Ubuntu is massively overrated. It's a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.
I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux's new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.
Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.
the snaps are terrible and they now have ads in the server version (CLI)
Wait they just include lines of advertisements or something in the command line??
It’s in the MOTD. Very easy to permanently disable, but still annoying.
Have to agree. They had a great start by enhancing Debian and being user friendly but, then they just kind of lost their way.
It should probably take Mint's place on this list.
Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my "daily driver" for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I'd stayed with Mint, I've have gone to LMDE by now.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more "features" from Ubuntu than it's using at this point.
That's why some people at wondering why wont Mint not rebase to Debian, and go from there... would be better than 'repairing' everything Ubuntu breaks.
Only issue I can see with LMDE compared to the Ubuntu variant is that some of their homegrown tools and stuff aren't included in LMDE for whatever reason. But, if they shifted their focus to LMDE and added all the tools there to give you the proper Mint experience, I think it would be amazing.
indeed.
Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.
I've never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I've installed both in VM but that's it.
I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I'd ever suggest to someone.
All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is "fine" at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.
And arch. Arch is godly.
(I use Arch btw.)
I'm gonna say "no", but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you're skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.
Couldn’t agree more. Arch is great if you need a malleable distro, Debian is for everything (else).
Debian is great if you want a stable distro. If you want the latest software run... Debian + Flatpak
Do you install ffmpeg via Flatpak?
In the spirit of your comment though, I have been meaning to try Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch.
malleable distro
Hi. Gentoo user here. 👏
I’ve not used Gentoo in years but I really ought to give it another go. Do you still have to compile everything from scratch or are there binary repos now?
Bu the more you diverge from the default the more portage will compile packages for your setup.
I don't know about you, but I don't mail my disteos; rsync is much faster.
I've used Arch on many different computers over the years. It's not stable, it breaks. I don't understand why it's great. Debian (minimal install) is better.
I've only had one problem with arch (it broke after an update once) except for that one problem it was always very stable and solid in my experience.
Debian is too "old" for me. I prefer bleeding edge and i refuse to use any flatpaks or such because they are a pain in the ass to set up right in my experience
Been at Ubuntu for a couple of years but I was pleasantly surprised when I went back to debian. Sticking to that one like shit on shingles.
Mint is definitely not overrated. It has done much for the community because they created a distro that is easy to understand if you switch to Linux, easy to maintain and mostly works out of the box. Also they don't use snap.
Agreed. I just have better things to do than muck about with my OS. Just slap Mint on that fucker and get on with your life. Now, of course I i know that many people like to tinker and have everything just so. I'm not in any way knocking that. But if you just want minimal hassle Mint is the shit.
Noob mint user here; first distro, I really like it. What's up with the snap contention that I keep seeing?
Snap is container Software. It's a program that runs software in an isolated area. Snaps is made by canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. And it's really hatred because, IIRC, it's very slow and not completely open source
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
Eek I just finished installing Manjaro to test it out.
Manjaro still hasn't broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I've used the three branches it offers.
It's fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they've been using it.
Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it's bulletproof.
Aaaaand.... commence the downvoting.
You have to keep updating it fairly often, otherwise things slip through the cracks. Most recently on a machine that hadn't been updated in about a year it wasn't able to install anything because it couldn't update its GPG keyring anymore. I find the solution to be pacman-keys --refresh-keys or something like that. Why they can't do that as part of one of the updates, I don't know.
There's also small things that crop up during normal installs but that's to be expected on any distro due to bugs in various packages.
Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.
My 2 cents is this. Don't install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:
Main Repo
Flatpak (if its not a system tool like an IDE)
AUR
But the AUR is the best part of Arch. I agree with you but why not use Arch or EndeavourOS and be free to use the AUR without fear.
Yes the AUR is the best feature of Arch, which is why I am still using an Arch distro and not Fedora or Debain.
However one of Manjaro's features which other Linux distros don't have, is how much of the OS's troubleshooting and repair is in GUIs. For the most part I can setup a fresh Manjaro install without touching the command line once. And that's how I want to use my machines, I want to just browse the web, play games, or do office tasks (the reason I use a computer), not trying to figure out how to install a GUI package manager from the AUR in EndeavourOS since it doesn't come with one.
“Ran it for a year straight alright before I broked it”. Exactly.
I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience
Wasn't Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That's what I've heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn't (isn't?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me.
I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn't break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn't even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.
Still no breaks on my side after 3 years of daily use.
Being 64-bit doesn't make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it's 64-bit
Being bleeding edge doesn't make you special, all I have to do is sit on a nail and now I'm bleeding edge too
Rolling releases don't make you special, anyone can have those if they take a shit on a steep slope
/s (was hoping we'd be able to leave this behind on reddit, but alas, people's sense of humor...)
I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.
..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.
I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.
Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That's its whole philosophy.
It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn't hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.
The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.
Yeah I get that. I'm running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn't find it hard to install, but as you say I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it's people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about "getting through the install" like it's some rite of passage.
I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I'm not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it's not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.
Just to reiterate my position, I'm not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I'm not fully convinced it's deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that's warranted because it's so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my "learning in a VM" distro.
Isn’t Gentoo the one for that title?
Gentoo isn't hard either, but it assumes you need what it offers. If you don't actively want to recompile this and that package with a custom combination of features then it's wasted and its normal way of doing things seems cumbersome.
The Gentoo install isn't hard, it's very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that's for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It's really not.
10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a "DIY but with good tools and the best wiki" kind of deal.
But yeah, agreed. These days it's pretty dang easy.
That's exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn't really find this all that "hands on". Sure it's not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don't get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying "advanced users only, DIY, etc" I'm thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It's a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don't really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.
Oh, yeah, for sure. AUR stuff is a somewhat more hands-on, at least if you actually read/edit PKGBUILD files the way you're meant to, and it's not too hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you've never had the guard rails off before, but yeah, pacman makes stuff easy.
"Advanced users only" these days seems to generally just mean, "CLI is a hard requirement" and maybe "you have to edit config files and not use a GUI" or (heaven forbid) "you may need to actually read and follow instructions"
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen's first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn't be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour's Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it's better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I'm not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven't dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it's great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I'll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I'm not completely happy I'll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can't say I've had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
@polygon@valentino@turkalino it’s kinda funny. Arch is like 2 steps away from just being a normal distro. Which is why Endeavor and Steam OS work so well. Just add some functions to take care of things like mirrors or installing the AUR or whatever and it’s a perfectly noob friendly distro. People got indignant about Arch install being added but at the end of the day I’d bet that most arch users at this point have the same defaults
Well, most people installing Arch for the first time have no idea what a typical Linux install does under the hood. That makes it a worthwhile learning experience. The same commands you use during the setup you can later use to fix or change things. It basically forces you to become a somewhat proficient Linux user.
Which GPU are you using?
I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.
The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.
BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).
In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.
Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).
Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.
obligatory I use Arch btw.
I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia's incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn't really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.
I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought "okay, here comes the hard part" until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it's perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it's smooth as butter.
Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I've got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.
Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.
Some people needs recent packages. This is the main point of Arch IMO.
Rolling releases
Yep, this phrase is now broken for me. It's all just turds rolling down hills from here on out. Thanks for that
Even when you are poking fun it is hard to find fault with Arch. Not even “funny because it is true” material.
Ubuntu. I think of it as the Yahoo of linux distros. It used to be good, but then they made terrible decisions that ultimately made them irrelevant.
Seeing Ubuntu now is like seeing your (previously) favourite musician, sold out and washed up.
More like OpenOffice. It still has some power on its branding, but new users should stay away from it and go for LibreOffice, that is any other main distro (Arch, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Debian, etc.). There's nothing exciting happening in Ubuntu anymore, but a lot of people still know its name.
I wish it were irrelevant. It's the default in a lot of non-hobby use cases. Even if it's nobody's favorite, switching requires a business reason and certain degree of consensus among devs/managers/partners/customers.
Gonna go with Manjaro. I can't, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It's not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I'm just confused.
I mean, any Arch derived distro with an "easy installer" kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don't make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they're not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR...
Endeavouros is more community welcoming & does not make bad choices with a real copyleft license.
Oh, I totally agree. If I was going to recommend an Arch derivative with an easier installer, Endeavor would be the one.
