I get the same all the time. OP reminded me to check today and Jetbrains toolbox had cached a lot of downloads that took up 42 GB in total. yarn folder with 2.3 GB. bazel folder with 15 GB (apparently used for building Anki),7 GB paru clones.
All in all it added up to 82 GB.
I’m on arch, which I consider one of the larger distros, where most such configuration is very simple. Not sure what rolling mesa is. I probably wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu to anyone who is against using Snap, but there are many distros to choose from if you want KDE as well? It’s more a question of why people would go for Hannah Montana Linux (figuratively speaking, some very niche distro).
But to respond to your core point, sure. If you do have a lot of customization needs for whatever reason, then by all means. (I still don’t get it)
I generally don’t understand why people go for the smaller ones at all. I guess it’s good that someone does to prevent the whole scene being dominated by a single distro, but with some exceptions (e.g. you hate systemd for some reason and really want systemd-less arch, or you have a super niche preferences). For 99% of distros it makes very little difference which one you use, except that you’ll have fewer resources at your disposal (fewer packages, fewer stack overflow threads, fewer everything).
Given your background it should come to no surprise that it doesn’t really matter much.
That said, I recommend Arch with some caveats, mainly with regards to the “very little effort to start using” requirement. If you know how to follow instructions, it should only be about 30-45 minutes to install it. It will on the other hand fit your other requirements of good defaults and not shipping with loads of applications. When you install an app you will get that app and nothing else, and the defaults will either be exactly what the upstream defaults would be if you built it yourself or something very close to that. You also have everything available through the AUR, and after using it for years I’ve yet to run into an update not going smoothly.
I’m well familiar with EEE, I’ve used Linux off and on for something like 20 years, back when Microsoft really was the boogeyman. I don’t think VS code qualifies for this category since it was originally (ish, has roots in Atom I think) open source and Microsoft. It was never embraced/extended, and extinguishing their own product makes no sense. (btw I don’t even use VS Code, shit vim plugins in my experience, jetbrains all the way)
WSL IMO is a concession on Microsoft’s part, because most dev tools nowadays are being made primarily with Linux in mind. It’s what makes Windows at all usable as a development platform in many situations. And pretty much nothing developed specifically for WSL. All WSL has on a normal Linux distro is integration with the host system AFAIK.
I hate Windows and dislike a lot of Microsoft products, but I think we’re way past Microsoft being the bad guy. They kinda like Linux now, and probably do more good than bad for it. There are much worse companies in tech, I think Microsoft’s worst crimes as of late is creating Teams and being boring.
How is it a pain? You just change the origin on your existing project, and new projects you just use the new one to start with.
That’s a promising idea, apparently my $TERM is not foot but xterm-256color by default. However starting with TERM=foot br or TERM=foot broot doesn’t seem to enable high res previews. :(
Anyone know if I can get the highres image previews in foot? I think I saw something about foot supporting the kitty graphics protocol, but I can’t get it to work. If I start it like normal I get low res previews, if I start it with TERM=kitty I get no previews.
For private use? Hot take, but Arch. It’s easy to maintain and not easy to break at all. I think I spend zero time on maintenance other than running package updates. I only reinstall when I get a new computer.
(I say for private use only because you’ll be getting weird looks from people if you use arch on a server in a professional setting, and it might break if you try to update it after five years of not doing it since there aren’t any “releases” to group big changes - in practice I run arch on my home server too with no issues)