Well, if you’re okay using 3+ years old versions of various software…
With bugs that were fixed years ago, but won’t make it into your distro’s repo for years.
Pop/cosmic let’s go!
yo you can just turn a choice into a meme and the crowd will go crazy
You’ll never become the governor of South Dakota like that
I’ve been using Arch (btw) for a few months now and have been really enjoying it. I am scared that something is going to break though. I have Timeshift and BorgBase backups but I would rather not deal with that tbh. I haven’t tried Debian yet but I think I might make it my next distro. However, it’s going to be really hard to give up the AUR and Arch wiki.
aur can mostly be replaced by flatpak and the arch wiki generally works in every distro
Consider btrfs for your next install then. Won’t boot? Fine! Just select your last automatic snapshot in grub.
Best of both worlds:
- install boring stable distro
- use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.
Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.
Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.
I think you meant to say nix lol.
Is Homebrew any good on Linux tho?
Homebrew is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
I use it on my recent Linux Mint install. Mint has pretty old packages or enormously bloated flatpacks, that come with limitations.
neovim only came in an ancient version, that doesn’t support lazyvim. Nicotine+ came as ancient from the Mint packages or as a 4 GB monster via flatpack.
I used Homebrew and everything installed quickly in current versions and worked like a breeze.
The great thing about Homebrew is that removing it is as easy as
rm -r /home/linuxbrewNix is great as well of course and very powerful. Can be a bit of a bitch to write all the config files though.
I have many other things I’d rather do on my computer, than mess around with the OS. I just want one that works and stays out of my way. Oh, and doesn’t spy on me.
I use Arch BTW full-time for work and personal for about 3 years now and haven’t had any issues at all.
The only issue I ever had was Arch ARM changing the naming convention for network devices and making me have to plug the first Raspberry Pi that I upgraded into a monitor to debug what was going on.
This was annoying for sure, but less annoying than using a 6 year old Python version like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work…
I see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.
That thing didn’t even have a base Exception class.
I worked with someone who uses arch on his work laptop
One day it just died and he had to spend a day or two setting it all up again
I mean, its not common, but it happens
That doesn’t happen. When it breaks, it’s always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)
Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don’t have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven’t had an issue yet.
Yep, the only time things have broken in Arch for me has been with Nvidia driver updates.
Yep. Funnily enough, never really had any issues with the drivers on a desktop, only on mobile, mostly switching between integrated and discrete. But after messing with them on my laptop for a few years, you better bet my laptop was only running Intel integrated and my desktop runs on amd.
Skill issue.
I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.
I’d guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.
been using Artix and Arch for two years, for work and play, no issues
I think bleeding edge linux is probably more stable than windows
Yeah, people like to think that bleeding edge means “untested”. As if your OS was directly receiving the dev’s
git push…I wonder if there’s a package manager that does just that, I want the real bleeding edge!
Portage allows that to some extent - you can make it install thr latest of everything. Depending on the ebuild, a lot of that will be straight from git. Master branch, not some random working one, mind you, but still.
Around 10 years here. Some issues, but much less time wasted in total than if I had done “dist-upgrade”s the whole time.
whats dist-upgrade? this is the first time ive heard of it
It’s what Debian and similar distributions use to switch from one stable release to the next. This happens every half year for Ubuntu and every blue moon for Debian, which makes it a significantly more error-prone process than updating Arch every week in my experience.
The LTS released every other year) is supported 5 years.
Oof, that’s probably almost a full reinstall when you upgrade, depending on how stable your stack is. A lot of services will will have breaking config changes in that time frame.
One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)
I’ve used several distros over the years, and out of all of them, the only distro where I’ve faced zero intractible problems has been CachyOS.
Also Linux is just more mature
I use Debian testing for… 20 years? I had serious problems with it. Twice. Nothing unrepairable, but still I needed another machine with internet to fix the problem. I suppose that is ok stability-wise for 20 years.
Sounds like the exact reason that official debian backports came into existence.
I choose the bleeding edge because nothing else cuts it.
This but new Linux users. They get attracted to the worse newbies distros every time
What’s the best one, apart from Mint?
The typical advice is:
- Mint
- ElementryOS
- Fedora
- Pop!
- Ubuntu (unpopular with Extremely Online people, but is pretty good at the Just Works for normies)
- Debian Stable for older hardware
Fedora
really? I haven’t touched regular fedora, how is the “vanilla” version different to derivities and other “vanilla” distros like debian or arch?
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community.
I have never installed Arch, but I guess it doesn’t; but debian does come with various DEs , including KDE and Gnome.
Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops.
ah ok, so fedora is generic and more up to date for new hardware, but debian lacks … cutting edge support, otherwise, it’s just as good for newbies.
And arch is still wiki based to install, even if you use archinstall.
Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
As usual OpenSuSE gets totally forgotten. Tumbleweed is 5the most stable rolling release I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.
Min- oh.