I still think, though, if you're looking for an "easy way to install Arch," you're gonna be happier with a different distro. Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed maybe.
One good reason to have distros like EndeavourOS is if you have to use an Enterprise WiFi network while installing Arch. Pain in the ass to get iwd to work with them.
The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.
Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?
The issue is new users.
If you have a vague understanding that Linux has distros and to switch to Linux, you'll likely Google "best Linux distro." Results that say "they all are good for different reasons" are unhelpful. Having sort through 50 options isn't helpful.
New users want to know what to install. This means that some distros get hyped up as the best, and then people point out the cracks.
Until there is a clear and objective list of distros with pros and cons labeled the cycle will continue.
I already gave mine. They're in the video.
You're going to have to start adding your lemmy contact info in the podcast now lol
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆
waaaat? I like the logo tho!
that logo is ancient and unappealing
I tried installing NixOS in a VM once and it spent at least 45 minutes doing something with python and I said "That's enough of that" and killed the VM.
Python works, it's pip that doesn't work because it's trying to install stuff into an immutable distro
You should take a look at the Gentoo logo. That's an international hate crime of a logo.
I've never seen it before until now, but you're totally right. I'm going to start hating it too now.
"Gaming" distros, save for Steam OS as that's for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).
Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it's too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you're not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They've made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for "stability" will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn't seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it's not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn't use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it's a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don't care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using "stability" or "compatibility" when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn't saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that's what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you're not using the AUR then this all won't have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn't a differentiation people are after.
For me, every non-mainstream distro. IMO every fork which is just a rebuild .iso should ratherly be an install script and extra repos. Simply because the lack of maintenancers and userbase tends to make those projects to die or getting updates way less often tahn should. People should join any existing project rather than creating new ones.
Or: meta packages! (Debian nomenclature, but it probably exists on non-Debian distros as well)
Much more secure than executing random code online, usually with root privileges. And reuses the existing infrastructure of the "parent" distro.
For all its strengths, Arch is kind of a pain in the ass to maintain. I daily drive it but I risk breaking something if I don't update regularly. My youtube laptop can't update at all anymore from something I don't care to fix (when Firefox breaks then its a big deal lmao) and my main rig needed to use the fallback initramfs for a while after I forgot to update for a while. mkinitcpio -P (I think) fixed it though
What do you mean exactly? A running system shouldn't spontaneously break from not being updated. It's just that partial upgrades can break compatibility/dependencies, but running full system upgrades should be fine, as long as you pay attention to breaking changes and major version bumps. Also with timeshift it should always be possible to get back to a working state.
I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don't run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won't have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you'd still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe "X" in "as long as I update every X, I'll be fine?" Who knows. That's not a very well-defined problem.
I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I'm picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I'd get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I'm willing to do the occasional bit of "real work" if needed to keep it going, but that's a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.
Yeah that's what I meant, not updating for a while makes it more likely to break next time I try. I think the time I had to use the fallback I waited something like close to a month?
I imagine it's a pacman keyring issue. I had it break on me on multiple occasions, on different machines, all after not having updated for a long-ish while.
I don't get this either. Before my current PC, my last install was 6 years old. I could count on one hand the number of times I broke that install and every single time was my own damn fault.
I had Manjaro on a laptop that didn't get updated for about a year. Broken on update because I didn't check Arch news first to see if manual intervention was needed. Was still faster to fix than a backup-reinstall.
Countless other installs of Arch or derivatives on various PCs and laptops without issue.
There can definitely be more of a learning curve but once you're set, I find it much easier to maintain than other distros. 🤷🏻♀️
MX Linux.
I don't know why it gets recommended so often, I don't actually think many people use it, but for some reason it's brought up all the time. I blame Distrowatch.
I was an MX user. It looks nice out of the box (better than Mint at the time) and the "flagship" version runs smooth on old laptops, probably thanks to Xfce.
Side note, MX has a rare feature, it provides a choice between two init systems.
100% distro watch
I realized Arch was overrated when I got a brand new 7900 XT and it didn't work on Arch at all because their LLVM was a version behind. It was up-to-date on Fedora and even Ubuntu, but not Arch. Then there was the whole broken grub thing. Bleeding edge and unstable I get, but you can't be unstable and also behind. You can run Arch in any distro with distrobox, I don't see why you wouldn't just do that.
Ubuntu has ads in the terminal when you update. Runs a highly modified GNOME that doesn't play well with some extensions. Snaps by default (although maybe not that bad now that they seem to launch a bit quicker). Unfortunately so many things only have Ubuntu support if they have Linux support at all, it's such a shame.
LLVM was held back for a good reason, it was breaking things left and right. Even so, if you really needed it there were always AUR packages for it, or lcarlier's mesa-git repo if you prefer prebuilt packages, so it's not as if you were just SOL. I got my 7900XT in december, and instructions on how to get it running were already all over the forums and subreddit at the time and it was working on the same day that I got it.
I don't know when you got your 7900XT, but it was broken on Ubuntu too for a good while, I'm not even sure that it currently works on 22.04 without using external PPAs. In the mean time, it now works with Arch out of the box.
As for the grub thing, I'm not sure how that could have been handled differently. Upstream introduced a change that created a compatibility issue, so Arch could either not update to a newer version of grub ever, or update anyway and tell its users how to handle the compatibility issue. The latter is what they did.
I got it the day it came out so it was the wild west. I think to get it to work on Arch I figured out you needed to compile the new llvm or something, and I just gave up at that point. Fedora Silverblue on the rawhide branch had everything for it, and as soon as 37 was caught up I just re-based on that branch and have been good ever since. Ubuntu did have some other issue I don't remember, not a new enough kernel maybe.
Yeah but I think you're unfairly blaming Arch for not being ready for a new GPU on release day, especially when there are still known issues with the upstream packages that are required for it.
I think you may also misunderstand what Arch is. It isn't meant to be absolute bleeding edge. It's meant to be a distro that's as up-to-date as possible yet stable enough for everyday use. So the Arch team does curate upgrades and does QA before they release it to the stable repos.
If you want something similar, without ads, no snaps, LTS, but with periodic kernel updates, then Pop!_OS might be up your alley.
I love System 76 but I hate modified GNOME anything. That's why I always use Fedora. When Cosmic DE comes out I'll give it a shot.
Ditto, really respect what System76 has done but I need a long break from Ubuntu and GNOME. Looking forward to Cosmic DE but until it’s mature it is difficult to see how far they’d get.
Eh, when I bought a brand new Lenova Legion 5 a few years ago the trackpad wouldn't work in Ubuntu, Fedora, or PopOS. It worked on the 4th distro I tried, Manjaro. So your mileage may vary.
That is most likely an Arch-thing rather than a Manjaro-thing.
Yeah, that is most likely an Arch thing which is why I made this comment in direct response to a person saying that Arch was behind Ubuntu when that is not always the case. I'm sure most people know that Manjaro is based on Arch.
If you want a Manjaro specific thing, then I could point to his "broken grub thing" which did not effect Manjaro because the updates are held back for longer and for further testing.
I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine.
But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
I still need to give NixOS the college try. The docs are slowly getting better but other than that I have heard great things from all over the Internet about it once you get your head around it. I failed at figuring it out on my own but the day will come where it makes sense I'm sure.
I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they're an essential building block for anything that isn't utterly trivial.
the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.
Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don't know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.
lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it's a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it's slightly different in important ways. there's no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.
Between zero-to-nix.com and nixos.wiki, I think there are enough docs to get started with it quickly.
I feel like it is too complicated for a desktop user. Linux is already complicated enough. On Silverblue I had to do some mental gymnastic to make some things work because everything is just made for Workstation. I don't think the advantages outweigh the benefits
I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?
Funny. Whole reason I use nixos is because I cba to tinker with my systems anymore. Tell me another OS with which I can manage 20+ systems with even less effort and I'd consider switching.
Ah but then you are talking about servers? That would be a different story!
The machine that I use for development (laptop) should always work (I would trust nixos with this) and if I want to spin up a container (docker run) or install an application (apt install)or change my vpn client configuration it is currently effortless and I'm not sure nixos can do that.
Actually using nixos for some of my private servers would be a nice use case...
I use it for workstations, laptops and servers alike. I also configure them all on my home pc and remote push the config. Been a while since I manually SSH'd onto one of my machines...
