.

Come on in! It’s still just as wild and wonderful as it ever was!

cos irc just works. It worked just fine 20 years ago. It worked 20 ish years before that. In 20 more years it’ll still work.

Any idiot with some time and a computer can throw up an ircd and host a server for people to chat on. Every other chat program either requires some random company to host it, or a much deeper knowledge of computers and software.

The clients are available for every system around. From tiny little simple single connection clients, to massive complex graphical systems. You want to chat on plan9? There’s a client. An ancient amstrad cpc? There’s a client. (That one might be a bit more challenging) Android, Linux, Windows, Mac? All of them have clients, most of them multiple.

I will say, I like Matrix, I like XMPP, I am not a huge fan of any of the chat clients with a single point of failure like discord or teams or whatever. But IRC is still my favorite, and probably will be forever.

I just have it setup the way I want.

This is the only true way to use a PC.

This is such a weird take for me, and it’s popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.

Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.

Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don’t want to do that is bizarre.

Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.

Endeavor OS exists, it’s what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that’s why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.

Of course, you can have that opinion. After all. linux is about having a choice.

I think my favorite is probably Alpine. It’s fun to use, it runs really smooth, and I enjoy working out how things work differently to other systems. However, I have kids, so most of the time I have to use something that just does things without a fight, since I don’t have time to work out bits and pieces. So for that I use arch.

I haven’t really shopped around in a while, I just use the gandi forwarding rather than hosting mail, so the changes haven’t hit me yet. I hear porkbun.com is pretty good. They don’t offer free email but they do have cheap email hosting and apparently the cheapest prices for registering a domain.

I did it a long time ago, I found it easiest to do it by dual booting. Install a more common distro, but setup the disks yourself so you have a chunk of space available at the end of the disk, then install LFS on to the space you left from inside your regular distro. It means you can just leave it at any break point without having to figure out where you were. You have a working distro to play on whilst things compile as well, which is nice. Then you can just add the LFS install to grub and boot into it whenever you want once it’s at that point.