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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

> When you start installing software and drivers, the OS gets totalled

I have been using multiple Linux distros for over 20 years (and supporting other people) and this has simply never happened to me. Not even since I started using a distro that is supposedly less stable (Manjaro).

> Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience

That is why very few distros expect users to do it. Are you thinking of Gentoo or similar? I think its good that there are distros that cater for people who want to compile software, but why choose one of those distros unless you actually want to compile software?

From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".

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> From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".

I believe the comment you're replying to is stating that Linux (and its app ecosystem) is much more fragmented than iOS and Android. Each distro has a "store" of apps that only reliably work on that distro.

Unless the "store" is GNOME Software, which as far as I can tell doesn't work reliably on any distro.

That made me laugh.

I knew rms at Berkeley, when he was still (considered) cool.

It's a "distribution" of software. People taking care to make a number of programs works together well enough on top of the kernel in order for you to use your hardware. But the build scripts for one works well enough if you're trying to use a less common distro (I shamelessly copied from Debian and Arch for a few software on Alpine).

I’ve been using Linux on the same timeline starting with RHEL3, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, and finally ArchLinux and I’ve had to arch-chroot from a live usb several times over the last five years to fix broken upgrades*. It hasn’t been more than an hour detour each time but it’s been far from painless. I just recently had to nuke and pave a Thinkpad X1 extreme to reset KDE/Plasma to a configuration that didn’t crash Plasma randomly or kernel panic when resuming from sleep (power management was especially bad for that old gen1 model until recently and I had to build a custom thermald or something). I’ve still got a problem with a monitor not working after power save - just monitor off, not even computer sleep - until I power cycle it. Some problems are even starting to crop up on my System76 Pangolin.

A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing. It’s far from as seamless (or as limited) as Android/iOS app stores.

* and not even half of them can be blamed on NVIDIA

Arch is not for consumers, Arch is for people who think they are "power users" or something like that.

> A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing.

Which is why I said "or similar". I actually had AUR in mind (as I use Manjaro).

> supposedly less stable (Manjaro).

It's not supposedly, a "rolling distro" can't be stable because it has no stable ABI (upgrading a few dependencies is enough to change the ABI exposed to applications).

When your compiled binaries work one moment and then don't work after a system update, that's considered unstable and is one of the reasons people pay Red Hat to support old Linux versions for 20 years.

Some people think "stability" means crashes when it comes to distros, it does not.

I think stable means both. I actually meant it in the second sense - Manjaro is significantly more likely to go wrong in ways that require fixing.

I should have used a less ambiguous term in this context though.

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