As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.
I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don’t wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.
Swapping out KDE/Plasma for Gnome or anything else is dead simple most of the time. The DE isn’t locked to the distro, you can have multiple DEs and windowing systems (X and Wayland) installed at once. You can select them from your login manager.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. You can have both the old school X Windowing system and the new Wayland installed at the same time, along with many different Desktop Environments and Window Managers. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
No one ever said learning something completely new was gonna be quick and easy. Take it piece by piece and follow tutorials. Installing Arch Linux will give you a good idea how everything fits together instead of just “click, click, click, reboot” and it’s installed. You don’t learn anything that way.
PopOS and Ubuntu - really just found that I don’t like gnome. Nothing against it, I know some people love it but it is not for me. This would likely apply to any gnome distro, but those were the two I tried and immediately moved on.
Honorable mention: Manjaro because “it just breaks™” but it wasn’t something I noticed immediately and initially liked the os…
You are aware that you can have multiple DEs installed at once, right? Also many distros have multiple different choices for the default DE. I haven’t used it for probably over a decade, but I’m sure Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu, still exists.
I am aware the DE can be changed, but it was just an honest answer to OP’s question. I downloaded like 8 different distros and put them on flash drives and tried them all out and that was what caused me to move on. I didn’t have kubuntu downloaded to try, probably because canonical seems to treat them as entirely different distros.
ie, some distros have the DE options when looking at the download page or have you choose during the live boot which to use and include multiple in one iso. Ubuntu makes no mention of those separate downloads unless you explore their site a bit further than the download page. It’s a minor difference but makes a difference when you’re grabbing a handful of isos to try out, you might miss it and assume the one iso has all the options available when it doesn’t, or that it is the only option they provide.
As for PopOS I actually did look into changing to KDE and the popular wisdom at the time on message boards was that changing to KDE would possibly or likely undo most of the benefits of the tweaks and changes system 76 made. I don’t have any idea if that is even true, just what came up when searching a few years back.
I get your reasoning, a lot of “re-spins” are hidden away on many distros download pages, but saying something like “I don’t like Ubuntu because it uses Gnome” is like saying “I don’t like Fords because they come with radios”.
Regarding PopOS it probably is true because it probably all GUI specific things setup for new users, anything system level wouldn’t be changed.
Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I’m doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn’t for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro
iirc the devs have added Disk Encryption support and it’ll ship in the next release (Orchid). I can imagine how confusing and frustrating that must’ve been!
Maybe I’ll give Vanilla OS another try when Orchid releases
I had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can’t handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.
When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, “why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now.” The answer is always “nothing important,” so I stick with Ubuntu.
I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren’t quite to the point of “just works” yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.
Every day is something of an exaggeration, but if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break. And this gets to be a problem, especially if I don’t keep a computer always on, or if I keep postponing updates because my laptop is not connected to the Internet at the schedule time. There are a dozens reasons why I miss regular updates, but the point is, it should not bork my system if I do miss updates for a while.
if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break.
Those are packaging bugs then. With proper packaging everything updates seamslessly. Outside of SteamOS I’m not a user of Arch-derived distributions but I am a user of openSUSE TW which is a rolling release and I have one old notebook for a specific task I need to do maybe twice a year and updating was never a problem and installing a package triggers updating all affected dependencies.
Yeah, I have definitely run across lots of Arch packaging bugs. They seem to give up making packages backward compatible after some length of time, that or their testing procedures are not as thorough as that of openSUSE. It is understandable, making a rolling release backward compatible for long periods of time can be fairly challenging. Although Nix OS and Guix OS have solved this problem.
Why do you think you need to update packages on Arch every single day?
It was just a bit of hyperbole regarding the amount of mental effort it takes to keep your system up to date, I don’t actually mean every single day. I mean if you don’t keep Arch up-to-date on a regular basis, packages tend to break, and then you need to re-install the OS or jump through a few hoops to repair the broken packages and their dependencies. Diligent regular updates is not a terrible mental burden, but a burden none-the-less, so using point release OS like Mint or Ubuntu are just easier.
Every couple of years I think to myself “You know, I can’t actually remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I’ve got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they’ve had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?”
Try Ubuntu Mate, it’s actually ok. I’m alot not the biggest fan of snaps. I try and get .debs or apt get, where I can. App Images seem a little odd to me, but Flatpack seems alright.
Would you mind to explain why? I have yet to try it, but the concept seems nice: predisposing a set of tools useful for linux gamers/creators for those who are not technical
While it has a bunch of patches that can boost gaming performance and such it’s stability takes a hit in some areas. It’s also not quite as user friendly as other options. It can be better for those looking for a fedora base if that’s what they prefer, tho.
It’s also extremely opinionated & while it’s a great fit for those who have a matching use case, for general uses it’s a bit too opinionated.
