lemmyvore

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Maybe you can think of the developer like a backend.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

You can also run many distros “live” from the install media without installing anything, to get a feel for them and to check that mosts things work (network, sound, movies etc.) You can make a bootable stick and choose the live option when it boots.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Also try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). I think it’s their best flavor actually, but not enough people know about it and usually only try the regular Mint.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

It’s a dumping ground for new packages. Nobody makes any guarantees about it. It’s supposed to be used only as a staging area by developers.

It may happen to work when you install it or it may crash constantly. You don’t know.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

You can but there isn’t a lot of choice, Octopi is pretty much the only other pacman GUI besides Pamac that’s sufficiently fleshed out. All the others are either just package searchers or CLI-only.

And Manjaro also has the Manjaro Settings Manager, which includes the kernel management module and the hardware drivers management module.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.

If your system breaks because of AUR it means you’re using AUR wrong… you’re not supposed to use AUR packages for critical system functions. It will break on Arch too if you do that.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I have something like 70 AUR packages on Manjaro and doing fine. Yes, they break every once in a while. They break on Arch too.

The thing is, you have to update AUR packages. They’re compiled against a certain system state and they will break eventually as the system updates. This will happen with source packages on any distro. It has nothing to do with Manjaro.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

That’s not how source packages work. The only way they’d break is in case of major upstream changes. Which do happen, but the only inconvenience would be recompiling the package. Which you’re supposed to do anyway.

Do you reinstall your AUR packages after an update? If yes, you will never see them break on Manjaro or Arch. If you don’t, they will break on both Manjaro and Arch.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Manjaro has graphical tools that make it super easy to manage packages, drivers and kernel versions.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

I’m saying that your problems are with AUR not Manjaro. It’s entirely possible you stumbled across some AUR packages that at a given time didn’t play nice with the official packages. The AUR is huge, it can happen.

But it could have also happened on Arch proper, two weeks earlier, no? The official packages were the same at that time.

I think you were put off Manjaro because it happened while you were on it and if you were to try again it could be different. But once we catch a bias against something it’s hard to revisit it.

I’m biased against Ubuntu and love Debian, for example, even though I realize that my issues with Ubuntu had to do with the way .deb repositories work and could happen with Debian, or that done of the things I disliked were just defaults that I could (and did) change.

Ultimately it’s as much a question of chemistry or vibing with a distro as with anything, and sometimes it helps to move to another distro even if they’re closely related under the hood.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

It’s not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it’s large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Like I said, the system will be almost completely unresponsive due to disk access being several orders of magnitude lower than RAM and allocation thrashing… you won’t be able to do much, the mouse, keyboard and display will react extremely slowly. There may be situations where you’d prefer this to an OOM kill, for example if you’re running a test or experiment where you’d rather have it finish even if it takes a very long time rather than lose the data. But if you’re a regular desktop user or server admin you’ll probably just reboot.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Swap is not “disk RAM”.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Um, you really need to read the entire phrase and not pick out only what you want from it. 😃

Swap can make a system slower to OOM kill, since it provides another, slower source of memory to thrash on in out of memory situations

It means that if you try to use it as a source of memory, when you run out of actual RAM it will make your system almost completely unresponsive due to disk thrash, instead of allowing the kernel to just kill the process that’s eating your RAM. So you’ll just end up hard-booting system.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

chrisdown.name/2018/01/…/in-defence-of-swap.html

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 6) might also be a good fit for you.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.

Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.

At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Windows hasn’t but the command prompt they put on the ISO could still be DOS. It’s perfect for this use case, it’s single process and lightweight.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

The command prompt to be exact. Which is presumably a version of MS-DOS. Which makes me wonder if you can’t simply boot MS-DOS or FreeDOS — assuming you can find a copy that boots under UEFI. It’s certainly lighter then a whole Windows iso and you can include the firmware with it on a tiny FAT partition.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

There’s no Red Hat anymore, it was sold to IBM 5 years ago. All their recent shifts in FOSS strategy are a predictable result of that. IBM only cares to streamline RHEL operations not about what’s usable or appropriate for Linux in general.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

You don’t have to edit the config files, if that’s what you mean. Generally speaking you should never need to edit any of them except in very unusual cases.

The config files are generally specific to apps and they can get transferred between distributions.

It’s actually common practice to take your /home with you too a new distro, it to put it on a separate partition so it’s still there after you reinstall the system partition. The app versions might be a little different and sometimes they’re may be small glitches when you do that but for the most part it works very well.

The only dot dirs you might care about is .cache which you may want to empty every once in a while (if you run out of space on /home). There’s also trash, if you use that, but that usually has its own widget on the desktop so you can explore or empty it.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Debian Stable is on 6.1.

lemmyvore, 9 months ago

Nobody uses SMR for live data anyway unless it’s in very particular circumstances.

Bcachefs is still at least a couple of years away from serious use. But sure, if it’s available and you have a good backup strategy you can use it today.