I guess, any website served by Google Cloud wouldn’t work either.

You mean, MMCCCXIII people.

Manjaro, because it’s rolling release and it’s built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

In case anything breaks, there’s quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

It’s been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.

It happened to me countless times that I was suffering with a task for hours and hours and hours, then finally found what the problem was. Then a few weeks later, facing the same issue again somewhere else, I only remembered the fact that I had that same issue weeks ago, but I completely forgot what the solution was.

Weirdly enough, sometimes it’s indeed a lifelong experience and I can remember the solution forever. I don’t really know what it depends on.

In my opinion it’s not useless at all. Lemmy marks the comments as edited, but that’s just to show the fact that it was edited. But if you add the reason why you edited, that makes it a whole lot more transparent.

Sometimes it could happen that I see a great comment full of great ideas from a great user, and it could be lengthy as well. Then later I go back to see the reactions, and I see the comment was edited. If I don’t know what was edited on it, then I have to read the whole comment again. But if it’s clearly stated that only typos were fixed, then I don’t bother with re-reading the comment.

That’s why you proofread before you post, don’t you?

COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.

I beg to differ. First of all, the fact that the Rust compiler eliminates a bunch of bugs that would cause crashes in other languages, is already a major factor in making the user experience smoother. Secondly, generally speaking, according to my own experience, overall code quality has a proportional effect on the software. If it’s written well, bugs are more likely to be caught during testing and less likely to occur after release. In a badly written software there are always more bugs. This point isn’t Rust-specific, just mentioning that developer-related stuff does have an impact on the user experience. And by the fact that Rust is such a powerful tool compared to others, and COSMIC being the first desktop environment written in RUST, it is revolutionary.

Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.

Sure, I didn’t say we can only have one solution for each problem. As long as a new solution is justified (offers unique features, better performance, more stable and reliable, or by other measures), then so be it. That will make the open source world better. For example, if they decided to write the Mir Wayland compositor in Rust, that would be a valid reason to keep pursuing it (although even then wouldn’t entirely be convinced by that). I’m still saying, for the problem of segmentation it isn’t very good that many small teams are creating software that otherwise already exist. I find contributing to the major ones more useful.

(Btw you seem to have a quite deep and extensive knowledge of the history of Ubuntu components. Upvoted for the detailed insights.)

This old canard again.

Dude, I was just sharing my own opinion. Has anyone mentioned these before? I didn’t know about that.

Came first.

Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.

For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.

Of the mentioned UI shells, I only have experience with Unity and Cinnamon. I can’t argue about the rest. However: COSMIC is actually revolutionary, since it’s entirely made in Rust. I’m actually looking forward to it and I’m eager to try it once it becomes stable. Cinnamon was made for a reason: back in the days, when Gnome 3 was released, its UI was quite controversial. Cinnamon aimed to provide a more classic experience while running on new Gnome. Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af). Bottom line here is, if they’re developing and maintaining their own solution for something that has a popular alternative, then better do a good job, otherwise don’t try to force it on the users. Or do force it, and maybe someone will like it… but OP was asking about the worst distro, so I came up with one that I personally didn’t find usable on the long run, and still is unrealistically popular in my opinion.

Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.

Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Okay, fair enough.

When I posted my original comment, I had the assumption that someone who uses Linux (or about to use Linux) knows at least the basic terms.

But to be honest, OP didn’t even specify for what purpose they were looking for the worst distro. Maybe they meant for a docker image for their k8s cluster. Who knows. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve been using Manjaro for like 7 years. Throughout these years I maybe had two issues with updates. I’ve easily fixed one by myself (it was a dependency issue), the other one was a bug in packaging. Mentioned it on their forum, they were crazy fast to reply (I wouldn’t even expect that from a software company, let alone an open source project), and the fix was out in a few hours.

Btw their issue tracking related to updates is top-notch. This is another reason why I had a positive impression with this distro.

Regarding their own software, I am also impressed by their mhwd scripts. Even a shitty Nvidia driver can be easily installed with it, which actually works. And their OS installation framework has been adopted by other distros as well.

Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.

I agree about the segmentation as a major issue, and that’s exactly why I brought it up in my original comment how it’s not okay that Canonical keeps re-inventing the wheel instead of improving an existing project.

I wasn’t comparing macOS to Ubuntu, I was comparing Apple to Canonical in a way how they approach the market. What I found similar is, that both of them are going their own way and making their product as different as possible from others. Not out of innovation, just for the sake of being different. Canonical is somewhat better though, because they’re dealing with free software, so technically you can uninstall what you don’t like, and install what you want. But why would I start to replace and configure components, when I can just have another distro that is working the way I like out of the box?