For me there is only two distros. They are Arch an Debian. But that is only me. I don't think that any of those distros are overreted they just have their own user types and needs.
I use Arch BTW
The first distro I feel in love with was Debian (potato I think). Before that I had dabbled here and there but never had something click. Played with Gentoo when it first landed (try a stage one Gentoo build without the internet to go to for answers to really learn it!) and after getting tired of compiling all the time tried this new Ubuntu thing. Stayed with that for years until snaps and decided to try Manjaro to learn about this Arch thing. Got sick of the problems and but the bullet and went "pure" Arch. Feel in love again like I did way back with Debian.
Now I use Debian on important servers and Arch on servers I can afford to play with and my day to day machine.
Never looked back. Debian for stability, Arch for everything else. Never been happier.
Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.
Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.
RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.
Any Linux without systemd or glibc: Mistakes were made, and then different mistakes were made trying to prove systemd made mistakes. Musl based Linux distros are going to have compatibility problems, so I might as well run a different OS. The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.
Having gone through the Arch install myself, what part dod you find you had to babysit? Boot the install media, format the drive, mount the mounts, install system, configure the system, and done. Maybe it’s just a more involved process than you’d like?
It’s everything after the install I don’t have time for. The install is the easy part. 😆
There are distros which are semi-rolling (Fedora) or rolling (Tumbleweed) which make it easy to maintain the install without lots of configuration.
Of course, there's always the special cheat code called archinstall that you can invoke immediately after login if you have a wired connection. Honestly, installing GNU/Linux isn't hard, maintaining it is. Installing Gentoo is following a handbook, maintaining gentoo requires rigorous application logic and configuring.
Archinstall also works on wireless using iwctl, that's what I did
Yea nobody would ever use Arch for the basis of anything game changing coughSteamOScough
Are you saying that Arch is the new Ubuntu?
The good/bad Linux distro circlejerk.
People are constantly speaking about what's the best or worst distro in long argumentation loosing their time. Instead, it would nice to make people actually switch to a Linux distro and stay on a distro. Each people people switching from another OS is a win. This matters and how making Linux distros more accessible to everyone.
Haha, noob. My distro is the best distro and everybody should be using it because nobody has a different use case and expectation anyway. My terminal skills are unrivalled, your mouse is blocking your progress to true productive greatness. My automated installation runs faster than you can download your proprietary drivers. I use imagemagick instead of gimp for its speed and user friendliness. Vim is the only editor you ever need. Do you even internet without your own email server? I rather install rpm's on arch than use flatpack.
//The linux endboss needs to be a meme. We could make chuck norris level jokes about him.
Gentoo? LFS?
Yes. One is obviously running in a kvm of the other. Both nailed down with grsec hardening and selinux and chroot jails everywhere a noob would use a container. The main filesystem is a readonly squashfs on raid1.
Any more ideas for the most hellish linux system we can create for our enemies?
I've been on arch for 4 or 5 years now. I think the "distro hopping" is mostly a meme my noobs. No hate.
I didn't mean distro hopping. I mean people actually staying on Linux after trying it and not going back to another os.
Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.
Why?
They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:
Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.
While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch; archinstall exists. And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.
Is the guy who called everyone thieves if they didn't donate enough before downloading still part of Elementary?
Is the guy who called everyone thieves if they didn’t donate enough before downloading still part of Elementary?
Assuming you're referring to this article; I don't know. Was it even ever revealed who the author was? Honestly I don't even think that it matters, as publicating the blogpost means that the team -at least to some degree- endorsed the idea.
And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them.
Without wanting to be elitist, I'd go further than that.
While archinstall is a nice convenience, even the "manual" installation is really just diligently reading and following the wiki guide.
If that's too much for you, you're likely going to struggle when stuff needs manual intervention and you're probably better off with a different distro.
It is or not what you are capable of, it is what you want to do. I have been using Linux since before Slackware; I can install Arch. So, what did I do recently when I needed to setup a spare iMac to prepare a course I am reaching on the side? I used EndeavourOS. My goal had nothing to do with proving my Linux skills. I just needed a nice environment to work in, I needed it quickly, and I needed easy access to quite a lot of other up-to-date software just as quickly and easily. What I needed was Arch with a great installer. Honestly, even just installing yay by default so that I can dive right into the AUR is a great convenience. If there really is something that requires my configuration later, I can do that. If I need to. If there is something beyond my knowledge the Arch wiki is amazing and ( unlike Manjaro ) it is 100% applicable to EndeavourOS. . For me, EndeavourOS strikes the perfect balance.
Of course, one doesn't have to install Arch manually; archiso and Endeavour are great conveniences and exist for a reason.
That doesn't change the fact that people who rely on those tools not because they want to save some time/effort but because they're unable to follow wiki instructions are likely better off with something other than Arch.
I installed Elementary OS on a computer I built for a friend's kid, because I wanted something that was easy to use and low maintenance. It was pretty good from that point of view, but eventually that release got outdated and I discovered that they don't suppose upgrades between major versions.
That's unfortunate indeed. Currently I gravitate towards installing something like Endless OS for either elderly people or children. Automatic atomic updates from the get go on an immutable distro based on Debian Stable; just good stuff. FWIW, it allows updates between major versions as well 😉.
Perhaps we'll give that a try since we're going to have to wipe his computer anyway.. They live quite far away so the top prio is something that won't require me to go there and fix the computer every now and then :)
As it even does major updates automatically, it's almost as handsfree as it gets.
AH, so this is a "tell me your favourite distro" post again. Tribalism isn't cool, man.
Linux Mint. People praise it as the perfect Window replacement yet when I tried it for a week, it didn't do anything better than default KDE Plasma Desktop. And since the devs haven't even started to work on Wayland support, the Distro will soon fall way behind.
I use Plasma and like it. I wouldn't have stuck around or really got started if it wasn't for Mint.
It might. Then we can still switch. For the time being it works just fine. The maintainers are a bit conservative for good reasons though. Mint is supposed to just work and for the most part it does just that.
I hated Cinnamon, I tried to like Mint. but it's a botched patched Ubuntu
Definitely Arch and Ubuntu.
what is overrated about them?
Ubuntu, ootb works, but snap all over, and ubuntu pro ads everywhere.. I can't even reinstall the company laptop into Fedora because of their policy... In the end I wrote a piece interface cli to make me felt at home using dnf masking apt, flatpak masking snap, and any dnf or flatpak behavior, works on snap or apt.. it's nightmare, but at least help me coup with using ubuntu... cope.. COPE...
Okay, but what is "overrated" about them? I don't like Ubuntu either, but I don't think it's overrated. It just is where it is
Easyness, where it's not. Fedora is better for noobs than ubuntu in my opinion.
If you're arguing for ease of use: they're pretty much on a par with each other. If you're arguing for ease of software installation I'd prefer Ubuntu over fedora, as Ubuntu is still the first linux distro any proprietary software company will port their software to (even though it's gotten better over the last few years), which is probably the only thing the average user cares about: does my software run or not?
Mint. Cinnamon is weird. I've had more problems and weird glitches with Cinnamon than any other DE. And it looks like it's straight out of 2004. That's why I'm a KDE junkie on KDE Neon now.
Yeah Mint is really ancient, not shitting on the Devs but everybody is moving to Wayland. While they keep their old project that runs only because of nostalgia.
Opensuse TW is better than Neon. The latter is used for testing dunno why people keep using it
As a KDE junkie, I'd still choose Cinnamon as the backup.
And I'm sitting here not understanding why people like KDEs' looks so much.
But then again, looks don't matter when you can theme everything. Nightfox Dusk with Tela Purple icons is a banger
I like a pretty much stock with tweaks KDE, personally. Nice and simple, utilitarian, but not necessarily minimal.
I've never really cared for the MacOS visual style though.
I shouldn't really care, but I may have to change DEs if I get a new high refresh rate monitor.
I'm currently using EndeavourOS with XFCE, so Wayland is a No. Could become a problem. Kinda is a problem already, because I'd like to overclock my main monitor to 75Hz, whereas the second one can only run 60.
Last time I tried to get Wayland on KDE a few months ago, it was a bit of a pain to get it working properly and then it was pretty buggy. Admittedly this was months ago, on Nvidia, and regular updates on making it better have been coming pretty consistently.
