211–220 of 242 posts
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Sounds like they worked too hard on making things feel safe and familiar to Windows users who might want to migrate.
Ah yes, the mythical Windows user who's finally ready to switch to Linux now after all these decades.
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'm really irritated by Arch's meme status, because it's genuinely a solid distro and out of all the weird Linux workstations I've spun up over the years, my Arch workstations have given me the least trouble. Manjaro, being Arch with batteries included, is an excellent starting point. Honestly the most useful thing about Arch is the documentation. The Arch Wiki is a fantastic resource for all sorts of common Linux ut…
My actual choices are: Debian for servers and tinkering hardware (including derivatives such as Armbian on non x86 embedded boards), Alpine on small servers and very small/older hardware and Manjaro on my laptops and PCs that I convert to Linux for other people, relatives etc. So far I've been very happy with these three choices, and Manjaro helped a lot to introduce Linux to non tech people.
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I'm typing this on a top spec 10 year old laptop. I'm saying it's funny to see them feel that they need to defend that choice.
How's the battery life on that 10-year-old laptop? The big improvement with modern laptops isn't compute power, it's energy efficiency and thus battery life, and also weight. Modern laptops are a lot easier to carry than 10-year-old models since they weigh a fraction as much.
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You say that, but I can take an SSD out of its wrapper, fit it to a PC, put an Ubuntu USB stick in, and have a fully-functioning machine in five minutes without actually having to interact with it in any way. What else can you recommend that does that?
Fedora. Boot stick, select the drive you want to install to, click install.
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 is pretty nice. I tried it after a new cloud provider didn't have option for Alpine Linux, which would be my first choice. Using Ubuntu had given me fear of anything related to it, so I was skeptical at first, but so far it has been a solid experience. The only thing I will never accept is services being started immediately after installing packages.
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There is nothing to deal with, outdated software still works, it's stable and you get on with your life. Anything of importance has deb package/official deb repo (Chrome, Brave, VS Code, Slack, Signal, Dropbox, etc), so you receive latest versions. There is flatpak as well. Newer kernel and some libraries could be found in backports repo. I use Debian with 0 flatpaks/snaps/Appimages, only Debian repos and few officia…
There are still some reason that you may want to use a newer version of a software when your distro is stable. e.g. The latest version added a new feature that is really useful to you, or a long-standing bug has been fixed in latest version. I think Flatpak would be current best choice for these tasks if you are running a stable distro. But I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application…
There is nuance here. Technically, this is how it currently is, since the "core OS" is the kernel, and you can absolutely update that separately from everything else.
But lots of what people tend to think of as the "OS" are just applications (in Linux, anyway), so if that's the point of view, then it gets trickier. You can still update that stuff independently, but you have to decide what parts count as "core OS" to you and you'll need to update each of them independently.
True "user applications" are updateable independently.
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How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop?
> How do you deal with grossly outdated software on Debian Desktop? Use the Source, Luke. If there's something too shiny that I really need on my Debian, I compile it from source. For example Emacs 29, with tree-sitter and whatnots, is just too shiny. So I compile it from source.