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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?

#101
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've been running Arch for about a decade now and it's only seriously broken a few (low single digits) times. Here are the main failure modes I've experienced:

The biggest one seems to be something related to the package mirrors only partially updating, or updates of common dependencies not being atomically applied to all packages - something like that. If you do a pacman -Syu in the middle of the critical time period, the system will fail to work with some core libs (libc, libicu) not being compatible. Booting into a recovery session and doing pacman -Syu again fixes it. However, it's been years since I experienced this - maybe they've taken some steps to eliminate this failure mode?

The other big (but still rare) failure mode is bugs in the kernel. The fix is simple, keep linux-lts installed alongside the standard linux kernel, so you can always boot into lts from the bootloader if the regular kernel doesn't work.

User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.

Aside from the first failure mode, the OS itself doesn't fail. I've had bad experiences with upgrading between major releases of distros like Ubuntu. They're bloated to begin with, and accumulate more cruft over time and major upgrades. Arch just works. Plus, there's lots of software in the official repos, and the AUR / package build system is also excellent - far superior to the whole PPA mess on Debian/Ubuntu, and the equivalent on Fedora.

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

#102
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How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?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.

I mean, if you really need newer software, then you can probably find a DPA (like Ubuntu's PPA). The PHP packages provided by Ondřej Surý come to mind as an example, which have recent versions that would otherwise be unavailable: https://deb.sury.org/

Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.

Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.

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

#103
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.

> "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion

Totally undeserved IME.

For me, Arch and Manjaro, both rolling, have always been more stable than Ubuntu has ever been. At this point, I've used all three for about an equal amount of time (~2 years). On Ubuntu, 4ish years ago, my DE and stuff crashed a LOT. Hardly ever happened on either Manjaro or Arch.

It makes some kind of sense: DE devs, for example, are banging away on the latest version of their software. They'll even ask you to upgrade your DE to the latest version to see if you can reproduce an issue you found on an older version for whatever your Ubuntu snapshot is using. Paradoxically, newer software seems to have less bugs.

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

#104
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.

Arch is my ideal distro, but since my motherboards started using UEFI I just haven't been able to install it. I followed the instructions from the Install Wiki[0], but just couldn't figure it out. Manjaro's been a nice in-between with a painless installation process

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

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

#105
post #38

I'm was sticking to ubuntu because 1. NVidia seem to love debian/ubuntu more that other distros, and in general I don't want to waste much time with setting up machine learning env/CUDA on my machines 2. work has debian based distro, so using same tool/mindset is convenient but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps and overall attitute (previous controversies with their unity desktop manager, ads in it etc)…

> but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps

If you want something on the desktop that is close enough to Ubuntu but without the snaps, you might want to have a look at Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/

Or some might also just use Debian with a desktop environment installed, there's not too many reasons to not do that.

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

#106
post #104
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.

Arch is my ideal distro, but since my motherboards started using UEFI I just haven't been able to install it. I followed the instructions from the Install Wiki[0], but just couldn't figure it out. Manjaro's been a nice in-between with a painless installation process [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

You can't disable UEFI in your BIOS settings? That's what I do.

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

#107

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's my favorite distro by a longshot. Sadly, I only recently completed upgrading to 11, so 12 will have to wait for a year or two.

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

#108
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.

I found the installer was lacking something I typically wanted. Disk encryption maybe? Or maybe it’s partitioning or file system options were limited? Can’t recall. It kept me from trying it out full time at one point

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

#109
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.

I like the security/privacy promises of options like snaps. It seems like other issues, like file sizes, aren’t the worst. And getting it to match your os options seems like a solvable problem. Could somebody explain why they hate these systems?

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

#110
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?

I willingly use Stable, although if you want something that includes more recent versions, you want Unstable.

Personally, there's only been one time in the last decade or so that not using the latest version of something has caused any real headache for me, and that was a manageable situation.

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