What distro? I use Ubuntu because I just want an OS, not a hobby.
Sure the daunting setup process would fall into the "a hobby" category but once it runs it tends to just keep running as long as you update it from time to time.
Using it now for ~5 Years and in that time I had two times problems one was that the new kernel version didn't work with my laptop and another which was fully my fault by doing some "special" boot setup with some custom self written package and not maintaining it. Oh and the only reasons they where problems was because I never setup recovery boot or boot prev. kernel version.
Besides that I remember having more work with maintaining Ubuntu when I used it ~8 years ago.
Also disclaimer I had some more work like setting up edurom with network manager without using any proper UI for it (nmtui...). It's doable but not properly documented. But non of this is a problem if you "just" use Gnome or KDE or at last part of the tooling from Gnome/KDE.
EDIT: But Fedora is probably what you are looking for. Widely used, well maintained and normally up to date.
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/any/netctl/
Why in the fuck is dialog an optional dependency?
Which sort of ties into my next problem which is that Arch simply isn't opinionated enough. Which is fine for people who want that kind of experience, but if you used Ubuntu before and you want a similar "install and go" experience, Arch really isn't the right answer. It is if your goal is to tinker with Arch, but that isn't what everybody wants.
Arch is pretty much exactly as opinionated as I want a distro to be. Hell, there are LOTS of folks who think it's too opinionated for forcing you to use systemd. The real installer is pacstrap, and it installs, I think, 300+ megs of stuff. That's all someone's opinion. And keeping it to just 300 megs is an opinion too, I guess.
EDIT: Okay, re-reading, and it sounds like installing 20 packages is a pain. But when I used Ubuntu I had to go through way more to get it how I liked it (and OS X is a nightmare 2 hours of clicking menus and buttons, and installing from web pages). I don't remember all of it now, but I had to get rid of the weird mini-vim and replace it with neovim, strip out Libre Office (nothing against them, I just have no use and it's a pain to wait for the giant updates all the time), my printer drivers were on a webpage somewhere, not the repo like Arch, etc. Ubuntu is WAY more work for me to get set up with just because removing and replacing is more work than installing.
Not all people who use netctl want wifi-menu.
> it isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation
It sure is. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_configuration -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netctl And there on the top of the netctl page it lists in a table dialog as a dependency of wifi-menu.
> Which sort of ties into my next problem which is that Arch simply isn't opinionated enough.
Maybe, but not all people have the same opinions...
> Don't worry about getting all the packages you want - you can easily install more of them once the basic system boots by itself. The only exception to this rule is installing any packages you need for setting up internet connectivity. These packages usually are:
> dhcpcd
> wvdial
I had fresh install recently, rebooted three times in LiveUSB to pick wifi-menu, wpa_supplicant, dialog (rechecked with pacman -Qe). That's fine, I still use Arch. And it is good Manjaro provides another set of defaults.
> DON'T PANIC!
> The Arch Linux system is assembled by the user, from the shell, using basic command line tools. This is The Arch Way.
I miss it much http://web.archive.org/web/20080720082349/http://wiki.archli...
> Maybe, but not all people have the same opinions...
Yes. And that's fucking fine. Arch Linux isn't opinionated. Which is great, but not what I (or others) might be looking for in a distro.
# cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.samp le /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
That's the first one... http://bash.org/?464385
Sure, if you want to remain a Linux beginner forever, the Arch docs would be terrible.
I find arch refreshing.
by the way, I like yad.
To clarify, I doubt that Manjaro is more debuggable than Arch, considering it's just Arch+added complications.
It can get really technical really quickly, and you end up making decisions almost randomly if you have shallow or no knowledge of a subject.
It's like ending up at the voting booth, and knowing what president you want, but then your momentum fades and you want to vote along party lines and get out.
I wonder for example, how many people are technically prepared to choose EFI vs BIOS boot, and if they want a bootloader, which one.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that by making the decision, even the wrong one, you build up a valuable pattern in your mind and you are growing.
That said, it's harder on arch to do more involved things like encrypted boot, selinux or virtualization. But when you do it, you can consider yourself a post hole digger.
EDIT:
> I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.
I definitely understand that, but I feel that if I went to Manjaro or Debian or whatever the added complexity would make debugging much more annoying.
People say this, but I've found plenty of reason to reinstall Arch (none of it necessarily having to do with Arch, and more trying different distros out of curiosity and Arch remaining my main distro). I always have these discussions with Arch veterans who seem so incredulous about my frustrations with Arch. And I sort of chalk it down to the fact that I ended up installing Arch anew more often than once a year and the last time you or some other vet installed Arch was years ago. I think there's a fundamental disconnect between Arch vets and beginners (or even intermediates), which is clearly shown by the scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide.
I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.
But FTR scrapping the "Beginner's guide" was done for really good reasons: it duplicated the content of other Wiki articles, which is a maintainability nightmare, and was too opinionated for Arch. All the content should still be accessible by wiki links to other Arch wiki articles.
Yes, this is why I emphasized the "install and go" aspect of Manjaro. It requires a certain amount of "opinionatedness" by the maintainers, which of course isn't a priority for Arch, which is also fine.
I saw and understood the reasons for scrapping the beginner's guide. I still disagreed with it. All I saw was that the Arch community was unwilling to provide for beginners. Yes, it's a lot of effort and it is to a degree duplication, but it's duplication in the same way that Simple Wikipedia is a duplication of Wikipedia. It sort of is, but it sort of isn't.