It’s neither the worst, nor the best. It just highly depends on use case.
I’ve watched a few comparison videos, and the performance gains are negligible when compared to other common distros, so that’s definitely not the point in installing it.
The good part about nobara is the set of tools that come preinstalled and the wecome program which lets you update the system, the drivers and the codecs.
Nothing you couldn’t replicate in a few minutes on another distro of course
Admittedly, it’s been a few years and I’m coming due, but let’s see what I can remember…
apt will brick itself if it gets interrupted mid transaction with no clear recourse apart from a total reinstall, so try not to get greedy and Ctrl+C if it looks like dpkg is hung
trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile
snapcraft, need I say more? Firefox takes several minutes to start up, we don’t talk about disk usage, installing a package with apt will sometimes install the snap version anyway requiring a Windows-registry-edit-esque hack to disable, and the last time I checked in, the loop devices it creates didn’t even get hidden in the file manager.
I’ve also definitely encountered my fair share of bugs and broken packages which are always fun to fix
What do you recommend for ubuntu alternative? I want to leave for something else, but I also want all my programs to install and work fine. If an app supports ubuntu, would it support debian as well?
You can start by trying Linux Mint, it’s based directly on Ubuntu but with most problematic bits of Ubuntu removed. Mint comes in several sub-flavors that mostly change the way your desktop looks and acts, start with the Cinnamon edition as it’s the safest bet.
apt will brick itself if it gets interrupted mid transaction with no clear recourse apart from a total reinstall, so try not to get greedy and Ctrl+C if it looks like dpkg is hung
You can dpkg -r the package you tried to install then apt won’t complain about missing dependency packages for your app as it won’t be marked for to be installed
trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile
There isn’t a big global community repo per say like aur but anyone can host their own repos with PPAs, you just need to add them to your lists
Most apt quirks are there with Debian too, not just an Ubuntu thing. The rest of the things you mentioned are fair.
trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile
In fairness it does have the PPA system which predates the AUR and does provide a good job of providing third party amd semi-third party software.
But you’re right that Ubuntu has sold out on building snaps for software instead of ppas.
The PPAs weren’t that useful. I mean they worked fine for the purpose, but if you used too many of them you’d eventually get your system into a dependency hell. That meant packages were stuck without updates and also blocking others from updating.
The other thing was that even if you kept clear of PPAs it was anybody’s guess if you could upgrade to the next release. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and you’d have to reinstall from scratch.
Put together it meant after a while you didn’t bother upgrading period, or upgraded only major releases but by reinstalling from scratch every single time (and preserving /home). It was a chore and I resented it and kept putting it off.
That Ubuntu would install the snap version of certain apps when I installed them directly in the terminal was the main reason I left Ubuntu after a few years. So annoying!
Honestly, if you’re not using nix to deploy systems or need it to create reproducible environments across systems, then NixOS is a bit overkill.
I want to use NixOS for servers and embedded systems as well, so I run it on my laptop. But the user experience gives Gentoo a run for it’s money for being the most finnicky bastard in the distro world. They would both contend if there was a Razzy award for usability.
I tried it out, and it was so cumbersome to install packages that I gave up. I understand its application in servers, but for home computers it’s a pain in the ass
Gnome is amazing, without it I probably wouldn’t bother with Linux. Honestly nothing comes close UX-wise for me. I don’t want yet another Windows clone.
Minimising is a misuse of the gnome workflow, ideally you’d move a window to another desktop. Better than hiding it in some dock IMO.
Maximising I literally never used the button for anyway. I double clicked the title bar, dragged the program to the top, or pressed Super+Up. Aiming for a relatively small button just feels worse than all of those. It’s literally a pointless button and I feel like the only reason anybody has it it just because they’re used to seeing it/having a Windows UX.
It’s fine that you want your UX to work like Microsoft’s, but that doesn’t mean others are bad.
E: people get really upset when you point out that their Windows clones are windows clones lol. It’s not an insult.
They must have swapped roles at some point, Elementary lets you minimize windows the last time I checked (use toolbar or gesture), and GNOME doesn’t 😂
I honestly don’t mind lack of visual customization as long as the design language makes sense, is clear, is consistent, and applies to all the system apps and default utilities. In the case of Elementary and GNOME this is OK IMO because they are ridiculously consistent, and share some similarities
“Not exactly Linux”, but FreeBSD. Gave it a couple tries but gave up when I realized its minimalism is a placebo at best and its “super security features” can (also) be achieved on any other standard Linux distribution.
Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it’s surprisingly bad at that.
Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
Opensuse world - I’ve only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn’t really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn’t click and I’ve left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I’ve never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.