They've recently made some changes to the style that make it a lot more modern, mostly switching to the papyrus icon pack and making the accent colors more saturated.
Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It's not bad by any means, but it's a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn't come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I ran Fedora 33, and upgraded it in place through to fedora 36. Ran pretty well the whole time.
I had snapper running for btrfs snapshotting, and did a double hop release jump to 38. Somehow I messed up my high water mark config for snapper in the mean time, and ran out of disk space mid-install without realizing. Symptom was firefox crashing. So I rebooted. Borked.
I agree with all of your complaints about it, and there’s plenty to dislike, but it’s still probably a good landing point for new users.
For me, it was the right amount of itjust.works at the right time, coming from debian (an update in 2018 killed my gdm, and I rage switched to fedora). Next stop is Gentoo!
The third party thing is outdated, you can enable it at install and have access to flathub and fusion repo. So installing Steam or Nvidia drivers is dead simple now. I would still say it's not great for new users because it's ultra minimal.
Nobara fixes quite a few aspects of this.
I really don't understand why backup tools like Timeshift or Snapper aren't shipping preinstalled & preconfigured in all mainstream type distros when you go with btrfs, or at least have an option in the installer for that.
@valentino I know Ubuntu is the meme answer but I’ve never been satisfied when I use it. On servers and desktops where I want stability, I find Debian to be much more reliable and straightforward. I had two Ubuntu pcs recently and the upgrade gui tool would just kill itself when trying to go to the next version so I had to look up the terminal option. And looking up packages only to find out I’m installing outdated snaps where the permissions get in the way
"Overrated" is a very specific word here. Some of the distros he just talks about their users and not the distro itself. Confusingly, he also then ignores the users entirely for other distros. I went into this assuming it would be low effort content, but it went even lower and ended up being just a "what comes to my mind when I think of this distro" list, which doesn't seem very fair towards some of the distros (near the top of the list even!) that don't have real complaints weighed against them.
Mint isn't a bad ditro its just overhyped for new users.
Nobara is very overrated. Comes with so much bloat apps and is confusing for new users. Don't understand why people recommended it.
It has some kernel tweaks and niche bug fixes for certain games but its just overrated.
Ubuntu is decent but definitely lost its touch over the years.
I think Pop!OS is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is now.
Also I definitely agree about Mint. I don't think it really sets out to hype itself up to be fair, it's just a nice-looking, easy to use and stable distro that does exactly what it's supposed to, and people tend to over-sell it a bit.
I definitely agree when it comes to Nobara. I've used Fedora for some time now, and I was curious about how it would be tailored to gaming. I made up my mind within three minutes using a live USB to go back to standard fedora. Too much preinstalled nonsense.
Whichever your favorite one is, that's the most overrated one
Arch btw
It's treason, then
Gentoo. Gentoo users have pretty much supplanted Arch (btw) users in the "annoying poweruser" niche.
I agree with you a bit on Garuda, even as someone myself who uses it. I've had it break multiple times on me, I still use it mainly because it has all the stuff I like by default (and a cool dragon theme, which should be a requirement of all distros).
Other than that, I'm gonna be boring and say Ubuntu. Just a worse Debian.
Nah, Gentoo has always appealed to annoying power users. Arch users have only recently joined us in that niche. 😉
Gentoo users have pretty much supplanted Arch (btw) users in the "annoying poweruser" niche.
Why do you say that? I still see tons of 'arch btw
' comments and very few 'Gentoo is the be all and end all of Linux distributions' ones.
IMHO NixOS, which is what I'm using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use "a long time ago", which leads me to believe he doesn't fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the "nix package manager", which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it's like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel's, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there's a disconnect between old nix ("stable") and new nix (flakes, "unstable", experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I'd just chime in, because this guy's take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive...
...though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you're trying to do out of the box, then it's very nice, or you'll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS's altered file structure. You don't simply add a .desktop file to the xsessions folder.
Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don't intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.
I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it's a game changer no doubt.
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Nobara.
Any Gaming Oriented distro except SteamOS.
These 3 especially feel overbloated
Mint works and you can recommend it, but it is a mess with its two versions. The "normal" version is based on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is already an user friendly distro.
Mint also has LMDE version, it makes more sense because directly based on a "rough" Debian, but it seems less popular.
Yes, but Ubuntu has snaps. Cinnamon is preferred by many to Gnome. It has clear differences.
RedStar OS
Nope, it's better then anything else here hands down.
Double checks for Hannah Montana Linux... Nope not listed... Yep it's the best here
Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.
And arch too.
I don’t do derivatives. Arch based distro? Just use Arch! Ubuntu, Mint, Pop or the hundreds alike, go Debian!
Eh, you're being lazy. Just compile the kernel from source.
Real men write their own OS in assembly!
Arch in general. As well as Manjaro (the most unreliable distro ever)
6 years on my manjaro install, zero problems.
Lucky guy.
Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it's still one of my favorite distributions and the one I'm using usually. I'm comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).
Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.
I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I'm a bit lazy to explore other options.
A nice introduction to Arch might be EndeavourOS.
Currently my answer is ubuntu. I tried to use lubuntu recently but just so much wasn't working out of the box like nm-applet wasn't running on startup. The apt package manager is really tedious to use too.
This could also be boiled down to my general incompetence when it comes to Ubuntu based systems though :p
Fedora is highly overrated.
Flatpaks never worked properly on Fedora for me.
I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.
I think workstation is overrated and silverblue is underrated.
I've never used Mint so wouldn't want to comment but it does seem to get a lot of praise and I can't see why.
EndeavorOS would be my vote. Arch with a GUI installer and horrible theme.
ZorinOS is definitely overrated, their update cycles are too slow (two years between major releases) and its unique features like ZorinConnect, Windows Software Tool , and their Zorin customized GNOME 42/XFCE isn't good enough against its sibling Mint.
Debian (Testing) I used it for a good month, and man was I disappointed. Only some things are actually up to date and packaged correctly. The nvidia drivers don't load the drm module because it's not called nvidia-drm on Debian (testing) it's called nvidia-current-drm. Also apt is the worst package manager
Use nala instead of apt, it's mostly a different frontend that looks way nicer, but also has vast improvements such as simultaneous downloads and a controllable history
Nala is even worse, so few commands
why do you say apt is the worst pm?
If you need to install a package that the author messed up the dependency lists for your shit outta luck. Other than manually unzipping and installing it you're stuck. Searching for a package is hell cause it's a massive list with like 4 lines per package. Yay/pacman is the best package manager, because it's got quick commands and when you search for something you don't have to make a mental note of the names you can just type 1, 4, 17, etc to choose a package to install. Oh and there aren't built shorter commands for apt! You can't say apt in package you have to write out install every single time
I'm using ZorinOS with Windows 11 Pro. It's good enough for everything I do.
All the distros that let you install packages from other distros. What's the point?
How many distros is that? Just VanillaOS and Blend? Or anything that hosts Distrobox?
I have been wanting to try Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch. Stable base with the largest and most up to date package repository sounds like a match made in heaven.
The point is your first sentence?
Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn't have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.
I think Elementary OS a bit. It's not bad necessarily (although I do think they're a bit over-aggressive about monetization which I don't really like) but I always see people talk it up about how functional and beautiful-looking it is, whereas when I tried it it just seemed like a pretty standard Ubuntu-based distro themed to look like a Mac.
Unless there's something amazing in there that I just didn't catch on to, but it just didn't really click for me.
@valentino All of them; they're mostly the same! /jk But seriously try another OS: OpenBSD, Haiku, Serenity, Plan 9...
Windows
I got my slacks on with dramatic music Slackware Linux! crowd gasps
I really really enjoyed this video. Matt is great, every video of his is a different type of gold, great content.
As for the distros:
Mint (my first distro, favourite beginner distro; when I tried using it a few months ago, however, the facade was stripped: it's not good for my use case anymore and that's fine)
Zorin
All the *buntus, but especially Kubuntu for some reason
Arch (I say that as a bit of an Arch fanboy)
NixOS (I say that as a NixOS user)
Most, if not all of the Arch-based distros (literally just Arch with an installer, some preinstalled stuff, and extra repos, except Manjaro which is a failure, but that's a different topic)
I haven't really heard anyone speak highly on Elementary OS or Solus so I don't exactly agree about them being overrated.
