Live data from Hacker News

Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

hackaday.com

41–50 of 242 posts

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#41
post #3

Lately I've been running Fedora. Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software. It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.

Fedora isn't perfect, but it can go for weeks without updates and then update cleanly reliably, which is not something you typically get with rolling distributions. This makes it well suited for use as a dual booted secondary OS or VM OS.

Anecdata: I've used Arch Linux for several years and it's been probably 3-4 years since I've had any stability issues with it after upgrading. And the last time I did run into problems, it was from bugs in the open source AMD GPU drivers due to how relatively immature they were at the time.

Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.

Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#42
I made the same move a few years ago and honestly never looked back. Manjaro might have its warts, but it works really well, has an active community, and gives almost all the advantages of Arch (the AUR is amazing!) for "cowards" like me. Manjaro "just worked" and it has been extremely easy to roll with the updates since install. I have since migrated other machines to Manjaro happily.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#43

Just a reminder to everybody, Debian 12 is about to release in 2 days. A few years ago I moved back from Ubuntu to Debian and couldn't be happier.

Debian is pretty nice. I tried it after a new cloud provider didn't have option for Alpine Linux, which would be my first choice. Using Ubuntu had given me fear of anything related to it, so I was skeptical at first, but so far it has been a solid experience. The only thing I will never accept is services being started immediately after installing packages.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate...how much do we really care about these different distros at this point. The world lives out of the browser. As long as I have chrome and VS Code I'm pretty good to go.

Good for you I guess, but most features I need aren't offered by web apps. Paradoxically, Linux is the only platform where desktop apps are the default.

Linux still has its fair share of electron wrapper "applications"

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#45
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you desire stability and you’re already used to Ubuntu derivatives, there’s always Debian.

The issue with Debian is how old application packages are, and I'm not really into Flatpak. Fedora's packages are pretty close in recency to what's shipping on other platforms.

Stability and update frequency are inversely correlated. It’s largely an unavoidable trade-off.

It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.

Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).

I’m just stating the obvious here, really.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#46
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you desire stability and you’re already used to Ubuntu derivatives, there’s always Debian.

The issue with Debian is how old application packages are, and I'm not really into Flatpak. Fedora's packages are pretty close in recency to what's shipping on other platforms.

Debian testing is more stable than other "so-called stable" distros, and has often newer packages than the contemporary ubuntu version.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#47

I see all of this complaining about snaps and the "direction" Canonical takes as a purity constest. Yes, Snaps can be annoying (it isn't in my case). Yes, Canonical is far from perfect. The Snap hate is really overblown. I'm using some to work daily and, apart from the annoying notification that appears far less than before (like once by a blue moon now on my system), they work exactly like .deb files. Every OS suck…

I don't think it is so much the snaps that are the problem, but that it is hard to get around them. I choose not to use snaps (or would like to choose that), but I find I am constantly fighting them. Why do I have a mount of some snap thing? Why does Firefox have to be a snap? I have enough things to know about without having to learn about snaps. sigh. So I am moving away from Ubuntu after years of being a happy user. It is not a hate thing, it is because either the choice to use snaps is not mine or because I am too stupid to know how to get rid of them.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#48

Manjaro is a nice hobbyist distro but it's not a distro to be taken seriously.

I've been using Manjaro for three years without issue. What gives?

Isn't Manjaro the distro that constantly fails to renew their SSL certificates, pushes security updates way too late, and distributed software that brought down the AUR a couple of times?

I have never used it myself, but from everything I've heard about it I'm kind of surprised how popular it is.

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#49
I don't want snaps anywhere. Definitely not on the server (ever looked how much RAM it takes on a machine with 512MB - 1GB of RAM?) and also not on the desktop.

I don't have to optimise my machine to get the calculator run within 1-2 seconds, this is just bad by design and there is no excuse.

They are an abomination or workaround for problems in OS library packaging (& manager) and OS security concepts.

If snaps are so cool why are there no similar concepts in other famous major desktops (even non Linux)?

Re: Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

#50
Maybe ten years ago I jumped from Ubuntu to Fedora, can't remember why - just wanted to shake things up maybe? This year I installed Mint on my main machine. Contemplating a switch to Debian 12 when it's out - but might not bother, Mint has been really nice.

What drove me from Fedora was mostly the need to upgrade every 6 months, and the short support windows.

Post reply on HN