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Comment by _blz2 | Hacker News Reader

I switched to arch linux a couple of weeks ago after being an ubuntu user for 8 years. After installing gnome3 I see not much difference between arch linux and Ubuntu. Sure, maintaining packages is quite different (and better) in arch linux than Ubuntu. I guess I was always a fan of desktop managers and not quite concerned about the distro.

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The AUR is also really cool, no more of "add this dodgy PPA", instead you download a file that allows to install dependencies and compile the original sources.

It's more transparent, and if you don't care, you can install pacaur that hides all of this behind a pacman interface

I'd say that a minor annoyance is: "here, clone this repo, hop inside the folder, oh... and grab these patches/diffs and pray that you can patch the source. Otherwise, you're not getting that cool feature that you saw on /r/unixporn". There's something to be said for downloading a binary, where someone has already fought through the compilation errors. Totally agree that the quality of AUR package (untouched by patches) are really good.

Yeah, choice of distro mainly matters in terms of how software is installed/updated, how recent the software is that you get in the distro's repositories, how well this software has been integration-tested how do the defaults look like (preinstalled software as well as settings) and most importantly of course, what color do they theme their stuff in?

If anything else irks you, you're probably looking for a different desktop environment or just to replace one application.

Ubuntu is mostly about issues with canonicals practices, (I mean come on, I can't be the only one who remembers the litany of times canonical has betrayed users?) but there are some major practical differences. For example, arch is rolling release, has the aur as opposed to random ppa lists, and arch tries to keep it simple (not minimalist according to an arch dev that's a common misconception).

Other than those sorta of things... you could say there's "not much difference" between almost any two distros. Especially since the Trojan horse systemd.

I personally don't trust canonical at all. I bet more would think like this if they read up on them a bit more.

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