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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?

#111

Post by JohnFen »

packetlost wrote: post #74
muppetman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.

I use it as a desktop OS on all of my nonserver machines, and it's been great. Obviously, tastes vary, of course.

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

#112

Post by JohnFen »

elischleifer wrote: post #4
thx-2718 wrote: 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.

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.

> The world lives out of the browser

Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.

Different strokes and all that.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

talkingtab wrote: post #47
monsieurgaufre wrote: post #26

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…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by realitythreek »

packetlost wrote: post #74
muppetman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.

Depends on the apps. For most it's completely irrelevant whether it’s the latest release. For others, there’s flatpaks or containers (docker/podman). Personally I think people get too attached to bleeding edge.

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

#115

Post by constantcrying »

> thus had to select a distro for which the installation is painless, the learning curve is minimal, and which doesn’t have too many neckbeard quirks.

While obviously Manjaro has a nice and pleasant GUI installer, it is a pretty weird distro with many quirks and not having some familiarity with Arch is probably a bad thing.

In my personal oppinion I have trusted Arch enough to rely on it for my education, it is a remarkably solid and reliable distro, regardless of the jokes about it. But I wouldn't put the same trust into Manjaro, it is definitely a weirder distro with more points of failure.

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

#116

Post by JohnFen »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #44
orbital-decay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

There are some, but nothing of real importance (to me, YMMV). There are no electron-based applications that I use.

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

#117

Post by nammi »

JohnFen wrote: post #106
nammi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may be a good idea, but I honestly haven't looked into it. My preference is for operating systems to just work, rather than me change all my motherboards to accommodate them

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

#118

Post by ptero »

packetlost wrote: post #74
muppetman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.

I use Debian on the desktop with various hardware, both inside the case and outside it (various SDRs and data capture toys) and it works great for me. Just a data point, YMMV.

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

#119

Post by mid-kid »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #101
WD-42 wrote: 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 perio…

>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.

And this is the thing people ignore when they say they have no issues with cutting edge (not necessarily rolling release, which can be stable) distributions. Note that I'm not egging on you, if you're happy with the way your system works and manages software updates there's nothing wrong with that.

The software that makes up the distribution is as critical as the distribution itself. When you use cutting edge software you roll along with the issues new software introduces as soon as they're introduced. This has a plethora of effects including temporary breakage, feature removal that gets later reconsidered, config files that no longer work (or do different things) from one day to the next, and similar things.

While stable distributions do eventually inherit the software anyway, they generally do so at a later patch release. They'll go from 2.3.6 to 2.3.7 while waiting for the newest 2.4.0 release to get itself together. When necessary, downstream patches are used to apply fixes from newer releases without directly upgrading to a whole new version. This makes for a much slower rate of change in general, and as such a much slower rate of breakage. One can work around a specific set of bugs, but when that set of bugs changes every other day, that's harder and more time consuming to deal with.

Personally I prefer this latter approach, mostly as it allows me to choose when things may break (i.e. when upgrading between releases). Gentoo is currently the distro that provides me this choice, allowing me to pick between stable and bleeding edge releases on a per-package basis, hold back updates without causing library linking issues, and allowing me to install packages without syncing the entire repository and upgrading everything. This allows me to set some time apart to upgrade my system and be able to deal with whatever broke this time.

My system's most recent breakage came in the form of adwaita-icon-theme removing all the remaining non-symbolic icons, causing some programs to now lack their icons.

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

#120

Post by jonathankoren »

markstos wrote: post #14
jonathankoren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. OSes are practically irrelevant. The only thing I need is a web browser and a terminal with posix like commands. I can (almost) get that on Windows these days. I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.

You also need some form of window management, and if you like tiling windows, Linux has the most options by far.

That's one of the jobs of Finder. And no, I don't like tiling windows.
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