Extra (that will piss off a lot of power users, also rant and story time): Void Linux. It just feels like it's weird for the sake of being weird. And a lot of times I tried to get river working, to no avail, and that is literally my greatest issue with Void, as well as the fa t it tries to be like Arch, but more stable. Don't het me wrong, that's literally the type of distro I want to run, but I just find it to be a bit of a mess for some reason. Arch has always besn smooth sailing, with Archinstall or via a manula install, while with Void I felt like I was fighting the system to make it do what I want it to. So yeah, Void. Love the "Enter the Void" marketing, and the idea, as well as the logo. The installer was fine, xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated, and I had a hard time getting river and sddm working properly. Runit was weird but I could get used to it if it actually worked well. The main issue I was having was that at first, the river session did not appear. I fixed that, but then I couldn't het sddm enabled on Void because it didn't have a service file for runit! Cue me trying to get that set up for an hour or two, until I gave up and moved on to Tumbleweed (where zypper broke on me and I had to depend on Yast to manage packages, sighs). And then I gave up on Tumbleweed, went to Arch, where things were ok, but I didn't really want a rolling relese so when NixOS 23.05 launched, I jumped ship and have been there since. It's a bit crazy to me that this system has been on my laptop since the start of June, but it does all of what I need in a good way, and that's without even taking advantage of the full capabilities of NixOS. I only use Home manaher to set my gtk and icon themes, and have not even touched flakes yet.
xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated
OpenSSL is such a pain in that regard. Want the info of a TLS certificate? openssl x509 -text -noout -in /path/to/file.pem. Single character flags? What are those?
Laughing in agreement at your list... then I get to Void. Instant angry.
But I understand your perspective. I would rarely recommend Void to someone, coming from a daily Void user. It is a lot. Paradigms are different. But I love it. It works when you figure it out, and I've never had a broken system with Void. It is truly stable. (Obligatory "in my experience".)
Instant Angry
I DID warn you! And it most certainly is a lot. It felt very overwhelming to me.
It works when you figure it out
And the same could be said of OpenSUSE, NixOS and Arch, but it takes time and effort from the user to figure it out, and Void caught me at a time wherw I was pissed and wanted a working system. I just thought "I'm hopping anyways, might as well tried Void. It can't be that different. And if it fails, I'm off to Tumbleweed". The system didn't fail, my getting around in the system and trying to figure it out, after being exhausted and frustrated, failed. If those rhings did not happen, I might have saved myself many hours of Tumbleweed and Arch, but hey, it is what it is, and I found a distro that fits my needs and works well for me. I'm glad you have done the same.
Edit: Overall Void is an INCREDIBLE project and I have a great deal of respect for its developers, creating their own package manager and init system, which is no easy task, but it is greatly overhyped, in my opinion, as are most distros. After all, they're just that. Distros. They won't change your life (unless you get a Linux job offering for one, like the guy that got a helpdesk job for running Arch, some company using RHEL or clones giving you a role for being familiar with Fedora, or the company that seeks NixOS Engineers) but overall, they likely won't change your life. They might offer a better and more efficient workflow for your needs that's not possible elsewhere, but even then, distro fanboyism, (saying that as an Arch fanboy, and a NixOS enjoyer) is kinda stupid, as your workflow can likely be replicated on other distros.
xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated
Ever heard of alias?
For me it's alias pks='xbps-query -Rs' and alias pki='xbps-install' (package search and package install).
I don't want to sound like a jerk, and I say this with all due respect for Void, which I kind of like, but...
If your argument against a command needing too many keystrokes is "use alias" then you've already lost. Even you think it's too long. Thats why you use alias...
Before Void I was using Debian (then Devuan), and I used aliases for the package manager commands there too.
Anyway, I think the "the program name is too long" argument is even worse.
I use aliases too, and I (mostly) use Fedora. Alias is a great tool. I also think "the program name is too long" is a pretty silly argument. We're on the same page there. All I meant was that "just use alias" isn't really a rebuttal to that particular point.
Huh, TIL Debian Hurd exists. Thought for sure you confused debian Hurd with gnu Hurd.
Arch
definitely ubuntu
Debian
" Sorry, in a community about doing your own thing and enjoying your own experience, you're opinion does not fit in. Enjoy the downvotes" - /Linux
I think Debian is a bit overrated too.
I've got to go with Endeavour. I'm not sure it's so much that it's overrated, but more that the community talks about it as a replacement for Manjaro which is far from the case. The installation may be easier than arch but once it's all up and running you're going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out. The documentation for endeavour is incredibly lacking too. It's an unnecessary middle step between a "beginner" distro and arch. If you can't follow the arch installation guide on the wiki then you're going to have even more trouble when it comes to endeavour
once it's all up and running you're going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out.
The tagline of the distro is "A terminal-centric distro with a vibrant and friendly community at its core"
So I'm not sure that is something to complain about, and is by design of their team.
To me it isn't designed as a beginner distro just a preconfigured arch with a nice gui installer and defaults that work for nearly everyone.
Yeah I completely agree, my issue is more with the amount of people that try and push it as a manjaro alternative. It doesn't in the slightest work as a manjaro altrnative for the reasons you've mentioned yet a bunch of people seem to think it is. I've seen endeavourOS recommended to beginners a bunch of times when they ask about manjaro
NixOS for sure, it's poorly documented and even worse designed.
Although I like NixOS, I have to agree with the documentation being crap. Which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so damn different. I mean, other distros have bad documentation, I just read some man pages or check the Arch or Fedora docs.
Do you also feel this way about Guix' documentation?
Guix's documentation needs a lot more work for sure, but it's definitely better.
NixOS does have poor docs, but why don't you elaborate on why you think it's poorly designed?
I have read that in the past, and I do agree with points of it, but I don't agree with the conclusion that Nix is poorly designed. A lot of the issues are in my opinion fairly minor considering the scope of Nix, and many of them are a matter of opinion.
Build system issues
Nix uses builders, which are functions that exist for different languages and frameworks. These build packages for these frameworks in consistent ways, they are documented in the Nixpkgs manual. Nix and Guix seems fairly equivalent here.
Language issues
I can agree with some parts of this, Nix is not a fantastic language imo. I don't think that it is a problem that Nix packages use shell scripting, as it is simpler to me than writing these parts in Guile and any Nix contributor is almost certainly familiar with bash already. I think the upcoming alternative language Nickle looks promising, mainly due to its static typing and improved standard library. I personally find Nix's json like syntax much simpler for basic configuration that Guix, and Guix is not enough better at more complex tasks to be worth it for me.
Debugging
Nix errors aren't great, but errors like infinite recursion are avoided by following good practices. I personally haven't had any errors that I found difficult to debug with a stack trace.
Grafts
I know that Nix does have a similar feature, but I don't know how it works and what its capabilities are in comparison to Guix. I think the amount of package rebuilds some updates cause is a problem, but we currently have the infrastructure to handle it and in practice it has not been a problem for me.
nix-env
Nix-env does not have a proper replacement because the community really doesn't have much interest in improving the UX of imperative workflows. nix profile is meant to replace it, but this will take some time as the nix3 cli is stabilized.
Bad UX
I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion on the deprecated tools. The nix2 vs nix3 cli debate is quite controversial unfortunately.
I disagree though that the current nix3 cli is a bad experience. I find the nix [command] syntax easy to use and understand.
To me this write up seemed like more of an argument that Guix is better than Nix, rather than Nix as a whole being bad. Guix seems great, but I chose Nix over Guix for one major reason, software availability. I prefer free software, but I'm not willing to not use proprietary software and not discuss it in Guix communities. Nix still has great support for things like Nvidia drivers and Steam, which seam difficult to use in Guix.
Also, does Guix have a feature comparable to Nix Flakes? The ability to manage projects and multiple systems with Flakes is Nix's killer feature for me.
I recently switched to NixOS and GNU Guix was also a possible option, and while in retrospective, I can agree with your points, there were two things NixOS does that I want that Guix doesn't offer:
Non-free packages (though I guess I could have used Nonguix)
An option for Secure Boot
I don't think the assessment "it's badly designed" is fair and your conclusion
Years and years of technical issues plague the project and there seems to be little interest in actually resolving these issues. Guix is comparatively much newer, yet the UX is much better and there are constant improvements in many areas. It also has the advantage of being built from the ground up with a clear design mind."
