Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate....
Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against
Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )
Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited
Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything
RHEL Workstation - everything too old
Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago
Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…
These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.
Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand
I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.
These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).
I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).
EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.
I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.
The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.
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.
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.
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
This isn’t Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn’t quite fully working yet....
I realize that even $2 systems are running full Linux distros these days but Python does not map to what I think of as “embedded”. If you have a full Python interpreter, it is already a pretty rich environment.
That said, this is what computing is starting to look like. There is less and less “bare metal”. I work with people that claim to be “firmware” engineers and then, when you look, you find out they have a full Ubuntu distro running and they may as well be running on a laptop.
It depends on what “can be used” means. I really like C# and it “can be used” for that full stack C# for example can write out native machine code, can manually and precisely lay out memory, and can directly link to assembly language routines. You can write an OS in C#. Even as a fan though, I would certainly argue that it is the wrong tool for that job.
In the same vein, while I know C++ “can” be used for web dev, I would argue that anybody that tries to do so for any significant project is insane.
I am not sure I would use Rust for “everything” but I do think the claim that Rust is one of the first languages where it is reasonable or practical to choose it for any of these uses is valid. Rust code can be very high level and often does not much different than a scripting language. At the same time, it can go as low-level as you want. This article is about an OS in Rust ( and there are few ). Web dev in Rust is totally reasonable and there are a few popular frameworks available. Rust has one of the best WASM stories around.
What kind of bugs are you running into? The original Waypipe proposal claimed that it was pushing less data than X. Let’s hope it gets faster in the future.
This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
Most of the GTK environments seem to be doing fine. Most of them seem headed to Wayland as well with the maturity of GTK in Wayland making that easier. Cinnamon will be ready for Wayland in a few months with both XFCE and MATE likely to have something out next year.
Incredibly, GIMP itself may finally get off GTK+ 2. They claim that GIMP 3 will launch in February. We will see how long it takes to get to GTK4. I think the transition will be easier. The jump from 2 to 3 was a big one.
COSMIC of course is going its own way with the Iced toolkit.
On the app side, GTK seems to still be a very popular option.
In terms of conclusions, I do not see mainstream resistance to new GTK versions. Some people balked at GNOME 3 but GNOME today seems more popular than ever. MATE faithfully kept the old GNOME experience but has migrated to newer GTK. It was not a rebellion against the toolkit.
Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it’ll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time....
People are completely missing the point here. “Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when Xorg should end?”
I would say nobody but perhaps a better answer is all of us that have left the work of maintaining Xorg to Red Hat. All that Red Hat is deciding is when they are going to stop contributing. So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.
Others are of course free to step up. In fact, it may not be much work. Red Hat will still be doing most of the work as they will still be supporting Xwayland ( mostly the same code as Xorg ), libdrm, libinput, KMS, and other stuff that both Xorg and Wayland share. They just won’t be bundling it up, testing it, and releasing it as Xorg anymore.
It's an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I'm reinstalling the OS, I thought I'd ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.
I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.
The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.
For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.
There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
I am not theorizing. And I am not taking about source code not compiling. I am talking about dependencies which includes the reports version numbers and version number expectations of packages maintained by different parties. Those broke all the time for me on Manjaro and it was often because of the differences between what was in the Arch repos vs the Manjaro repos.
When Manjaro fell behind at one point, I ended up with a version of GEGL ( labeled - git ) being pulled from the AUR. Later releases of GIMP refused to upgrade over that version of GEGL. I just lived with it for a few months hoping it would clear itself up but it never did. I basically had to back everything my out and install again. Not that it was hard but these kinds of annoyances happened for me all the time on Mnajaro and basically never on EbdeavourOS or Arch.
What made me move away from Manjaro to begin with were all the problems it had with the dotnet packages at the time. I blamed dotnet and the AUR and was amazed that the problems went away when I used EndeavourOS instead.
Are you saying that as an Arch user or a Manjaro user? Have you ever used a different Arch distro? I am just wondering how many of the “other Arch distros are just as broken” people have actually used both. I have used several. In my experience, Manjaro stands alone in terms of the number of problems I have had. I guess I am just unlucky.
A great middle-ground is EndeavourOS. It has a great installer. It makes pretty decent choices. You have a pretty much 100% pure Arch system after install. There are only a couple dozen EndeavourOS packages and most of them are utilities. You can remove all the EndeavourOS stuff in a couple of minutes if you really want to and comment out the repos. Not sure why you would. Just pointing out how vanilla it is.
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future (www.phoronix.com)
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate....
What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them? (gadgettendency.com)
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
Redox OS - an OS built entirely out of Rust (www.redox-os.org)
This isn’t Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn’t quite fully working yet....
Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default (www.phoronix.com)
Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments? (ludditus.com)
This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
Make a Linux App (makealinux.app)
Make a Linux app. Stop making distributions.
My Experience Of Linux Gaming (Switching from Windows)
Hello all,...
[Video] Red Hat Is About To End Xorg: Is Wayland Ready? (www.youtube.com)
Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it’ll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time....
What distro would you recommend for a 32-bit old Acer One laptop? (kbin.social)
It's an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I'm reinstalling the OS, I thought I'd ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.
Manjaro OS
So I’ve been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished....