The funny thing for me is I swapped to fedora after my last attempt to use arch failed spectacularly.
I’ve found I’m at a point where I just want my device to work and work well
Just means your over 25
/me a 42 year old that uses Arch
I take that personally.
/me adjusts my knee high socks.
42 and wearing long socks like that? You need help bud’
Once you hit 40 your knees need all the help they can get.
Lol I’m close. Not quite there yet but looks like my linux habits have a head start
I’m on kubuntu. I can just Google questions with ubuntu attached to the query and it tells me a gui solution if it’s available. Bonus, there’s far less people telling me I’m doing it wrong, they just assume I’m a newbie.
The literal ArchWiki says you may not want to use Arch if you are happy with your current OS.
based
This is good, i hope somebody printed this and hand it over to Arch Linux cult
Use NixOS
I’ve been running cachyOS for the last few months…
i’ve heard a bunch of people talking about cachyos
i use endeavour os, and when i get my pc back (i moved and haven’t been able to build it yet) i’m planning on installing base arch
so, what are the upsides to cachyos?
As a gaming-oriented distro, CachyOS is ready to use right out of the box. It’s similar to Endeavor, but goes a few steps further with its opinions. I’d still be using it if it weren’t for AUR’s serious malware problems.
hmmm interesting. i might use it, but now i need to know more about the AUR’s malware problems. i haven’t heard of them and am now kinda scared
I don’t even notice Debian, which is exactly how an operating system should work.
And yet…
I love this
Here’s the thing. When I talk to friends interested in Linux, it’s always Debian or Fedora that I suggest. I think they draw a good line for what the average user wants and needs and they’re stable. In fact, I used Fedora for a long time, and all my homelab stuff runs Debian. It wasn’t until computers themselves became a hobby that I switched to Arch. And I think that’s likely the cutoff. If you’re a computer user, stable distros are great. If you’re more a hobbiest… Well, the Arch wiki can own your free time.
Debian is where the jaded users end up when they lack the will to flash another usb stick.
“I’m good, fuck it.”
Sounds lovely for making a swiss-army-knife of distros.
“Man I wish I could do more with my new computer” – Fedora
“Yeah I just want to breathe some new life into this old laptop and have it last me until the end of time” – Debian
NixOS has entered the chat
Normal distro -> arch -> gentoo -> nixOS -> QubesOS -> Debian pipeline.
The only problem with Debian is that I want packages from this century.
Thats what you think you want but by the time you’re at the end of the pipeline you just want a computer that works.
So far, that’s exactly why I’ve stopped at Nix.
Everything is declared exactly how I want it. If something would break, it just bails on the update. If I want to set up a new machine, I just clone my config and build it.
I’m not sure what could be more “just works” than that.
When I went 24.11 it exploded in some fantastic manner. None of my boot menu rollbacks worked. I spent a long ass time trying to recover the upgrade. I eventually realized it would be a lot faster to wipe, reinstall, re-import my old home and configuration.nix and I was back up.
25.05 didn’t even flinch, just worked.
Now I’m patiently waiting for postmarket to sort out LTE modems on phones before I buy an old pixel and install nixos on it :)
In my experience that means packages from this century. Eventually you do need a new software for something. Trying to get software from 10 years ago to agree with software released in the last 6 months leads to breaking things or finding myself doing Linux From Scratch on top of debian or ubuntu.
It turns out if everything is new everything really does just work. That’s why I use Artix (child of Arch). It’s less pain. You just have to ignore the myth that these systems are “hard.” Graphics cards and Steam work out of the gait. There is a reason why StreamOS is built on Arch.
No more compile hell in the rare case you need to compile because the AUR does the same thing, but in a single command line resolving all dependencies. It’s like compiling without the experience of compiling.
Just make sure you always
pacman -Syubeforepacman -S {package}. No exceptions. Or in rare cases you may have to chroot from a live disk andpacman -S linuxto fix your initramfs. If you do that one thing nothing ever breaks.
Almost every interaction with a boomer involving their computer/phone
The zoomers and gen-alpha aren’t doing much better. Just ask the average teen what a filesystem is and how to find a file without it being organized in some sort of media gallery app.
As a millennial, I often feel like I’m surrounded by tech illiterates on both the upper AND lower sides of my age bracket.
You are absolutely right
It’s dumb as hell to most here, but ordinary users their own ideas on what a desktop should look like that often doesn’t agree with the intelligentsia. Just let them have it.
The computer in the picture is infected with adware
If everything is the way you like it, you are winning. Keep on winning.
Dosent even have to be the way you like it. It only has to be the way that lets you get work done. If you can get work done on your thinking sand tool then it is a good tool.
Arch is for new users, experienced ones use Gentoo
Calm down there Satan.
echo 'os-distro/gentoo -satan' >> /etc/portage/package.use emerge -yvuDN @world
Neither one of those will put hair on your chest, Saddle up NixOS, that’ll make you want to stab people in the eye… still fun tho
If Nix wasn’t binary (at least it was last time I checked.