(emphasis mine) is misleading ; it's not better despite being newer, it's better because it is newer and was able to learn from Nix and improve upon it. Also what would you call the Nix whitepaper if not the design behind Nix?
Seeing a lot of Manjaro here, what's the deal?
I installed it just yesterday on a test machine to check it out as I plan on steering over from windows long-term so just browsing what's out there. Don't really have issues and it ticks the boxes of a more user-friendly installation and comes out of the box with Plasma. I may try out pure Arch or the GUI fork just not to have the hassle of setting up the DE
On top of what other already said they accidentally DDOS'd the Aur repos and took it down for couple hours one time.
I installed it just yesterday on a test machine
Hmmm.
Manjaro is a really good distro to start with. It has very nice defaults including the correct zsh plugins.
Should make your transition to Arch whenever the time comes very smooth.
It does have a bad reputation because they don't seem to manage it well (e.g. keys keep expiring), and the said defaults are implemented in a very hacky way (if you see the code).
Also they follow a delayed release which is really unnecessary given Arch is stable already; and in fact the delay can cause issues if you use AUR (which you will, eventually discover and learn about and love).
You have to manually manage new kernel branches with the manjaro-settings-manager.
Lots of people get told "it's arch with good defaults! Just sudo pacman -Syu and you're good!"
...which leads to them eventually breaking their systems and blaming manjaro.
No rolling release is appropriate for people who can't RTFM.
Gentoo. There's way better methods to learn Linux, compiling, and the filesystem hierarchy standard. Start with Linux From Scratch and go from there.
LFS doesn't give you a usable system in practice though. A distribution is nothing without package management.
Gentoo gives you a thorough course in Linux fundamentals, and has lots of other benefits. Forget the mild gains of compiling for your specific CPU, it's really all about the incredible flexibility of Portage.
incredible flexibility of Portage
Exactly.
I know people running systemd AND OpenRC on their Gentoo installs. Gentoo is a metadistro. It gives you the tools to build your own distro.
SO in comparison to LFS, Gentoo is pretty similar. It's just the tools that differ (although one can use Portage with LFS...)
Gentoo gives you a thorough course in Linux fundamentals
I basically learned everything Linux related from using Gentoo.
I can't imagine why someone would want both init systems; that's awesome.
I also know few cases of runit+OpenRC.
IIRC one of those support having an external service manager...
There are also few s6 users. I've kepts things quite simple with OpenRC+openrc-init.
Yeah but which one teaches you more about how Linux works, versus how this distro works ? Linux isn't a package manager.
The kernel isn’t, but distros, as people think of Linux, kind of are package management projects.
LFS surely teaches more, but not by much.
Portage lets you see down into the proper guts of Linux deployment. It's much more applicable knowledge than almost any other distro. Plus, the install and maintenance teach non-specific fundamentals as well.
LFS gives a bit more learning and an utterly impractical OS for real life.
Gentoo teaches slightly less, and gives you an extremely robust and flexible OS.
Why are you implying using Gentoo only makes sense to learn Linux?
I'm not implying that. I am implying that Gentoo is overrated as a distro. See, the title of the thread.
Ubuntu is massively overrated. It's a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.
I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux's new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.
Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.
the snaps are terrible and they now have ads in the server version (CLI)
Wait they just include lines of advertisements or something in the command line??
It’s in the MOTD. Very easy to permanently disable, but still annoying.
It’s also in apt https://twitter.com/omgubuntu/status/1574759306544701443?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
What??
The shell MOTD defaults to an Ubuntu Premium ad. It's low-key but it's indisputably an ad.
Dude, what?
I see it is in motd, but is it dynamic? I mean does it fetch new ad when needed?
OK, but you're not seeing Coke ads in the CLI. It's just for the pro version. Lets stop with the pearl clutching.
Pearl clutching is an exaggerated outage. They didn't even show any outrage. Just noted a fact.
Have to agree. They had a great start by enhancing Debian and being user friendly but, then they just kind of lost their way.
It should probably take Mint's place on this list.
Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my "daily driver" for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I'd stayed with Mint, I've have gone to LMDE by now.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more "features" from Ubuntu than it's using at this point.
That's why some people at wondering why wont Mint not rebase to Debian, and go from there... would be better than 'repairing' everything Ubuntu breaks.
Only issue I can see with LMDE compared to the Ubuntu variant is that some of their homegrown tools and stuff aren't included in LMDE for whatever reason. But, if they shifted their focus to LMDE and added all the tools there to give you the proper Mint experience, I think it would be amazing.
indeed. Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.
I've never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I've installed both in VM but that's it.
I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I'd ever suggest to someone.
All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is "fine" at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.
And arch. Arch is godly.
(I use Arch btw.)
I'm gonna say "no", but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you're skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.
Couldn’t agree more. Arch is great if you need a malleable distro, Debian is for everything (else).
Debian is great if you want a stable distro. If you want the latest software run... Debian + Flatpak
Do you install ffmpeg via Flatpak?
In the spirit of your comment though, I have been meaning to try Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch.
Hi. Gentoo user here. 👏
I’ve not used Gentoo in years but I really ought to give it another go. Do you still have to compile everything from scratch or are there binary repos now?
Maybe soon?
Bu the more you diverge from the default the more portage will compile packages for your setup.
I don't know about you, but I don't mail my disteos; rsync is much faster.
I've used Arch on many different computers over the years. It's not stable, it breaks. I don't understand why it's great. Debian (minimal install) is better.
I've only had one problem with arch (it broke after an update once) except for that one problem it was always very stable and solid in my experience.
Debian is too "old" for me. I prefer bleeding edge and i refuse to use any flatpaks or such because they are a pain in the ass to set up right in my experience
Been at Ubuntu for a couple of years but I was pleasantly surprised when I went back to debian. Sticking to that one like shit on shingles.
Mint is definitely not overrated. It has done much for the community because they created a distro that is easy to understand if you switch to Linux, easy to maintain and mostly works out of the box. Also they don't use snap.
Agreed. I just have better things to do than muck about with my OS. Just slap Mint on that fucker and get on with your life. Now, of course I i know that many people like to tinker and have everything just so. I'm not in any way knocking that. But if you just want minimal hassle Mint is the shit.
Noob mint user here; first distro, I really like it. What's up with the snap contention that I keep seeing?
Snap is container Software. It's a program that runs software in an isolated area. Snaps is made by canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. And it's really hatred because, IIRC, it's very slow and not completely open source
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
@nerdschleife
@valentino
Eek I just finished installing Manjaro to test it out.
Manjaro still hasn't broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I've used the three branches it offers.
It's fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they've been using it.
Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it's bulletproof.
Aaaaand.... commence the downvoting.
You have to keep updating it fairly often, otherwise things slip through the cracks. Most recently on a machine that hadn't been updated in about a year it wasn't able to install anything because it couldn't update its GPG keyring anymore. I find the solution to be
pacman-keys --refresh-keysor something like that. Why they can't do that as part of one of the updates, I don't know.There's also small things that crop up during normal installs but that's to be expected on any distro due to bugs in various packages.
Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.
My 2 cents is this. Don't install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:
Main Repo
Flatpak (if its not a system tool like an IDE)
AUR
But the AUR is the best part of Arch. I agree with you but why not use Arch or EndeavourOS and be free to use the AUR without fear.
Yes the AUR is the best feature of Arch, which is why I am still using an Arch distro and not Fedora or Debain.
However one of Manjaro's features which other Linux distros don't have, is how much of the OS's troubleshooting and repair is in GUIs. For the most part I can setup a fresh Manjaro install without touching the command line once. And that's how I want to use my machines, I want to just browse the web, play games, or do office tasks (the reason I use a computer), not trying to figure out how to install a GUI package manager from the AUR in EndeavourOS since it doesn't come with one.
“Ran it for a year straight alright before I broked it”. Exactly.
I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience
Manjaro is amazing ( for a while ).
RIP
Wasn't Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That's what I've heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn't (isn't?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn't break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn't even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.
Still no breaks on my side after 3 years of daily use.