I’ve got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel ~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)
Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
Ah yes, when Microsoft looked for a contractor to develop FOSS implementations of some Windows technologies to meet demands by the EU and Mark Shullteworth made a big fuss of it until making deals with Microsoft himself…
What about that time Suse supported Microsoft’s claim that Linux infringes on their patents? Ms got enough grounds to sue everyone even marginally related to Linux for over a decade, Suse got a contract to sell licences that prevent Ms from suing companies for using Linux.
The wider company, that included Novell at that time, entered some cross patent licensing deal. It happens all the time. Didn’t kill Linux as we can comfortably say these days.
With enough sophistry anything can seem insignificant. The Linux we use today has developed within the constraints of Microsoft threatening to sue anyone and everyone. The only reason they could do that was due to suse, as the longest running commercial distro, publicly saying that Linux infringes on those patents.
I need to try Gentoo again. The installer used to be absolute garbage and required a ton of work to get the a usable system if you deviated too far from a normal computer setup.
There is no installer as such. You copy an archive, extract it and rebuild @world. Anything beyond that is up to you. I’m sticking to openrc - haven’t had any issues since libxcrypt news item. Can’t even recall what it was.
Mind to elaborate a little bit more about the Manjaro problem? I am driving it since a couple of years without any issue but I keep hearing this… now I am afraid :)
I hope it works for you forever. I am not going to get in an argument with the other Manjaro users here that will come to argue with you.
Just keep in mind that most of the people warning you away from Manjaro have a story that basically sums up as “I used to love Manjaro until, one day, it totally broke on me. Now I won’t touch it.” Sadly, this includes me. Will you join us one day? I hope not.
People who do stuff they shouldn’t, like using non-recommended kernel or driver versions or replace critical system components from AUR, then blame it on the distro when stuff breaks.
People who don’t understand how AUR works and think that Manjaro holding back binary packages for a couple of weeks has any effect on AUR (which is built from source…)
People who can’t get over the times when they didn’t renew their certs or when they accidentally DDoS’ed the AUR. It doesn’t matter if the distro is good or not. Those instances of carelessness should be held against it forever.
People who can’t stand the fact it’s a commercial distro.
People who can’t stand the thought of any Arch-based distro that dares to do anything different from Arch (other than make the install easier, that one seems to be acceptable for some reason; but there are more extreme people who dislike that too).
I am trying to think of how to respond to this without being a jerk.
Let me skip to the end. Until very recently, I thought of Manjaro users as innocents that just did not understand the risk. Like islanders living next to a volcano that had never erupted in their lifetime.
I still view most Manjaro users that way. Manjaro defenders though I now think of as dog owners whose animals have bitten multiple times. When told, the owner insists that “my dog would never do that” or “if it did, you must have done something wrong”. I am done arguing with those people. All I can do is warn others that this dog has bitten several of us and you may not want to enter that yard. If you do, who knows, the dog may be friendly. Or not. Again, all I can tell you is that many of us have scars. Use that information as you will.
Most “Manjaro detractors” I have encountered have years of experience with both Manjaro and other Arch distros. Their tales come from experience. When they share their cautionary tales, there are often Manjaro defenders whose best defence is just to deny that what the “detractors” are saying ( about their own experience ) is real.
My core question for the defenders would be, if it is our fault, why do we only encounter the problems on Manjaro?
Let’s go through the bullets above one by one:
I never did that on Manjaro. I probably do it more on EOS. Why only problems on Manjaro?
why does my lack of knowledge of how the AUR works only break things on Manjaro?
this bullet is the best. It admits that Manjaro has repeatedly broken things but we should not hold it against it. Literally this is saying that “Manjaro breaks things” is wrong because, while it does, we should just get over it. Hilarious.
how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
I got in a lengthy back and forth with a Manjaro fan the other day where I repeatedly related the ways that Manjaro used to break on me and how that does not happen for me on vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. They just kept coming back telling me that it could not have happened and, if I thought it could, that I did not understand how the AUR works. It was insane. Basically, this guy could not follow what I was saying to him. His response to his inability to understand the scenario that I was describing was to insult my intelligence and expertise.
Look loser. I don’t care if you believe me that your dog bites. I will continue to warn people and they can decide if they want to risk it or not.
Isn’t it funny how none of the people who claim that Manjaro “just broke” on them can recall what the problem was? They can’t point at a bug report. It’s nothing they did, naturally (they’re “experienced” users, after all). It just broke.
Meanwhile, it never broke for me or others, in years of use, with dozens of AUR packages installed. So yeah. I think I’ll stick to concrete evidence like a rational person, thanks.
A few years ago I wanted to get away from Ubuntu on my desktop PC so I sat down and considered about a dozen of the most recommended Linux distros install images.
My requirements were:
Image should be live so I could test it without installing.
Should work out of the box with everything I could think to throw at it: wifi, Bluetooth devices including controllers, network shares, play music/video out of the box, printing, audio devices on USB etc.