I’d pick Ubuntu. I don’t really understand why it’s still so popular. Never ever had a successful dist-upgrade with it, so technically if you wanna stay up to date with it, you have to reinstall every six months.

And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.

Are there any worse distros? Probably yes. But in proportion to its popularity, Ubuntu is the absolute worst, that’s not even a question to me.

Edit: I can see several replies to my comment praising Ubuntu for its role in making Linux platform (and free software) more popular. That’s fine, perfectly valid. In fact, my very first experience with Linux was with Ubuntu as well, through a CD addition to a PC magazine back in 2005.

To clarify myself (since the post itself is not very elaborate), when I posted my comment, I was thinking of the quality/usability/stability of Linux distributions, and due to personal experience I’ve never found Ubuntu usable in the long term. I did try it several times through the years, also installed it on my mom’s laptop (fairly simple setup with no customizations at all on a Dell Latitude, a.k.a good hardware), and even there basic things just didn’t work on the long run.

I’ve been using Manjaro for many years, and it’s been working mostly flawlessly. Minor issues arise sometimes, but that’s incredibly rare, and easy to fix.

That’s way too much hassle. I guess, when the anti-adblock kicks in on my devices, I’ll just stop watching YouTube. I have tons of better stuff to do anyway.

I don’t really get why some people cultivate FOSS so much that they refuse to install anything that even remotely contains proprietary parts. Of course I understand the advantages of FOSS, but I won’t go against proprietary software. I use whatever offers the best functionality, stability, usability for my tasks.

And that’s actually the exact reason why I use Linux.

MacOS is quite good too, but I cannot afford the hardware necessary for it, plus I hate Mac keyboard layout so freaking much. Yes, it’s possible to get used to it, but only if I exclusively use Mac. Since I’m switching between computers all the time, this is a deal breaker for me. Plus I enjoy the better customisability of Linux. And last but not least, although macOS UI is packed with clever solutions, I still find a KDE or a Gnome UI a little bit more usable.

As for Windows… where do I even begin lol… Let’s just say, it’s way too buggy, way too unreliable, way too much hassle for me. Back in the days, when I started using Linux (about 15 years ago), this wasn’t the case. Around that time Windows was a stable, reliable OS, which worked very well and it was convenient to use. I’m talking about XP and later 7. (Vista and 8 were the poor ones in the infamous good-bad-good-bad-… pattern.) Meanwhile on Linux it was sometimes quite hard to make some hardware work, and the applications weren’t very robust, sometimes they crashed, sometimes the whole OS crashed, and generally the whole thing felt like a hobby-OS.

But things changed over time. In the past decade I haven’t experienced any serious anomaly on Linux, all my hardware work out-of-the-box, and in maybe the past 5 years or even more, I absolutely haven’t experienced any issue at all, not even minor ones. Nothing. This thing is just super stable. You install it once, keep updating it, and it just runs perfectly forever. Windows went the opposite way: my graphics card, for example, stopped working, because Windows deleted the driver during an update, it’s a hassle to set up everything, it doesn’t just work out-of-the-box, it crashes sometimes, it’s pumped full of bloatware and ads.

And I generally find a UNIX-like system much more comfortable to use than Windows, especially for programming. Yes, there’s WSL on Windows - but that didn’t always work out well for me. I could go on and on and on all day, but long story short, the structure of Linux is more convenient and more comfortable to use for me.

So why I switched to Linux back then, you might ask. That time was different: I was experimenting with everything, and at first I used both Windows and Linux, former one being my main system. And as time went by, I slowly got more and more familiar with Linux, and I realized how convenient it was for my tasks. And at some point I stuck with it despite the occasional issues, which - as I mentioned - have gotten resolved long ago already.

I still use proprietary software. I use Steam, because that’s probably the biggest game library and it supports Linux. I use JetBrains developer tools.

There’s this Affinity suite that I would love to use, or even Corel software, but unfortunately both of them failed to provide a Linux version, and I refuse to purchase software that doesn’t run on Linux. Thus I’m stuck with Inkscape (awesome, but always crashes with bigger files), Gimp (I hate its UI so much), Darktable (kinda slow, plus some modules broke in the latest update, but otherwise awesome).

Luckily photo/graphics editing is less than 5% of the tasks I have, so the inconvenience of this area is negligible. For what I mostly use my computer, Linux is the best platform for me.

I’ve just tried to search for ‘tank man’ and also ‘tiananmen square’ with DuckDuckGo’s image search, and both of them returned the picture we all know, that dictator Winnie the Poop doesn’t wanna see…

Man page for dummies. Nice! I like it!

I usually skip the -v, because it’s much faster that way.

• not clicking on advertisements

Even if someone doesn’t use an adblocker for some reason… who the fuck would click on ads?!