It's duplicated effort, definitely, and if you don't prioritize onboarding beginners, then it's also wasted effort. But as somebody who personally used the guide a lot, as somebody who takes no pleasure in scouring through 5 different 30 page long wiki pages to find an answer to something trivial, the documentation as is simply isn't an adequate replacement for the beginner's guide. I've accepted that the Arch community has decided that it's the best solution, but I won't stop criticizing them in discussions like this for sacrificing such a great resource just because we happen to have different priorities.
Ubuntu gave me simple install. Once I've started tinkering it become broken. Following Installation guide and Beginners guide I got stable system with internet connection without Gnome toolbar widget. I could build on top of it.
These days I stick with Arch because of fresh packages, rolling release, makepkg and AUR. Just looking at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_interface is enough to stick with wifi-menu / wpa_supplicant.
I miss Arch though, I learned a lot about Linux through it, but every hour spent fixing something is an hour less spent on actual work.
> If you have linux experience Arch Linux can be a good idea
Something doesn’t add up there...
FWIW I switched from Ubuntu to Arch recently and to me the setup was a breeze. Just follow the instructions. I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
See, I'd like to use LXDE, and right now I use Lubuntu. I'm interested in switching to Debian, but then I read someone say Debian testing is "more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices" [2]. Then I look at these best practices [3] and I'm like, I don't really have time for all that...
But maybe that person is just overly cautious. So I look at Debian's page [1] for best practices and it wants me to use btrfs or LVM snapshots in case an update puts the system into an unrecoverable position. I... don't think I have time for that.
Maybe I can use Debian stable and just get software not available in Debian stable via... snap [4]. Ok, they also list Flatpak and docker, but this is getting frustrating... Is that really the best way to go about this? Because other than snap auto-updating on my machines behind my back, Lubuntu's been working great up to now.
So basically, is there a Ubuntu / Lubuntu that just doesn't have snap auto-updates? If anyone knows, I'd really appreciate it!
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038222 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044878 [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Snap
At least a few years ago, Ubuntu's LTS releases were derived from Debian Testing, while Ubuntu's standard releases were derived from Debian Unstable.
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sed -i 's/buster/testing/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt dist-upgrade
1. Pin unstable lower than testing.
2. Configure apt/debsecan as outlined here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=725934
So I suppose that rules out Debian (?)
[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...
EDIT: I was mostly wrong about the "breaking changes", but this seems like a breaking change: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...
Anyway, those release notes are huge, I'd say it is less painful to maintain an Arch system for personal use because of that. You should update/upgrade more often, but the required interventions, if any, are easy.
(yes I know there are ways to use another package manager on a given Linux distro, even homebrew, but I'd rather see a strong distro built around that idea, not even trying to provide every-friggin'-thing in the distro's software repos)
(That's why your question sounds like a joke :) Or maybe it was a joke?)
I’ve used Ubuntu since the 2000s and never really branched out to explore different distros. I’ve added LWN’s Distributions List [1] to my reading list to lessen my ignorance.
If not, what other distro allows this (other than Nix)?
This is the main feature I'm looking for.
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...
Example rolling out pulseaudio when it didn't work well. One version I recall went from acceptable font rendering to can't stand to start at it levels of horribleness. The release of gnome 3.0 the release of KDE 4.0.
Fedora was also the only thing that worked on my new laptop, because every other distro runs a super old kernel. I'm a super happy Fedora user :)
This is even still a thing based on Centos 7 and running gnome 2 not a gnome 2 derivative but actual gnome 2.
I agree what you say is presumably so however Ubuntu LTS/Debian or arch update cadence, pick one, are still better than updating every 6 months for most users. If I want really up to date software I would like to have it now not months from now. If I have to wait I would like actual stability.
Fedora is optimized for testing new tech to be rolled out by red hat not for usage by end users. As it stands you can benefit from the sweat of their brow while not actually using fedora by using something that actually is.
Also note that if you install software from additional repos updates between versions may not be as smooth between versions. If you don't package choice is certainly going to be substantially inferior compared to arch or ubuntu.
Depends on what you need. CentOS Stream is rolling release.
> Updates in place have historically been less than awesome and it adopts new tech before it is ready with no practical way to run either the old version of fedora or the old version of the software.
There's Modularity for different software versions.
Until I started using FreeBSD on my desktop a few months ago, I had run Debian on most of my personal machines for ~15 years, and often on work machines. For the most part, I was able to track the testing repo and "apt-get dist-upgrade" once a month, and not really worry about anything. Very few breaking changes, and when there were, it was usually related to proprietary drivers (thank you NVIDIA).
IME with Ubuntu on work computers, staying up to date is a much bigger hassle. Besides some of the out of the box settings being brain dead (IMO, of course), upgrading between releases is a pretty big deal with major changes and a lot of breakage.
I don't use Gnome or KDE (on either OS), so that probably helps, but I still always plan for Ubuntu upgrades to break stuff on me.
With Debian, I configure it how I want, and then it just stays out of the way. With Ubuntu, I feel like Canonical is always trying to change my mind and push things on me.
Been using it for years, including one installation of their rolling release, Tumbleweed, which is surprisingly stable for a bleeding edge distro.
That's very ironic, because I've found that Ubuntu's shenanigans always end up requiring more time and effort from the user than, say, install Debian and just get on with your life.