For a long time, people shat all over pipewire and said it wasn’t viable as a replacement for the existing Linux audio stack, but clearly that hasn’t ended up being the case
When it was brand new there were some edge case bugs that broke on certain workflows and hardware, but that’s pretty much entirely fixed now and I’m guessing for a long time now it’s been more universally stable than pulseaudio was.
Also, some people just pointlessly dislike anything that’s new, or because it breaks their spacebar heating
I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.
Despite snaps and Canonical’s BS, Ubuntu is the best distro for beginners because it “just works” in a way other distros do not. You are doing new users a disservice by telling them to avoid it.
(Note: I personally dislike Ubuntu. This isn’t about fanboyism; this is about giving credit where it’s due.)
Same about Manjaro, it’s probably the most beginner-friendly Arch distro. Arch is inherently not beginner-friendly, of course any distro that attempts to make it more so will have to change a couple of things. It’s a pity some people can’t see beyond keeping Arch “pure”.
I’ve actually had pretty bad experiences with Manjaro. No. 1, it cones with a lot of “apps” that aren’t obvious in what they do, and package management on Arch and Arch-based distros is very very not obvious to beginners (Syu? What does Syu mean. Wait, you mean I’m updating my whole system every time I want to install something? Where’s GNOME Software? Etc)
Manjaro usually ships two versions depending on the DE you choose, one is minimal which doesn’t even include flatpaks and the other is full which what sounds like you had.
Also you don’t have to be typing pacman -Syu if you use the GUI tools like pamac to update the system, and if you still want to use the terminal instead of type yay which does a pacman -Syu and also updates your aur packages.
Hmm… I may have to try Manjaro again, but the simple fact that there are 2 GUI package managers is not a great sign for total noobs. The main reason I’ve been staying away from it tho is the cert controversy and the arch repo ddos.
There were no arch repo ddos, there were cases where the AUR went down because pamac was searching Aur packages as users were typing package names on it and turns out there were way too many users going into the Aur. It is actually quite sad how much disinformation there is about manjaro that even the manjarno snorlax repo recently corrected a bunch of critism it had about manjaro before being taken down lol.
Also Manjaro only ships pamac with KDE in both versions, no idea if gnome includes their store in their packages. Manjaro also includes already functional and useful versions of window managers like i3 that are already setup, if it wasn’t for it I would have never discovered how useful i3 is because setting i3 from the beginning is very difficult.
Manjaro has a graphical app for installing and upgrading software, as well as one for managing kernel versions and one for drivers. You don’t need to know about the command line options if you don’t want to.
I’ve ran my gaming pc on Manjaro for about 2 years. There were too many issues to list here, but the one huge problem for me for new users is updates.
You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly. This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro. I mean, those posts are great, but all other majors distros update without intervention.
Also, I always updated from the tty as there’s a weird “never update inside Gnome” policy.
You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly.
You don’t have to wait for them, you can update without it. The vast majority of issues in those posts are caused by the upstream packages not by Manjaro. If you use one of those packages and if an update brings a problem and if you’re affected by it you can read the latest post to see if there’s a readily available solution that someone in the Manjaro community has already found. It’s a community service not a mandatory read.
This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro.
You have to keep in mind it’s still an Arch derivative. I said the most beginner-friendly among Arch distros, not the most beginner-friendly in the world. Arch is a bleeding-edge rolling-release distro. When you keep constantly updating tens of thousands of packages to their latest versions some of them will occasionally have bugs. It’s the price you pay for staying on the bleeding edge.
all other majors distros update without intervention.
I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.
Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.
Windows Telemetry at first. Then Windows browbeating various products - “Edge please download Firefox” - Edge: “Why, I am better than Firefox” Me:“Do as I say” Edge: “But -blah blah nah” and so on. I know there are ways around it, but if someone can force an update against my will on my machine, it is not my machine. This leads to questions of what else can they do without my permission. Linux is my machine. I control when and how and what. Also customization.
Having to disable protected services to stop updates from rebooting in the middle of a nine hour encode was it for me. Checking on my encode at what should have been 90% and find my PC at the login screen was it for me. Handbrake works better for me in Linux, too.
Windows is boated and eventually becomes unusable or unsupported.
Linux has no such issue.
That was my initial reason for trying it.
Since then I’ve revived countless computers with Linux.
Dark mode back in the day (XP/Vista era). I wanted to theme everything and have cool UI/visual features in a non-shady download-this-third-party-totally-safe-theme-engine-wink-wink way.
I recently switched my laptop to Garuda, it's an Arch based gaming distro. It seems to mostly work right out of the box, but I did have to tweak a few steam games to force them to use my dedicated graphics.
I guess I could go in and force steam itself to use the graphics card via env... But I only have a handful of large games at the moment. It's just as easy to set the requirement per game right now.
Arch based distros are easy AF. I’ve been on Linux for 2 years, I’ve tried 10+ distros, and Arch has been the easiest for me, and stable as it gets, while allowing me to get the latest drivers needed for gaming.
I’ve been using Crystal Linux, but got tired of it’s CLI only package helper, and since then I’ve moved to Manjaro KDE.
Whatever you chose, make sure you get automatic BTRFS snapshots, so you can roll back at boot whenever you wreck it.
I’ve read here on Lemmy that NixOS is a great concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, stating that it’s overly complicated and documentation is lacking.
If you only care about stability then you should go with Debian. If instead you want something that limits you so that you can’t easily wreck it, you could use an immutable distro like Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue, BlendOS or Ubuntu Core Desktop.
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