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Comment by _wmun | Hacker News Reader

This past year, on my Thinkpad P50, I've switched between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch; Arch has by far been the least buggy. With Ubuntu, things would go haywire when docking/undocking. With Fedora, putting it to sleep was always a risk because after putting it to sleep I would sometimes I would open up my laptop to a black screen that I couldn't recover from. I was fine with that and just wouldn't put my laptop to sleep but eventually I started using Zoom and Fedora would crash within an hour and a half of using it. This pushed me over the edge to wipe my laptop and install Arch; I'm really glad I did.

I still have an issue where the system is not detecting when my laptop lid closing but at least it's not crashing every day or two.

Plain vanilla Debian is a lot more solid than Ubuntu as long as the hardware is well-supported. With very new hardware you end up having to stay on the testing or unstable release channel for a while, which is quite a bit messier since, e.g. some security updates may be delayed. Still more predictable than Arch or Manjaro though.

This fragmentation between what works on what dists makes me sad. Philosophically I've always admired BSD for the consistency, considering how there's just 3-ish of them, realistically I'm a Manjaro user as I don't have enough Linux-fu to set Arch up.

Long ago I decided to use Debian STABLE with Gnome. There is no fuss. There are no surprises. You just get back to work and (the infrequent) upgrades don't break.

There are some apps which I have to install outside the regular repositories (RStudio, Google Chrome, Zoom, etc.) but they all provide binaries specifically for Debian, and it seems this is becoming more commonplace. I recently installed Mattermost for a client on Debian Stable, and it was trivial given their provided binary and instructions. Time is valuable, folks.

Honestly you don't need any particular skills to install Arch. Just time and access to the instructions. It's a neat way to spend an afternoon once, but I just switched to Manjaro too on future installations,

I loved Arch until I figured out their security patch intervals are like a week behind upstream..

That is sadly what you get with an non-commercial all-volunteer distribution. We only have so much time on our hands and Security Team members are productive members of the community holding several roles.

More contributors are always needed and welcome.

I'm one of those that when I fiddle with something I really wanna know what I'm doing too,so my arch installation would probably take weeks (and I'd learn a lot).

Soon-ish™

If you already know the basics, you won't find too much surprising stuff. That's actually the reason I like Arch, whenever I wanted to customize something, I would find the steps in other distros more esoteric and made with a lot of assumptions, in that regard Arch seems simpler to me.

If you want to investigate what you're executing in your system, as opposed to find what fedora does under the hood during install, you might find Arch install is nice an simple.

Manjaro Architect's installer is really neat btw.

+1 for Manjaro. I greatly enjoyed using that for a time on one of my tinkering systems.

In my other comment, s/Arch/Manjaro, sorry.

You can either edit your other comment, or delete and recreate it if too much time has passed.

> This fragmentation between what works on what dists makes me sad. Philosophically I've always admired BSD for the consistency,

what use is that consistency if even all combined together they only support a percent of the consumer hardware support that the average Linux distro has though ?

Absolutely none in practice, which is why I run Linux on my machine while hoping dearly for systemd, networkmanager and some distro agnostic package manager to succeed and make "distros" more OS less redundant.

The year of the Linux desktop will be 2021! /s

And what 3ish are those? Serious question. Of the top of my hat I can come up with freebsd, netbsd, openbsd and dragonfly bsd. And those fork like crazy in ghost bsd, pcbsd (I think that's dead), freenas, trueos and pfsense just to name a few. I don't follow the BSD ecosystem closely, but I got interested in trying it out again (since the last time I tried a bsd was over 10 years ago), but my impression was always that the BSD ecosystem had way harder forks that didn't share code between each other (or rarely do) and makes it harder to know what works and what doesn't.

At one CCC event there was a talk about a security vulnerability and it was interesting to see how the response times of the different BSDs was and how they tackled the security fix.

Well Free, Net and OpenBSD.

I wouldn't call FreeNAS/TrueNAS and pfSense distros in the sense of a Linux dist (since they are non generic, I see them as an "application" that happens to include an operating system).

"All" "distro bsds" seem to follow FreeBSD very closely and building upon it rather than modifying it (providing installers and such while still being a true FreeBSD).

Dragonfly being the exception here, don't know enough about it.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert and do not mean to step on anyones toes.

Arch Linux is super simple. Don't set up a bootloader; use efibootmgr to launch Linux directly with the UEFI firmware using EFISTUB and you're golden.

Could it simply be due to the difference in kernel versions?

E.g. you have some new-ish hardware where the most recent kernel (packaged in Arch) includes fixes.

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