81–90 of 96 posts
(I do prefer RPMs, though.)
I switched to Arch a few years ago and I regret not having done it sooner. All the things I was assuming about stability being a problem or having to muck around with complex settings, were all wrong. It works extremely well. My OS and all my apps update once a day - no reboots, no loaders. The AUR is great. When I use my macbook or boot into windows the user experience feels outdated by comparison.
Do you use any preconfigured distro like EndeavourOS and Manjaro or from "scratch"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been curious about that. Any time I ask about it, a lot of Arch folks come out to explain why Manjaro is terrible and makes all kinds of bad choices similar to the ones TFA is about. How much of that is real vs. overblown purism about Arch?
If you want Arch with a simple installer, use EndeavourOS. Manjaro has a history of DDoSing the AUR, letting various website certs expire multiple times and holding back any package updates for two weeks (even security updates), but also shipping WIP github patches without notifying users properly. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/ https://dont-ship.it/
That mostly aligns to what I'd hear about Manjaro before. I'd successfully installed it before, but when part of the point of Arch is how good the AUR/Pacman is, hearing that it seems to mess up both of those is a big turnoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've upgraded Arch machines after a year offline and it sounds like that was less painful. Ubuntu has been making some interesting choices lately.
I found lxd very appealing in the beginning, but when they favoured snap as distribution channel, where, apparently, updates and restarts could only be blocked using the firewall [0], I moved away from it. And Ubuntu in general. [0] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LXD
I prefer stability over novelty, thus the transition was nearly transparent for me.
> Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak Yayy!!! > And to focus their efforts exclusively on deb, Yayyy!!! > and snap. ... oh. Honestly I avoid flatpak/snap/etc like the plague. Every time I've used them, some sort of device or file can't be accessed, or something isn't working. If I need anything that isn't covered by apt repositories, I just compile from source now, and have my own system for detecting updates…
The sales pitch advantages exist, but are not more valuable than the disadvantages.
If an app has such an insane build setup that the only possible way to ship the app is just ship the entire system, then the problem is the developers of that app, and perhaps it's only correct that people just avoid that app in favor of one that is built more thoughtfully, instead of papering over and hiding the hideous spaghetti monster by stuffing the whole mess into a box and pretending the box is the app.
It's a response to a problem, it's just a shit response.
What about "it's easier for developers to ship updates"? I do no want every random developer who are mostly none of them thoughtful systems engineers and integrators to be able to update my system. I'll pull down the same updates from their git or my distro, and in either case have some form of downstream sanity check rather than give them essentially a key to my system that I wouldn't have given any other rando. Also this plea of being easier for developers to ship is akin to "everything would be much smoother and more efficient if everyone else would just do what I say" It would be, for them, but I'm not sympathetic that tgey can't be assed to make their software generic and portable.
I speak these opinions as all 3 of user, sysadmin, developer myself.
A bundled system is fine for a reference implementation, not something you're supposed to require every user to run in a container.
A few days ago I wanted to update an Ubuntu laptop that hasn't been turned on for over a year. I had steam and brave browser installed using snap. Updating these two took as much time as updating everything else in the system (1.6Gb of downloads). Then I uninstalled brave, which took about 6-8 minutes. The laptop has NixOS today. NixOS has official GUI installer now https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso
Yeah updating flatpaks on the Steam Deck takes ages, and because of the way the SteamOS is set up - you really are incentivized to use flatpaks over actual packages (which could break with updates).
Running flatpak update or whatever the exact command line is in the terminal will be much faster than trying to go through the GUI. I've seen this happen before on a Kubuntu install and on an Arch VM, I think it may just be a Discover bug.
> Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak Yayy!!! > And to focus their efforts exclusively on deb, Yayyy!!! > and snap. ... oh. Honestly I avoid flatpak/snap/etc like the plague. Every time I've used them, some sort of device or file can't be accessed, or something isn't working. If I need anything that isn't covered by apt repositories, I just compile from source now, and have my own system for detecting updates…
On the other hand, I repeatedly recommend that ordinary users do not install software from third party apt repositories unless they really really have to. Fundamentally they're a hack, don't work right, and often result in latent packaging problems that cause future release upgrades to explode. People then unfortunately attribute those failures to the distribution rather than the broken hacks they themselves installe…
I didn't say there is no need for them. They are just horrible solutions.
> I repeatedly recommend that ordinary users do not install software from third party apt repositories unless they really really have to
Fair enough, I wasn't making the case for third-party repositories specifically; I was indeed making the case for distribution-curated repositories.
In general if a version of a particular piece of software in the distribution's curated repository is older than the version I require, what I'm saying is that I will generally go to the project's website "a la windows style", and either download whatever binary they provide, or preferably if possible compile from source. My misc-updates package then simply checks for available updates, which is the main functionality missing when manually installing packages.
Obviously this may not be the best solution for everyone else, but for my own needs I found it far more functional and usable than either flatpak or snap.
I switched to Arch a few years ago and I regret not having done it sooner. All the things I was assuming about stability being a problem or having to muck around with complex settings, were all wrong. It works extremely well. My OS and all my apps update once a day - no reboots, no loaders. The AUR is great. When I use my macbook or boot into windows the user experience feels outdated by comparison.
I always hear this and really want to jump in, and then I wasted a full week trying to get Arch to dual-boot on my Framework laptop and just couldn't get it to work. The Arch wiki installation instructions regularly were out of date with the current installer and told you to use flags that didn't exist when setting up your disks. I assume I'd love it once I got it installed, but for everything I hear about how good t…