Comment by dualogy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dualogy | Hacker News Reader

Major props to the Fedora project, really gotta get this off my chest as I had Yet Another "distro-hopping just still ain't worth it even in 2017" moment yesterday.

Somehow I have accumulated 4 laptops still-in-running-condition currently. Every rare once in a while, on a lazy weekend or when caught with a cold, I feel I should experimentally check out other distros and/or DE/WM combos than the singular one that has proven time and again for me to work-out-of-the-box, on any machine, after a swift painless install, without headaches hickups or troubles: Fedora with Gnome 3 (manually tweaked down to ultra-minimalism later on of course --- wouldn't mind i3 but guess what, it just freezes out-of-the-box, and the others seem to be abandonware).

Whether it's some some Arch or some Suse, Xfce DE or i3 or other WM.. it always either bugs out severely right in the live environment or during their install, or immediately after.

Great for tinkerers, but my reasoning always immediately jumps to "meh I have enough own code-bases to tinker with --- I might wanna tweak a properly running system but not trouble-shoot its setup" and so I just restore Fedora+Gnome3 and think, "ah well, maybe in another year from now".

We're talking bog-standard laptops here: an XPS, 2 older ThinkPads, a very budget Asus.

I'm quite grateful someone pointed me to Fedora when I got over my 3D gfx fascination phase and was more than ready to ditch Windows again "stat". Really stands on its own. (Granted, Ubuntu also seems to work well for many but I don't see any benefit over F now that I know about it =)

I've used Arch Linux (with Gnome 3, i3, dwm, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate) for 6 years now and it has (or any of the DE's/WM's have) _never_ bugged out on me (many different laptops and desktops as well). I've only once had a destroyed installation and it was completely my fault. I would actually recommend Arch Linux as a great distribution for getting real work done. I know academic research groups that use it as OS for the boxes in their labs and they've never had problems with stability or things working out the box. Fedora is a great OS, but I just don't really see it having a big leg up on everybody else.

That's fair. I know all these work for many systems and people. Maybe I have different tolerance threshold as to what constitutes "bugginess". Just happened yesterday again with latest suse and antergos on a ~3yo Thinkpad I wanted to freshen up. Just had to shout out my heartfelt props here =)

I think a lot of it is that leaky abstractions don't get noticed by folks with a firm understanding of what's happening under the hood, but present themselves as bugs to folks who haven't spent as much time on lower parts of the stack.

The result is what one person think of as a bug is another person's obvious limitation.

I no longer use Arch Linux due to breakage. In the six years you didn't have a problem when they switched to systemd and bugged all the config files to null? There have been several times when I pacman -Syu and didn't read the front page and there goes 15 minute to 3 hours.

I had several HUGE reports due and I ended up having to go on a different machine and git pull to get them done it time. I never recommend Arch Linux for anything beside personal hobby work.

Yah, agreed. I've used arch for a long time as well, and gentoo before it. I've actually had less breakage with gentoo back in the day.

Their notification system for breaking changes is truly awful (or rather, does not exist). I've been bitten 3 times, each taking a few hours+ and a lot of reading to figure out. I find all of the things you're supposed to "just know" or check before running a `pacman -Syu` to be pretty silly. The official attitude towards these sorts of issues appear to be dismissive, which is what convinced me to finally drop it.

You could set up a nice backup and restore system in less than 3 hours to make sure that software upgrade issues never affect your professional work work. I have that for my personal hobby work even though 6 years Arch have made me appreciate the most stable and predictable system I ever used.

Ugh I remember using btrfs for this. It was never worth the effort and I would have a bunch of little paper cuts or a full drive very quickly.

> I know academic research groups that use it as OS for the boxes in their labs and they've never had problems with stability or things working out the box.

They're been lucky then, but with Arch never say never. I hope more research boxes would run NixOS to ensure reproducible results.

NixOS does not resolve the problem of updates breaking things unless you don't update your system (same with Arch). It does allow you to rollback in case of problems, however the same is true to Arch if you invest in the proper setup (btrfs snapshots for example).

Its all about the perception.

I've been running Arch on testing repos and with the linux-mainline kernel for years now and haven't experienced any major breakage at all.

I believe its down to the reputation of Arch Linux - people perceive it as a "bleeding-edge" and "breaking" OS and thus every even minor problem they experience is attributed to the OS and this perception is reinforced.

The same people might be scourging for hours on ubuntuforums because Ubuntu filled up their /boot partition with obsolete kernels and won't boot anymore. But its still perceived as "stable".

> The same people might be scourging for hours on ubuntuforums because Ubuntu filled up their /boot partition with obsolete kernels and won't boot anymore. But its still perceived as "stable".

This is totally unacceptable. I started using ubuntu in production thinking it was "stable". After 6 months, the server wouldn't boot because of this reason. I don't think I ever manually installed updates. It just updated itself and broke itself.

You might want to read what Dustin Kirkland wrote here on Hacker News about this about half a year ago.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14026353

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14027489

I have OpenSUSE on 6 machines and my milage has been SUSE works great out of the box. Every once in a while I'll have a issue with a Ethernet card, but that is usually a 5 minute fix.

I have to say that Linux seems to be the least frustrating installs I ever do. Apple and Windows still drive me nuts at times.

I'm also a happy OpenSUSE user, have been for almost 5 years now. You're totally right, they're installs are extremely quick and painless

Installing Fedora on my laptop with an nvidia graphics card was a frustrating experience, but I don't know if it's any better for other distros. The install process was insanely slow, but more frustratingly certain input fields would register a single keypress as anywhere from 1 to 30 keypresses.

I knew there was issues with nvidia cards, but wasn't ready for the keypress issue. I was still able to get a basic install done which let me drop to command line mode and change out the driver.

OpenSUSE gives you the option to use the blobs or the opensource drivers. I use the evil blobs which will never be officially supported on Fedora.

Get the negativo repo. That's the most painless experience.

That's not a Fedora's fault though. The OS works perfectly with the open source drivers, both amdgpu and nouveau (which fully supports only older NVidia graphic cards, unfortunately).

i3 with Fedora runs flawlessly for me out of the box: dnf install i3 i3status dmenu i3lock

On what version of Fedora? Wayland has been enabled by default since F25 and i3wm does not work in Wayland... nor do the Nvidia drivers last I tried it...

You can still run an x session out of the box. Wayland is just the session it defaults to when you load GDM for the first time.

There is Sway, which is i3 ported to Wayland.

> dmenu

try rofi instead, it has dmenu mode (rofi -dmenu) and so much more

Try out Manjaro, especially the i3 edition

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