Dunno, it never seemed too interesting to me.
I moved to fedora after a decade on Arch.
Feels like home.
I don’t get distro hopping
There are better uses for your time
But hey, do as you want
Yeah at some point they are all the same to me it’s just the different package manager. Pacman, apt, yum or whatever they are calling it now a days.
Most use systemd.
I started using Arch flavors because when you have brand new hardware the latest kernel can be important. After the machine is a couple years old it doesn’t really matter.
Also Endeavouros is where it’s at (but don’t tell the vanilla Arch people, they won’t help me with my problems if they find out)
they are all the same
If anyone is interested in something different, I could recommend Guix. No systemd. The package manager works different than your typical
apt.Agreed. After years of Ubuntu (who remember single digits?) Endeavour OS really knocked it out of the park on my new laptop. Everything smooth as butter, out of the box. Hibernation works on a bleeding edge device. No tearing. HDR works. VRR works. YouTube 4k 60fps no drops. Games run beautifully.
Okay, some BT issues, and the Wifi card is crap, and I don’t know how much of this is due to having an AMD graphics vs NVIDIA. But it’s sooo damn smooth. Games just work. KDE plasma >>>> gnome, and I say that as a gnome user since canonical killed unity.
Don’t get me started on the arch ecosystem and documentation. yay 😁
Just do what you’ve been wanting to do for a long time
I think when you first get into Linux it’s a valid thing. you want to find the distro that you’re most comfortable with.
When I first started using linux I tried them all and eventually just settled on Arch because it felt right to me. That being said I don’t knock anyone who uses whatever. A good friend of mine online uses Slackware and he loves it, it works for him. There’s no “wrong” distro, it’s whatever works for you. you have to initially hop around though to find that though.
Also distro hopping is great when it comes to helping people, especially new linux users. I’ve made many friends within the community because for a solid year I just hopped all over the place and tried to learn it all.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian when I got pissed about something.
But it’s not a hop, more like a leisurely walk 😀
See the world, they said…
What is grass and why should I touch it?
Lol, The grass is kind of okay but that brake glowing thing in the sky can f right off
It causes cancer so how good is it really
You can have your cake and eat it too! Just install Arch in a VM to play around with without jeopardizing the stability of your main machine. Once you feel comfortable, you can make the switch. Or not. Having choices is great.
I feel a lot of people really forget that virtual machines exist.
Unpopular opinion: I love Ubuntu. No, I don’t use snaps at all. I have an Nvidia GPU and it’s literally the only OS working out of the box. Yes I tried Debian, I’m too busy to fiddle with drivers. No, I can’t get rid of the GPU, I depend on it for critical workflows. I love the minimalism of Gnome. Never liked KDE/Cinnamon honestly, they’re too busy for my tastes. For 15 years I’ve tried other distros and I’m always back on Ubuntu. I’ll ride the purple penguin to my grave.
Downvotes only please.
It certainly seems like public opinion changed the tast ten years or so. As an ubuntu user, could you confirm or deny these claims I’ve seen? One is that firefox is a snap even if you try to install it with apt. Another is that they show ads to get paid ubuntu in the terminal output?
I can confirm them both. I’m considering moving to Debian because of this.
You can uninstall snap and use flatpak for those apps but it was a slap in the face when Firefox suddenly was replaced by a snap through apt
Oh that’s a bit underhand, especially when they must be well aware that snap can be unpopular.
If you really like Ubuntu, Linux mint Ubuntu version comes with the snap defaults removed.
I really liked Ubuntu back when the color scheme was more brown/orange, it seemed so friendly. The last ten years I’ve been on Debian though, but LMDE seems interesting.
LMDE is great, it’s what I recommend to all new Linux users. Lots of tiny things that remove friction, like not requiring Sudo for apt and showing stars when typing a password.
I with they would align LMDE with regular Mint in one aspect though, that there would be an out of the box btrfs layout that matches what Timeshift expects (iirc @ and @home?) which is different from how debian and therefore LMDE sets it up automagically. Maybe this has changed in recent years.
True and true.
If you do a minimal install, it will still force apt to install snapd and snaps for certain packages, including Firefox. It can be worked around, but it’s very hard to keep snaps out of your system. This is why I dumped Ubuntu and never looked back. Fedora is my happy place, now.
You got me there, firefox is the only snap I really use. Probably can be removed and replaced with apt version but honestly I don’t care much. I tend to clean reinstall frequently and I leave as much in the default setup as I can.
If it works, it works. But it does cause me to have another step to update everything, which is slightly annoying. And yes I don’t like Canonical’s insistence on snaps. I just try to avoid them really.
Ads, certainly never seen them.
Joke’s on you, downvotes aren’t a thing on my instance, you’ll take my upvote and you’ll like it
I’ve had 0 problems out of Debian since bookworm.
That said, I daily drive Nix and use Ubuntu LTS for servers because I’m too lazy to keep up with it otherwise.
I thought Canonical got on board with spying ages ago. May I do not recall correctly.
