A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it’s pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
I agree. Even though I use extensions for dock, desktop icons and appindicators, I respect the Gnome devs for keeping things opinionated. It allows them to focus on implementing core functionality well, rather than having to support every customization option, which would clutter the settings and slow down development.
Exactly. KDE people praise its flexibility and tweakability, but I feel it tries to cater at too many use cases at once, and looks much harder to maintain as it always felt buggy and a bit janky to me.
Gnome devs may have very strong opinions and that seems to anger some people, but their approach is actually the best for small teams: focus on a single use case, make it as polished as possible, and let users develop extensions to cater to their own use cases.
In my opinion Plasma has gotten much better with the last couple of releases. Around 5.21 the defaults actually got pretty good and since 5.24 Wayland support is quite good, on par with GNOME in my opinion.
After using GNOME Shell for a decade I have recently switched to Plasma 5.27 on my desktop due to its VRR support (I have two 170 Hz QHD monitors). A couple of weeks later I also moved my laptops to Plasma, even though I wanted to keep GNOME on them, since Plasma has gotten so nice!
Just wanted to give a heads-up in case you haven’t tried Plasma in the last couple of years. ;) But especially if you rely on dynamic workspaces and don’t want to adapt your workflow (like I did when I switched to Plasma), there’s just no alternative to GNOME and it has gotten really polished and nice as well.
They aren’t as natural. E. g. you have to swipe the same direction to open or close the window overview, whereas with GNOME the animation actually follows the direction your fingers are swiping. But they at least reliably trigger the action you want to execute.
Since Plasma doesn’t have dynamic workspaces, I use it completely differently than GNOME anyways. E. g. I don’t make use of workspaces and use minimise instead. Therefore touchpad gestures on Plasma are much less relevant to me than on GNOME at the moment.
They are usable but nowhere as good as gnome’s implementation. Fortunately this seems to be improving with plasma 6. One of the devs inspired by gnome has implemented gnome-like swipe gestures and a similar workspaces overview
I made a quick plugin to also run stuff from path, and am currently working on a proper ssh plugin for that - extending them is a bit more involved than the simple rofi/wofi scripts, but there’s a lot more things an anyrun plugin can do.
Same here. being subscribed to unixporn community, hyprland always makes me wanna try it. but everytime i did, i just couldn’t make it as my norm. Then i return to my good old Gnome.
(what sereral months of DE/WM hopping made me realize was i am not good at using WM’s. The only one i used atleast few months was openbox in archcraft )
I had the opposite problem, I had my mouse all nicely configured just how I wanted it using Piper on linux, then booted windows to test something unrelated (which if I remember correctly didn’t even have the logitech software installed) and it somehow instantly reset my mouse to factory defaults. I decided whatever I was trying to do wasn’t worth the effort and have not had windows installed on my main computer since
For all worrying about it I’d like to say, you can re-add driver code and compile your own kernel, and everything will be working fine, and last time I’ve read wiki there’s SLTC support for Linux 6.1 means your GPUs will be officially supported until 2033
AMD and nVidia on Windows: So your GPU is still very capable and useful for almost everything including most gaming tasks, but it’s a couple years old and not making us money any more? Sucks to be you, have fun hunting for unmaintained legacy drivers with likely security holes from questionable sources.
Linux: Your video card is from a long bygone era of computing, before the term “GPU” was a thing, and basically a museum piece by now? We’ll maintain a long-term support version for you for the next ten years.
I don’t get the hate arch gets - it’s the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it’s not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don’t really have to do anything.
I have not used it for a long time but it’s really easy to fuck the install and potentially your entire system, depending on the fuckup(s).
As a matter of fact, that is exactly why I used it the first time : since it’s a nice lightweight distro and it has some interesting gotchas regarding installation, our sysadmin teacher had us all install it and set it up before we could actually use our distro of choice
It’s a great distro to learn a lot about Linux. I challenged myself to install it on my Surface Go 2, and make it usable as a tablet, as well as make it boot with secure boot and more. Now it’s happily running Arch with KDE, using the linux-surface kernel signed with my own secure boot key and a pacman hook that signs that kernel after every update. I learned all of this acompanied by a lot of fuckups and reinstalls, until I was able to fix things after breaking them instead of starting from scratch.
I fully agree that it’s bad for users who aren’t that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
It’s like arch except it doesn’t break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.
From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it’s the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don’t know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.
But I understand that you just can’t advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.
I’ve been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn’t ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run “pacman -Syu --noconfirm” willynilly.
I still wouldn’t recommend it as the first distro as it doesn’t hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.
It’s been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don’t know what I did wrong tho.
Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.
What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.
In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that’s the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian (“why are all the packages so old!”), or Fedora (“ew, Red Hat”), or Gentoo (“is that a laptop or a space heater?”) or…er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.
I don’t think arch has it any worse than the rest.
I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven't been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it's way better experience. I've been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
Unlikely, but who knows? Can you try and boot Windows (install iso probably enough)? Or some very old Linux distro? It might just be your monitor becoming weird with age.
Edit: Alsobtry with a laptop or something and see how it goes.
DVI should not control the monitor’s actual physical controls - it does include a small non-display channel but IIRC that’s used to get the display modes info from the monitor, and potentially to transmit contrast information and the like; some monitors will prevent you from adjusting contrast if DVI sends that info for example, but it certainly shouldn’t disable the power button.
My guess would be a hardware issue - in the monitor itself - which is somehow triggered by the sequence in which you do enable the displays, and your system update being unrelated. It’s a huge guess though. One thing to try is repeating both sequences (the one that locks your buttons and the one that doesn’t) using a live CD - not a “nobara 38” one if such a thing exists, another distro. Trying both monitors on another computer would be an interesting test as well, although not necessarily that helpful (because if it doesn’t occur there, it might just mean the issue is triggered by peculiarities in your graphic card).
So I decided to bite the bullet and did a fresh install of Fedora 39 and that appeared to have made the issue go away. In the process of installing updates and configuring it the way I like, the monitor control buttons on both monitors response. So, it seems like the cause of the issue could have been a glitch during an update. Who knows? At least I know that it’s not a hardware issue (cross finders). :)
Yes it work with English content very well. You can rerout all your audio to it via helvum. The big problem is that it only has 3 languages supported English, French and Polish. So it technicality works but not in German unfortunately. But I can say now it partly works on Linux.
As a hyprland user, gnome is great and I would recommend it to pretty much anyone
Hyprland is great if you consider your machine a toy as well as a tool and enjoy spending hours customising and theming
I would choose my hyprland setup over gnome 9 times out of 10, but I’d choose gnome over someone else’s setup every time because they actually know what they’re doing and make a great one size fits all DE (my hyprland config takes very heavy inspiration from GNOME with a few changes to suit my personal preference)
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