Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AnduinOS

anduinos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 221 posts

Re: AnduinOS

#191

Post by bobajeff »

popol12 wrote: post #188
the__alchemist wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: Most of the software I use isn't available in `apt`, or the version there is dated. I prefer to get software from its official source, not a third party I don't know will have the current or any versions. And, there is more to software than free/OSS.

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt. Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates.

Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

Re: AnduinOS

#192

Post by j_w »

popol12 wrote: post #188
the__alchemist wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: Most of the software I use isn't available in `apt`, or the version there is dated. I prefer to get software from its official source, not a third party I don't know will have the current or any versions. And, there is more to software than free/OSS.

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt. Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

The AUR really is night and day compared to other package managers. Official packages get updates FAST, user packages typically not much slower.

Issues with new versions get immediate solutions on the forums, so breaking changes hardly impact you if you just check the front page of the forums when they do happen.

Arch has the reputation of being the hardcore distro, but really its so user friendly to manage after the initial setup (and I think they have an "easy" setup process if you don't want to manually configure everything now).

Re: AnduinOS

#193

Post by j_w »

bobajeff wrote: post #191
popol12 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt. Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates. Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

Since I've started daily driving Arch on my personal machine I've had two instances that I can recall of a breaking change, both related to an NVIDIA driver update relying on some package that for whatever reason couldn't be bundled with the NVIDIA driver package. On the front page of the forums the fix was immediately available.

The reputation that things are always breaking just doesn't have merit anymore.

Re: AnduinOS

#195

Post by popol12 »

bobajeff wrote: post #191
popol12 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt. Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates. Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

I was scared too and found out that it's actually the opposite !

I'm using Manjaro (derived from Arch), so I can't talk for Arch itself but so far (2 years) it's been way more friendly to me than Ubuntu (which I used for 7 years before).

Re: AnduinOS

#196

Post by pidgeon_lover »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #165
wsc981 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the Mac way is preferable, if possible. Download a package (disk image) - macOS automatically extracts to the desktop. Drag and drop the application from the disk image into the /Applications directory. Done. This is the way, I believe, most software should be installed. I understand some stuff might need to touch system files and for that, perhaps a wizard makes sense.

It's neat enough, but I still prefer to not have to download stuff, and instead have the available software in a central repository. There's a reason why projects like Homebrew exist for Mac.

Central repositories and package managers are the reason I avoid Linux - I like to keep offline backups of old software. This is extremely difficult on Linux and you have to trust the package managers to keep your software available. I do not trust them to do so, and have faced countless issues at work with package deprecation on industrial Linux boxes. I end up having to manually search for and archive a million DEBs, which I can then manually install, and it ends up just being a very messy and time consuming way of approximating a fraction of Windows/Mac/Android's power.

Re: AnduinOS

#197

Post by pidgeon_lover »

alerighi wrote: post #141
tombert wrote: post #69

This actually looks pretty neat, particularly the integration with Flatpak. One thing that confused me when I first went to Linux a million years ago was the difference in how you install stuff. With Windows you download an exe file, double click it, next next next finish, and you have your app installed. With Linux, every distro is slightly different and it's almost never quite as straightforward to people. I think…

Honestly, the fact that to install software you have to go on a site, download an installer, and run it, is one of the reasons why I don't like Windows. Not only that thing is time consuming and cannot be easily automated, but it's error prone, you are likely to find in the first Google results not the official website of the software but some other site like Softonic that with the software also installs bloatware/ma…

The Windows way, the software will always be available and will work "forever" from that installer. Archive to disk, reinstall in 30 years. Everything installs to a few easy-to-find paths, and the community support is amazing thanks to the largest userbase of all operating systems. Windows has its telemetry and update problems, but if you're not violating Microsoft's EULAs and hacking your own PC (with easy-to-use GUIs), you're not using it right.

The Linux way, the maintainers will archive your DEB or one of its dependencies and it will disappear - your business-critical machine now no longer works. You will not be able to reinstall it when travelling without an internet connection. The developer of another program might be Russian and now for political reasons his server is blocked/censored, so you can no longer install his software. Another developer changes the EULA and implements AI and mandatory telemetry and backdoors to the Five Eyes - your Linux system auto-updates and now you're pwned. You install a rolling release Linux and it updates endlessly until your CPU performance is compromised (see how Win10/11/iOS updates); you try to roll back and your software and dependencies all break (unfixable because APT installed them God-knows-where all over your system); when fixed, you find that because of the rolling release, you can't find the specific "last-good-version" of that one tool.

Re: AnduinOS

#198

Post by pidgeon_lover »

slim wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #69

This actually looks pretty neat, particularly the integration with Flatpak. One thing that confused me when I first went to Linux a million years ago was the difference in how you install stuff. With Windows you download an exe file, double click it, next next next finish, and you have your app installed. With Linux, every distro is slightly different and it's almost never quite as straightforward to people. I think…

On your mobile phone you install software like in linux, by looking it up in the store. Windows is the outlier

On my mobile phone, I install software like on Windows, via APK/XAPK/IPA. I archive "last-known-good" versions of software I like, before the developer adds telemetry, advertising, AI and drops support for my OS version.

All "Linux forks" (MacOS, iOS, Android, Playstation OSes) all solve the installer problem and have offline installers.

Linux is the outlier.

Re: AnduinOS

#199

Post by LauraMedia »

spjt wrote: post #171
ginko wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be an independent distro it should at least have its own package manager.

The last thing the world needs is another Linux package manager. F-Droid uses apt and it could hardly be considered Debian. It's an interesting question though, that I haven't thought about. At a minimum I'd say that it should have some sort of coherent goals and philosophy, its own package repository , and should not be replicable from its parent distro with a script to install/remove various packages. The last one…

To me, a "distro" always was a prepackaged system that includes everything you need to use (it for). Of course there are major distros, they build their own systems and packages and bundle them with their main releases. But then there are also subdistros, that build other/more packages for a different experience (think elementaryOS).
Post reply on HN