Arch
Being 64-bit doesn't make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it's 64-bit
Being bleeding edge doesn't make you special, all I have to do is sit on a nail and now I'm bleeding edge too
Rolling releases don't make you special, anyone can have those if they take a shit on a steep slope
/s (was hoping we'd be able to leave this behind on reddit, but alas, people's sense of humor...)
I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.
..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.
I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.
Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That's its whole philosophy.
It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn't hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.
The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.
Yeah I get that. I'm running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn't find it hard to install, but as you say I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it's people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about "getting through the install" like it's some rite of passage.
I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I'm not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it's not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.
Just to reiterate my position, I'm not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I'm not fully convinced it's deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that's warranted because it's so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my "learning in a VM" distro.
Isn’t Gentoo the one for that title?
Gentoo isn't hard either, but it assumes you need what it offers. If you don't actively want to recompile this and that package with a custom combination of features then it's wasted and its normal way of doing things seems cumbersome.
The Gentoo install isn't hard, it's very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that's for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It's really not.
10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a "DIY but with good tools and the best wiki" kind of deal.
But yeah, agreed. These days it's pretty dang easy.
That's exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn't really find this all that "hands on". Sure it's not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don't get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying "advanced users only, DIY, etc" I'm thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It's a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don't really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.
Oh, yeah, for sure. AUR stuff is a somewhat more hands-on, at least if you actually read/edit PKGBUILD files the way you're meant to, and it's not too hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you've never had the guard rails off before, but yeah, pacman makes stuff easy.
"Advanced users only" these days seems to generally just mean, "CLI is a hard requirement" and maybe "you have to edit config files and not use a GUI" or (heaven forbid) "you may need to actually read and follow instructions"
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen's first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn't be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour's Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it's better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I'm not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven't dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it's great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I'll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I'm not completely happy I'll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can't say I've had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
@polygon @valentino @turkalino it’s kinda funny. Arch is like 2 steps away from just being a normal distro. Which is why Endeavor and Steam OS work so well. Just add some functions to take care of things like mirrors or installing the AUR or whatever and it’s a perfectly noob friendly distro. People got indignant about Arch install being added but at the end of the day I’d bet that most arch users at this point have the same defaults
Well, most people installing Arch for the first time have no idea what a typical Linux install does under the hood. That makes it a worthwhile learning experience. The same commands you use during the setup you can later use to fix or change things. It basically forces you to become a somewhat proficient Linux user.
Which GPU are you using?
I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.
The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.
BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).
In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.
Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).
Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.
obligatory I use Arch btw.
I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia's incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn't really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.
I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought "okay, here comes the hard part" until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it's perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it's smooth as butter.
Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I've got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.
Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.
Some people needs recent packages. This is the main point of Arch IMO.
Yep, this phrase is now broken for me. It's all just turds rolling down hills from here on out. Thanks for that
Even when you are poking fun it is hard to find fault with Arch. Not even “funny because it is true” material.
Ubuntu. I think of it as the Yahoo of linux distros. It used to be good, but then they made terrible decisions that ultimately made them irrelevant.
Seeing Ubuntu now is like seeing your (previously) favourite musician, sold out and washed up.
More like OpenOffice. It still has some power on its branding, but new users should stay away from it and go for LibreOffice, that is any other main distro (Arch, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Debian, etc.). There's nothing exciting happening in Ubuntu anymore, but a lot of people still know its name.
I wish it were irrelevant. It's the default in a lot of non-hobby use cases. Even if it's nobody's favorite, switching requires a business reason and certain degree of consensus among devs/managers/partners/customers.
Gonna go with Manjaro. I can't, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It's not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I'm just confused.
I mean, any Arch derived distro with an "easy installer" kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don't make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they're not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR...
https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Endeavouros is more community welcoming & does not make bad choices with a real copyleft license.
Oh, I totally agree. If I was going to recommend an Arch derivative with an easier installer, Endeavor would be the one.
I still think, though, if you're looking for an "easy way to install Arch," you're gonna be happier with a different distro. Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed maybe.
One good reason to have distros like EndeavourOS is if you have to use an Enterprise WiFi network while installing Arch. Pain in the ass to get iwd to work with them.
The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.
Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?
The issue is new users.
If you have a vague understanding that Linux has distros and to switch to Linux, you'll likely Google "best Linux distro." Results that say "they all are good for different reasons" are unhelpful. Having sort through 50 options isn't helpful.
New users want to know what to install. This means that some distros get hyped up as the best, and then people point out the cracks.
Until there is a clear and objective list of distros with pros and cons labeled the cycle will continue.
I already gave mine. They're in the video.
You're going to have to start adding your lemmy contact info in the podcast now lol
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆
waaaat? I like the logo tho!
that logo is ancient and unappealing
I tried installing NixOS in a VM once and it spent at least 45 minutes doing something with python and I said "That's enough of that" and killed the VM.
Python works, it's pip that doesn't work because it's trying to install stuff into an immutable distro
You should take a look at the Gentoo logo. That's an international hate crime of a logo.
I've never seen it before until now, but you're totally right. I'm going to start hating it too now.
"Gaming" distros, save for Steam OS as that's for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).
Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it's too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you're not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They've made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for "stability" will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn't seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it's not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn't use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it's a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don't care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using "stability" or "compatibility" when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn't saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that's what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you're not using the AUR then this all won't have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn't a differentiation people are after.
For me, every non-mainstream distro. IMO every fork which is just a rebuild .iso should ratherly be an install script and extra repos. Simply because the lack of maintenancers and userbase tends to make those projects to die or getting updates way less often tahn should. People should join any existing project rather than creating new ones.
Or: meta packages! (Debian nomenclature, but it probably exists on non-Debian distros as well)
Much more secure than executing random code online, usually with root privileges. And reuses the existing infrastructure of the "parent" distro.
For all its strengths, Arch is kind of a pain in the ass to maintain. I daily drive it but I risk breaking something if I don't update regularly. My youtube laptop can't update at all anymore from something I don't care to fix (when Firefox breaks then its a big deal lmao) and my main rig needed to use the fallback initramfs for a while after I forgot to update for a while. mkinitcpio -P (I think) fixed it though
What do you mean exactly? A running system shouldn't spontaneously break from not being updated. It's just that partial upgrades can break compatibility/dependencies, but running full system upgrades should be fine, as long as you pay attention to breaking changes and major version bumps. Also with timeshift it should always be possible to get back to a working state.
I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don't run
pacman -Syufor a year, you probably won't have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you'd still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe "X" in "as long as I update every X, I'll be fine?" Who knows. That's not a very well-defined problem.I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I'm picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I'd get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I'm willing to do the occasional bit of "real work" if needed to keep it going, but that's a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.
Yeah that's what I meant, not updating for a while makes it more likely to break next time I try. I think the time I had to use the fallback I waited something like close to a month?
I imagine it's a pacman keyring issue. I had it break on me on multiple occasions, on different machines, all after not having updated for a long-ish while.
I don't get this either. Before my current PC, my last install was 6 years old. I could count on one hand the number of times I broke that install and every single time was my own damn fault.
I had Manjaro on a laptop that didn't get updated for about a year. Broken on update because I didn't check Arch news first to see if manual intervention was needed. Was still faster to fix than a backup-reinstall.
Countless other installs of Arch or derivatives on various PCs and laptops without issue.
There can definitely be more of a learning curve but once you're set, I find it much easier to maintain than other distros. 🤷🏻♀️
MX Linux.
I don't know why it gets recommended so often, I don't actually think many people use it, but for some reason it's brought up all the time. I blame Distrowatch.
I was an MX user. It looks nice out of the box (better than Mint at the time) and the "flagship" version runs smooth on old laptops, probably thanks to Xfce. Side note, MX has a rare feature, it provides a choice between two init systems.
100% distro watch
I realized Arch was overrated when I got a brand new 7900 XT and it didn't work on Arch at all because their LLVM was a version behind. It was up-to-date on Fedora and even Ubuntu, but not Arch. Then there was the whole broken grub thing. Bleeding edge and unstable I get, but you can't be unstable and also behind. You can run Arch in any distro with distrobox, I don't see why you wouldn't just do that.
Ubuntu has ads in the terminal when you update. Runs a highly modified GNOME that doesn't play well with some extensions. Snaps by default (although maybe not that bad now that they seem to launch a bit quicker). Unfortunately so many things only have Ubuntu support if they have Linux support at all, it's such a shame.