Historically they have had a lot of funding problems. There’s been at least two or three times where they’ve partnered with somebody for marketing opportunies. And the egregious things were over a decade ago now. They decide to market with somebody, put an ad in there default desktop, or install a default application, or collect user data from dash, being open source it’s been noticed immediately and they end up rolling it back. Hell, it’s the reason half the forks exist.
Sure, people still get edgy about everything they do at this point but realistically they’ve not been all that bad. But I wouldn’t trust them with closed source for a second.
At current I think they’re only collecting some super basic user information and it is opt out. And to me from a server standpoint I don’t really care what they’re doing at the desktop level. I don’t even really care about snaps because I’m not installing anything on that box that would use snaps. It’s like firewall, kubernetes, and some monitoring tools. They’re not doing command line spying on my kubectl.
They’re a good choice for a headless server. They’ve got a nice long LTS with support for years. Their agile on security fixes. And they keep their repos pretty current.
My second choice would be Debian. They have an LTS service where people are only encouraged to pay. But imo their repos aren’t anywhere near as up to date.
I tried
I cannot downvote a GNOME lover
Nobara works ootb too if you ever want to try a fedora spin. they even have a separate installer for nvidia users.
I’ve always admired Ubuntu for making installing nVidia driver pretty painless.
I don’t know nVidia gpu you have, but I’m looking at immutable distros and I found Aurora, (based on Fedora Kinonite). Before I even downloaded the iso, they asked if I had an nVidia chipset and which one. I simply selected the driver for my older 1650 chipset and they automatically added the correct driver into the iso. I installed it and everything was working properly on first boot.
It was without a doubt the most painless nVidia driver install I’ve ever had on ANY OS.
Trying to help with the downvote situation. Glad you decided on a distro that works for you and you’re not succumbing to the pressure.
Install Guix
Guix’s FOSS stance is cool, but Nix is much more mature
Guix’s FOSS stance is… cool… I guess… but can be very impractical. The main channel only ships linux-libre which will give you problems on most modern hardware. I immediately had to add
nonguixto get my laptop working.No, the reason I went with Guix is because their tools and APIs seem/feel a bit more polished than Nix. I also feel better about learning Guile Scheme because it’s a more general-purpose language than Nixlang and I just personally found it more intuitive.
But yeah Nix is definitely more mature, has more packages, and has more documentation scattered about. Also, Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of systemd… which… I don’t know how I feel about that yet…
How do you do Flakes with Guix? When I tried to use it, the closest I could get was a script using time-machine to output a lockfile, and it was still missing many other important features such as inputting other Flakes and their dependencies. Also NixOS/Home Manager have tons of configuration options that integrate with each other (i.e. Shell integrations, stylix) that Guix doesn’t have so with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful. Also on aarch64 Guix is way bugger and like half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time, their lack of quality control was also one of the things that pushed me to Nix.
The one thing I do miss from Guix though is the containerized shells.
Unpopular opinion: install community distros, not corporate ones. That way you can support the developers for their hardwork. Redhat doesn’t need our money, they already make enough of it. I use CachyOS, btw.
Which ones are corporate besides Redhat and what’s the relation to this post?
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed sends it’s love.
Hi, Tumbleweed 👋🏽
I just switched to CachyOS and I’m really enjoying it so far. My journey so far has been Mint > Bazzite > Kubuntu > back to Mint > CachyOS and for the first time I don’t have any real complaints. There’s a voice inside my head telling me to jump to just standard Arch though. Not really sure why. Have you tried standard Arch? If so, how does it compare to CachyOS? I probably won’t end up switching, I haven’t had any issues yet and I’m a computer problem magnet and certified idiot, so I’ll probably stick to what works, but something draws me to pure Arch.
Standard arch is just a downgrade from cachy if you just want a functional computer and not have to think about it.
I’ve run vanilla arch for quite a while. CachyOS is a ton better. Arch is barebones and you have to do everything yourself. If you have the time and patience to do it, then more power to ya. I’m a dad of two, one of which is on the spectrum. So, I wanted something like Arch that just works and doesn’t require too much maintenance, and cachy has been just that.
I’ve not had a single major issue with it in the 3 months it’s been running on my machine. Just your normal Linux annoyances. I love how the gaming package on cachy is literally one click of a button. Also, it’s a lot faster
Thanks for your input. I’m going to be a dad soon, so I should probably stick with cachy then.
Dude, fucking congratulations 🎉🎉. And yes, your PC should never take time away from your kids. I love taking care of mine, they’re so much fun. I love that my PC just works. And if Cachy gives me any trouble, it’s gone and will be replaced with something immutable like Bazzite. I legit want my machine to JUST work with minimal issues. I have had Bazzite on a laptop I have for close to 6 months now and it’s rock solid and a true just works distro.
Thanks man, yeah I’m pretty excited. I’ve always wanted kids, it’s crazy to think I’m finally going to have one soon.
For sure, family always comes first, especially kids.
