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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?

#171

Post by vineethkm »

bamfly wrote: post #97
RussianCow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience…

I have heard good things about NixOS but I am also told its not a normie daily driver.

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

#172

Post by smcin »

slabity wrote: post #48
zdragnar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

'AUR' = Arch User Repository on Manjaro. Non-Manjaro users won't know that acronym.

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

#173

Post by eli_gottlieb »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #146

Manjaro isn't much better. They tried to force a proprietary office suite on their users and tried their hand at the adware thing too. Stop relying on "user friendly" distros, you haven't needed them for almost a decade, most common distributions run out of the box with no problems most of the time.

Really? So if I switched back to Gentoo after 20 years away I would find that I could quickly get a nice desktop environment set up, have the NVIDIA graphics drivers properly installed and compatible, log into my office Wifi and detect the office printer, and be able to install Anaconda and get back to training PyTorch models, within a couple of days?

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

#176

Post by chlorion »

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.

Many people don't realize that Arch is basically just providing the latest stable release from upstreams, nothing more and nothing less.

Most projects do testing before making a release of course, and for lots of software releases are very reliable. The kernel is an example of this, where Arch packages the most recent "stable" kernel rather than sticking to an LTS version. There is nothing "unstable" about this, in the sense of "unstable" meaning unreliable or buggy.

The key thing is that "stable" and "unstable" have practically nothing to do with the quality or reliability of the distro. Unstable only means that the packages may update in non-backwards compatible ways, so you need to be prepared to make changes to accommodate that. Normally it's something like updating a configuration file, or passing different flags to a command line program, or something along those lines. Maybe you run some sort of service that links to shared libraries on the system, you need to be prepared to relink to updated versions or not depend on system-wide versions at all.

So long as you make sure to keep up with changes, rolling release distros are exactly as reliable as upstream releases.

The other thing to note is that tracking releases may actually end up being more reliable, because you are constantly getting bug fixes and improvements!

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

#178

Post by OfSanguineFire »

pessimizer wrote: post #123
caycep wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's "testing", not unstable. "Unstable" is actually unstable, and seems to be where people are actually testing things. I find the names needlessly misleading, although accurate, because "testing" is being tested to be the next "stable." "Unstable" is where people are figuring out things; they go into "testing" when they're pretty much figured out. I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updat…

Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.

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

#179

Post by anotherhue »

vineethkm wrote: post #171
bamfly wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience…

I have heard good things about NixOS but I am also told its not a normie daily driver.

You better love Unix to run NixOS. I do love Unix, I was a FreeBSD fellow, but Nix is so incredible that everything else feels like poking at your hard drive with a stick.

Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.

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

#180

Post by RealAberration »

arandomhuman wrote: post #161
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.

Using Arch is a dream compared to things like Ubuntu for me. PPAs and release cycles made upgrades awkward on Ubuntu. I've been a user for 3 years on my work laptop and have had everything be almost completely painless. (One time yay broke something and a python module had to be removed lol)

I may need to trailblaze development on a Linux VM at a new job because my rural DSL isn't up to the task of doing everything on my local MacBook like all the other devs. I have a lot of experience with Arch on desktops and laptops. I was leaning towards Ubuntu just due to a vague sense that "more of the important stuff will 'just work' " but do you think Arch might be a better call?
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