RebornOS: A beautiful user-friendly take on Arch Linux with many desktop options | Hacker News Reader

RebornOS: A beautiful user-friendly take on Arch Linux with many desktop options

zdnet.com

It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

I get that Linux is about choice, but if you're trying to make something that's user-friendly maybe also don't provide a dozen window manager options if your user can't meaningfully decide between them.

This reads as an article by someone who knows their way around Arch and has wildly different opinions about friendliness than most regular users would have.

Btw, nothing against RebornOS itself, I just don't understand the tone of the article.

> It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

Are you referring to pacman here? If so, why do you believe it to be broken? Plus one could make a GUI front-end for it that is user-friendly.

TFA describes trouble with the included GUI front-end, resorting to installing a different one after manually updating pacman in the terminal.

User friendly, that ordeal is not.

So the issue is with the GUI, and not the package manager itself?

I do mean this in the nicest way possible:

You could read the linked article and quickly find out for yourself :-)

OK, but I was responding to:

> It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

The package manager here is pacman, and it implies that pacman is broken out of the box.

If the primary way the user is interacting with the package manager in this user-friendly distro is via the GUI then of course I mean the GUI when talking about the package manager.

Alrighties, got chu. In that case I agree.

You still haven't read the article, have you? :-(

Shush, I have! I am just nitpicking here. :P

Does nitpicking often yield good information in your experience?

Sometimes. I already told you why I asked the question, it did not specify the GUI per se, only the package manager, and the GUI front-end to that package manager is NOT the package manager itself, which is exactly what has been said. It has already been answered though. But again, if someone mentions the package manager and not the GUI, why would I believe otherwise? I was simply asking for clarification. Does asking for clarification often yield good information in your experience?

Sometimes, re-reading the source material can elucidate questions I have about comments :-)

In this case, it's really obvious what everyone was talking about with the context of the article fresh in my mind.

His comment is very clear after you read the OP link.

> I did have a small issue with Pamac after the installation. When I tried to run the app, it refused to sync with the update databases and wouldn't show any applications available for installation. Fortunately, I knew how to update Arch manually (with the command sudo pacman -Syu). After running that command (and rebooting), I expected Pamac to behave exactly as expected. It did not.

`pamac`, an unofficial third-party GUI frontend for the Arch Linux package management system is recently broken because the underlying API by Arch Linux got updated. The update I refer to came with the package `pacman` (not to be confused with pamac above).

Ironically the tone of your comment suggests hints of elitism.

My guess is that you think pacman is inferior to apt or rpm. But for some reason you don't want to go into depth with what is actuallly wrong with pacman and you just regurgitates a comment or article you've read at some point that bashes pacman.

The article describes having trouble with the included graphical package manager.

>Turns out, Pamac is fairly broken, so the solution is to install the bauh GUI…

Take a deep breath next time you think someone is criticising your preferred software.

Maybe the elitism was the friends we made along the way.

As skyyler pointed out, my gripe is not with pacman but the fact that the author of TFA asserts that an OS is user-friendly even though it ships with a broken package management GUI out of the box.

I don't have a horse in the pacman/apt/rpm race since life is too short for those kinds of arguments and I'm sure they all have their pros and cons. Having said that, I'm not sure why having a preference for apt or rpm would be elitist though.

Or you could use Arch, and get the benefits of running the distribution that has both largest development team of all arch-based distributions, as well as the largest userbase.

The install might perhaps need a little more reading, and take a few more minutes, but the returns are well worth the investment.

Same argument applies for running Debian vs its million derivatives.

How is this different from EndeavourOS?

RebornOS seems to have a system configuration utility, more DE/WM options to choose from and a different overall style. EndeavourOS prides itself as being terminal centric, while RebornOS allows the user to configure the system graphically with their 'RebornOS Fire System'.

As an advanced user these are largely unimportant differences, but as a newbie there might be an appeal to choose RebornOS.

Thank you for the response! It seems like EndavourOS still is the right middle ground for me then, but I can understand the motivations behind this project better now.

That being said, I'm not sure Arch is the best distro to build a newcomer-friendly version of. The number of times I've had to manually fix stuff after a broken upgrade...

EndeavourOS uses dracut instead of mkinitcpio (whereas Arch Linux uses mkinitcpio). EndeavourOS brands all its desktops for online installation. In contrast, RebornOS made the choice to stick close with Arch Linux, with no branding for desktops installed online, uses mkinitcpio like Arch Linux, only deviations being fixes for problems that Arch Linux refuses to resolve - broken default themes on Cinnamon, MATE, and UKUI, the possibility of black screen on boot for Nvidia hybrid GPU, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com