the horror of the day is the FHS. i know why it's Like That, but i've been dealing with issues over the past couple of days regarding which parts of the filesystem i can externalize and which ones i can't, as i want to be able to provision new roots with pacstrap whenever i want. further down the rabbit hole i discovered that sharing a /home partition isn't actually as safe as i've thought it was for years... ~/.config and ~/.local contain files that can't always be cleanly ported between roots.

some interesting ideas in https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html but as to what can be implemented right now by me with my current understanding, i think the only things i can safely externalize are /usr/local and /var/tmp and /var/cache maybe? even then i'm not 100% sure because there's no clean separation of state, and sometimes packages and programs will just dump shit wherever they think is appropriate. i've seen too much stuff in config directories that isn't actually config. idk what to do about that...

on some level i think i might vaguely want something like nixos/guix + flatpak + bottles but those are nonstarters because they won't work with some incredibly specific stuff on my system, like my blackmagic intensity pro 4k in obs studio, or like foobar2000 under wine with certain plugins. i've only been able to get that stuff easily working under arch, so i can't really move off of arch unless the alternative supports those specific things. hence why i've been trying to figure something out