I don’t really know a bunch of distros, but I helped convert some normies so here’s a list of pain points I rather not have as a first experience
- No rolling distro. While some people may never see an issue in their life, some may see it right away. Bad first impression (Someone insisted on starting on fedora, then noticed the hard way that the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel)
- easy Nvidia driver install (only for gamers on Nvidia)
- Has a gui app store
- has a common package manager that is often shown in tutorials (like apt. You always see exemple apt commands)
- sudo is configured
- doesn’t have a DE that tries to revolutionize UX
New users are dumb, so it needs to be easy for them
Sudo is configured in the Debian installer, if you click the “root not allowed to log in” checkbox. So it literally checks all your boxes.
Oh? Didn’t know about that. Thanks
Just checked, and sadly it’s not as straightforward as that.
Sudo is configured if you leave the password field blank for the root user.
Which is of course documented in the installation guide, but hardly anyone ever reads that.RTFM I guess
Just use nyarch /s
Pop was mine,
Yep I outgrew it and moved on to better and worse distros. But pop helped me kick windows to the kerb
LTS is all fun and games and stability until someone releases an update with features that I really really want right now. This is why I keep coming back to KDE neon.
I’m really curious as to what those features would be?
Most recently I switched from Debian because the version of plasma I was running had a bunch of little issues running wayland on my Nvidia card (bought when i was running windows, will be going amd… Someday). The new version of plasma had a bunch of Nvidia specific fixes that wouldn’t make it down to my system for months.
Tbh, I also kinda like the little issues that i occasionally have with rolling release distros. I learn a lot from having to fix things and it keeps me sharp.
I have this, but in Windows 11. I’m stuck.
Windows 11 will never touch my home machines, but I still need to use Windows for a couple things. I’m so happy there’s Windows 10 LTSC ioT.
Same here. I want to ditch Windows 11 so badly, but I tried Linux Mint and I lost half my frame rate in games. I guess if you use a Nvidia GPU on Linux then you’re shit outta luck sadly, as I heard the reason is poor driver support. If I did something wrong I’ll gladly try Linux again but I don’t have high hopes it will work now :(
Tumbleweed and Nvidia Proprietary drivers worked really well for my games. There is Bazzite that’s ready to go for gaming too.
nvidia drivers are good performance-wise, you should have installed the proprietary ones because mint comes with nouveau, which does not perform well at all. if you did that, let’s talk about L3 cache. ironically gaming on low end hardware is worse on linux because apparently proton needs quite a bit of that cache. my previous cpu (9600kf) had 9 MB and it was hopeless, current one has almost 100 and performance is not an issue anymore.
btw pop os comes with proprietary nvidia drivers so you don’t need to think about it all, but because they ship it with their half-done cosmic de, can’t recommend it to newcomers anymore…
100%, biggest performance upgrade I ever experienced for Linux gaming was upgrading to a X3D CPU.
My CPU (Ryzen 9 3900XT) is a 12 core CPU paired with an RTX 5080. My CPU sucks for gaming and is meant more for workstations, so you might be onto something here…
What games specifically? Some distros require a bit more driver installation, so maybe that was part of it (was running an rtx 2070 super on linux until a few months ago on linux, didn’t have any issues with frame rates). The poor driver support is mostly on laptops, as they sometimes have issues switching between integrated and discrete graphics.
Opensuse Tumbleweed is my way to go and I am pretty happy. Also do have an NVIDIA Card…
On my system I am using kde x11 instead of wayland for the same reason. Last time I tried wayland I was getting half of the framerate compared to x11.
At some point I want to switch to a gaming-oriented distros and see if it’s magically better there.
Did you install the actual nvidia drivers or were you just using the default nouveau driver?
I tried both propietary drivers and the open source (x.org) drivers. All were lower FPS. Ryzen 9 3900XT + RTX 5080 for reference
You need to change to a newer kernel when you use Mint for gaming. It has a GUI for it.
But personally, I’d just install Bazzite instead, it has all gaming- related optimizations built in from the start.Thank you so much!
I’m just waiting for win 11 to fail catastrophically in me. That will definitely give me the time to install Linux… checks notes… Debian?
Yep that’s my plan, whenever my Win11 install becomes broken, I’ll make the switch, laggy games be damned! Maybe we can install Arch so we can fit in with the Linux crowd and finally say “I use Arch btw”
TFW Windows drops everything you’re doing to automatically install unstable updates
Best feeling ever.
I had an update today knock out my wireless card. We’re living on the edge.
I’ve been very happy with Endeavour / Arch on my desktop for the past year until last week. Issues when waking up the desktop, Plasma panels disappearing, resolution forced to the minimum, etc. I rolled back the kernel to the LTS version and it fixed a few things. I can’t complain because it’s not my main computer but it’s not ideal.
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…Step 2: Why is x broken after an update!?
…
Step 99: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Is it just me? I’ve had more issues with Linux updates than Windows updates at this point. Don’t get me started with major distro updates.
To me it kinda depends on what hardware/distro.
Currently running MX on multiple systems for more than a year now and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
I do remember, however, using fedora and whatnot ages ago having exactly what you describe.
If you want something more stable you might wanna look at debian, opensuse,… (I’m sure someone more knowledgeable will complete this list). They might not be as flashy but you can depend on those and get some work done.
More than a year doesn’t sound particularly long.
I never make it to step 1
It turns out you love installing and configuring software, not actually using it.
I’m in this post and I don’t like it
