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

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

#61
> My daily driver is a middle-aged Dell laptop, it’s about five years old but because I invested in the highest spec I could at the time, with an i7 of the day and 16 gigabytes of memory it’s still a contender.

I like how they need to defend themselves for using a 5 year old laptop.

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

#62

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…

There are similar concepts: I use flatpak on other distros. It is just that flatpaks are not remotely as invasive and inconsistent as snaps (and probably most importantly, not forced on you).

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

#63

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 use…

What are you constantly fighting with snaps about? What snaps are you using that are so broken that you have to fight with it? I mean that seriously. I've never had this experience and I've used Ubuntu for ~15 years.

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

#64
post #34

Arch Linux is a meme but also a really solid distro. I'm writing this from a 2+ year old Arch install that has had basically 0 stability issues. "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion, and many arch packages aren't as bleeding edge as you'd expect. Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.

I moved to Arch last week because I did not have a USB drive large enough for the new Ubuntu install iso and they did not provide a net installer either (it is a new PC). The silliest reason, but now I find Arch lovely and everything works for me (including typically fragile things). Weird how such a silly thing led to switching away after 15 years as an Ubuntu user.

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

#65
post #35

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.

How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?

What I do is that the very few apps that I want/need the most recent upstream version of (Firefox, Thunderbird, Digicam, KeepassXC), I use the AppImage version of those. (The Mozilla has some other system than AppImage, but it works really well with auto updating, etc. nonetheless)

On the off chance that I need some library, I may use a backports mirror. But I am not needing any at the moment and don't recall the last time I had to use backports. Must have been at least a couple of years since...

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

#66
I just moved my Raspberry Pi 4 (8MB) from Ubuntu to Debian 11. I run Ubuntu in several other environments so having one common Linux has been good. But Debian 11 is significantly faster. Same hardware, just noticeably faster.

There are a few anomalies, I suspect mostly from the fact that Gnome is a post install add on. The Gnome network applet doesn't work but the network works fine. The only thing that is problematic on the PI is Firefox - it lags.

I intend to slowly migrate my other systems -Desktop, Digital Ocean to Debian after a bit longer.

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

#67
post #5

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.

When your browser is shipped via a snap and is 2 versions out of date because the update mechanism sucks and has been failing silently for over a month, it makes a difference. There's my personal anecdote.

why do you install it from snap? I'm using ubuntu and don't install from snap most of the time.

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

#68

I've been using Regolith (Ubuntu + well-integrated i3) happily for a while, but the Snap moves from Ubuntu are a massive turn-off. Looks like Regolith can in theory be installed on top of Pop!_OS which seems to target the same audience while going in a more sensible direction. Anybody tried that combo, or have any feedback on PopOS in general?

I found Regolith nice to use except for the configuration. It seems to split the configuration into a bunch of files rather than just a standard i3 config file.

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

#69
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?

You deal with it by being happy that it doesn't constantly change UI/Interface/Features and break your workflow unexpectedly sometimes. Yes, you don't always have the latest and greatest and if that's a solid requirement, Debian isn't a good choice. But for a stable, not-going-to-change-out-from-under-you point of view, Debian is fantastic. Software you can rely on that's still patched for security issues.

isn't there a testing/"unstable" version that has the latest/greatest? I had heard it was roughly as stable as ubuntu...

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

#70

> My daily driver is a middle-aged Dell laptop, it’s about five years old but because I invested in the highest spec I could at the time, with an i7 of the day and 16 gigabytes of memory it’s still a contender. I like how they need to defend themselves for using a 5 year old laptop.

What? A top spec 5 year old (2018) laptop should be plenty fast for most common desktop use.

I have a 2016 Dell latitude laying around with Debian 11 on it. It is plenty fast for most things. Even running virtual machines in virtual box with gaming (mostly older Windows games I run in a WinXP VM)

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