Easy to install and maintain. No need for brain-dead install or zero maintenance, I’m a seasoned Linux user and anyway I don’t want to be absurd, but I also don’t want to spend my spare time debugging or maintaining the desktop system. I have a server for that.
Recent packages and frequent updates, but stable.
Usable for everyday use, work (mostly Citrix and other forms of remote desktop) and of course gaming.
Rolling release.
Guess which distro ticked absolutely every single box.
Suit yourself. I’m telling you that you’re sleeping on one of the most user-friendly, up to date, gaming-ready, stable and generally hassle free distros out there, and it’s coming from someone who actually tried all the popular ones.
In exchange you just have to stick to a LTS kernel and not replace critical system components from AUR. Which I think you’ll agree are reasonable conditions for all Arch distros, heck, all distros.
Gentoo all the way since 20 years, on all kind of devices, going strong and never looked back.
Ubuntu, I hate you. A messy complex windows-esque caricature in the Linux world, where “somebody else” knows better than me and shoves it down my gully.
So there you go, my best and worst distros choice.
Been usig Debian for home and work and on hundreds of servers for 2 decades and it have been near flawless. Any issues i have had have always been my own fault.
While debian is the least offensive, I did explicitly say world. Add your buntus, mints, whathaveyou into the mix and shit hits the fan very quickly. Yes, real world runs that bollocks in prod. No, I do not agree with it.
No downvote here my friend. I love arch, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Plug-and-play distros are great too, they just have different strong points.
Haha, I’ve been daily driving slackware since the late 90s. I like to tinker and install a lot of stuff. I seem to break anything with an automated package manager and dependency resolution.
Nah, I’m just a hobbyist. I’m a n00b compared to all the regulars in the slackware channel on IRC. But I love tinkering and learning. I’d need your help to install vanilla arch, just like you’d probably need mine to get started on slackware. (The slackware install is actually super easy).
I’ve been trying to distrohop the past couple months, see what else is out there. I wasn’t paying attention installing Garuda and borked my EFI partition. I did manage to chroot into my still working slackware partition, but I couldn’t figure out how to re-install grub. So I formatted and did a fresh slackware install.
MicroOS. I didn’t switch from losedows to still have my PC restart on me while I was working. Also, it kinda broke and was annoying to configure, and had way too little documentation.
If you scroll to the bottom in the combustion section you add packages you want, and custom scripts. OpenSUSE also haa auto yast for cloning your system and applying it to another machine
Gentoo: I hated constantly compiling and configuring. It was incredibly time consuming. If I was compiling for uncommon cases it might make sense, but I am dealing with a pretty standard dev machine.
NixOS: The configuration is kind of a pain and never really got the extra features you get beyond package management working correctly.
I refuse to believe there are people who use Gentoo seriously. There is no possible way it’s not just a joke about how goofy a true stallman-esque approach to FOSS is.
I can see it being ok if you cross compile for something like an old power pc mac. Even then there are still some distros that support power pc (Maybe bsds too?).
I used it on an old potato chip of a Pentium 4 (this was nearly 20 years ago). It took days to compile what I wanted, which was a basic system plus KDE. I don’t know what was going through my 17 year old brain. But hey, it walked me through some details of a Linux system that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Now I would recommend Linux From Scratch for learning and a nice, stable distro with a large, supportive community for a daily driver.
Are you me? I just posted the same thing above. I attempted to get KDE working during my freshman year of college (2004-2005) on what was either a high end P4 or Athlon X2, it would spend 10-15 hours compiling X and then break, leaving me no clue what to do but I went from using Ubuntu for about 5 months to a stage 2 Gentoo installation. I never did get it working.
I’ll give you one reason for using Gentoo: option of no systemd.
Gentoo is one of the few distros which still offer a systemdless setup given its nature of high configurability. You can tell the system-wide config file to exclude systemd support in every package it attemps to compile.
I hope you or anyone who just enjoys their linux machine running fine and happily, now be able to see what freedom can mean in the open source universe. Cheers.
I use it, been using it for a while. Both my desktop and laptop run it. I like it a lot and find it really easy to use. Amytime I find an issue I can pretty quickly fix it and keep my system clean. Games run great, my music production software is great, it's fast, and just overall very enjoyable to use.
To all gentoo detractors… 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours…) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ
I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours… and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.
I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.
I’ve considered giving it a go again since I have a 24 core Threadripper which could easily compile everything pretty quickly, I just never got around to it.
Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags… Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn’t do that again.
I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.
Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.
Yeah I remember trying it out on a k6-2 400 MHz (maybe? I don’t remember if that was it’s rated speed of it it was with the bus at 112mhz) and it was days of downloading sources and even more for compiling. I think there was a bootable CD bundled with some zine that allowed you to have something running on your machine
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