LLVM was held back for a good reason, it was breaking things left and right. Even so, if you really needed it there were always AUR packages for it, or lcarlier's mesa-git repo if you prefer prebuilt packages, so it's not as if you were just SOL. I got my 7900XT in december, and instructions on how to get it running were already all over the forums and subreddit at the time and it was working on the same day that I got it.
I don't know when you got your 7900XT, but it was broken on Ubuntu too for a good while, I'm not even sure that it currently works on 22.04 without using external PPAs. In the mean time, it now works with Arch out of the box.
As for the grub thing, I'm not sure how that could have been handled differently. Upstream introduced a change that created a compatibility issue, so Arch could either not update to a newer version of grub ever, or update anyway and tell its users how to handle the compatibility issue. The latter is what they did.
I got it the day it came out so it was the wild west. I think to get it to work on Arch I figured out you needed to compile the new llvm or something, and I just gave up at that point. Fedora Silverblue on the rawhide branch had everything for it, and as soon as 37 was caught up I just re-based on that branch and have been good ever since. Ubuntu did have some other issue I don't remember, not a new enough kernel maybe.
Yeah but I think you're unfairly blaming Arch for not being ready for a new GPU on release day, especially when there are still known issues with the upstream packages that are required for it.
I think you may also misunderstand what Arch is. It isn't meant to be absolute bleeding edge. It's meant to be a distro that's as up-to-date as possible yet stable enough for everyday use. So the Arch team does curate upgrades and does QA before they release it to the stable repos.
If you want something similar, without ads, no snaps, LTS, but with periodic kernel updates, then Pop!_OS might be up your alley.
I love System 76 but I hate modified GNOME anything. That's why I always use Fedora. When Cosmic DE comes out I'll give it a shot.
Ditto, really respect what System76 has done but I need a long break from Ubuntu and GNOME. Looking forward to Cosmic DE but until it’s mature it is difficult to see how far they’d get.
Eh, when I bought a brand new Lenova Legion 5 a few years ago the trackpad wouldn't work in Ubuntu, Fedora, or PopOS. It worked on the 4th distro I tried, Manjaro. So your mileage may vary.
That is most likely an Arch-thing rather than a Manjaro-thing.
Yeah, that is most likely an Arch thing which is why I made this comment in direct response to a person saying that Arch was behind Ubuntu when that is not always the case. I'm sure most people know that Manjaro is based on Arch.
If you want a Manjaro specific thing, then I could point to his "broken grub thing" which did not effect Manjaro because the updates are held back for longer and for further testing.
I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
I still need to give NixOS the college try. The docs are slowly getting better but other than that I have heard great things from all over the Internet about it once you get your head around it. I failed at figuring it out on my own but the day will come where it makes sense I'm sure.
I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they're an essential building block for anything that isn't utterly trivial.
the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.
Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don't know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.
lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it's a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it's slightly different in important ways. there's no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.
For learning how to write and modify packages there is the nixpkgs manual, which also contains a section on writing modules.
Between zero-to-nix.com and nixos.wiki, I think there are enough docs to get started with it quickly.
I feel like it is too complicated for a desktop user. Linux is already complicated enough. On Silverblue I had to do some mental gymnastic to make some things work because everything is just made for Workstation. I don't think the advantages outweigh the benefits
I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?
Funny. Whole reason I use nixos is because I cba to tinker with my systems anymore. Tell me another OS with which I can manage 20+ systems with even less effort and I'd consider switching.
Ah but then you are talking about servers? That would be a different story! The machine that I use for development (laptop) should always work (I would trust nixos with this) and if I want to spin up a container (docker run) or install an application (apt install)or change my vpn client configuration it is currently effortless and I'm not sure nixos can do that.
Actually using nixos for some of my private servers would be a nice use case...
I use it for workstations, laptops and servers alike. I also configure them all on my home pc and remote push the config. Been a while since I manually SSH'd onto one of my machines...
For me there is only two distros. They are Arch an Debian. But that is only me. I don't think that any of those distros are overreted they just have their own user types and needs.
I use Arch BTW
The first distro I feel in love with was Debian (potato I think). Before that I had dabbled here and there but never had something click. Played with Gentoo when it first landed (try a stage one Gentoo build without the internet to go to for answers to really learn it!) and after getting tired of compiling all the time tried this new Ubuntu thing. Stayed with that for years until snaps and decided to try Manjaro to learn about this Arch thing. Got sick of the problems and but the bullet and went "pure" Arch. Feel in love again like I did way back with Debian.
Now I use Debian on important servers and Arch on servers I can afford to play with and my day to day machine.
Never looked back. Debian for stability, Arch for everything else. Never been happier.
My list overrated list additions:
Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.
Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.
RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.
Any Linux without systemd or glibc: Mistakes were made, and then different mistakes were made trying to prove systemd made mistakes. Musl based Linux distros are going to have compatibility problems, so I might as well run a different OS. The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.
Having gone through the Arch install myself, what part dod you find you had to babysit? Boot the install media, format the drive, mount the mounts, install system, configure the system, and done. Maybe it’s just a more involved process than you’d like?
It’s everything after the install I don’t have time for. The install is the easy part. 😆
There are distros which are semi-rolling (Fedora) or rolling (Tumbleweed) which make it easy to maintain the install without lots of configuration.
Of course, there's always the special cheat code called
archinstallthat you can invoke immediately after login if you have a wired connection. Honestly, installing GNU/Linux isn't hard, maintaining it is. Installing Gentoo is following a handbook, maintaining gentoo requires rigorous application logic and configuring.Archinstall also works on wireless using iwctl, that's what I did
Arch is for sweaty fanboy memes, not workflow
That wiki tho
Arch is a wiki with an association distro
Yea nobody would ever use Arch for the basis of anything game changing coughSteamOScough
Are you saying that Arch is the new Ubuntu?
The good/bad Linux distro circlejerk.
People are constantly speaking about what's the best or worst distro in long argumentation loosing their time. Instead, it would nice to make people actually switch to a Linux distro and stay on a distro. Each people people switching from another OS is a win. This matters and how making Linux distros more accessible to everyone.
Haha, noob. My distro is the best distro and everybody should be using it because nobody has a different use case and expectation anyway. My terminal skills are unrivalled, your mouse is blocking your progress to true productive greatness. My automated installation runs faster than you can download your proprietary drivers. I use imagemagick instead of gimp for its speed and user friendliness. Vim is the only editor you ever need. Do you even internet without your own email server? I rather install rpm's on arch than use flatpack.
//The linux endboss needs to be a meme. We could make chuck norris level jokes about him.
Gentoo? LFS?
Yes. One is obviously running in a kvm of the other. Both nailed down with grsec hardening and selinux and chroot jails everywhere a noob would use a container. The main filesystem is a readonly squashfs on raid1.
Any more ideas for the most hellish linux system we can create for our enemies?
I've been on arch for 4 or 5 years now. I think the "distro hopping" is mostly a meme my noobs. No hate.
I didn't mean distro hopping. I mean people actually staying on Linux after trying it and not going back to another os.
Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.
Why?
They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:
Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.
While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch;
archinstallexists. And if one is not able to install Arch usingarchinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.Is the guy who called everyone thieves if they didn't donate enough before downloading still part of Elementary?
Assuming you're referring to this article; I don't know. Was it even ever revealed who the author was? Honestly I don't even think that it matters, as publicating the blogpost means that the team -at least to some degree- endorsed the idea.
Without wanting to be elitist, I'd go further than that. While archinstall is a nice convenience, even the "manual" installation is really just diligently reading and following the wiki guide.
If that's too much for you, you're likely going to struggle when stuff needs manual intervention and you're probably better off with a different distro.
It is or not what you are capable of, it is what you want to do. I have been using Linux since before Slackware; I can install Arch. So, what did I do recently when I needed to setup a spare iMac to prepare a course I am reaching on the side? I used EndeavourOS. My goal had nothing to do with proving my Linux skills. I just needed a nice environment to work in, I needed it quickly, and I needed easy access to quite a lot of other up-to-date software just as quickly and easily. What I needed was Arch with a great installer. Honestly, even just installing yay by default so that I can dive right into the AUR is a great convenience. If there really is something that requires my configuration later, I can do that. If I need to. If there is something beyond my knowledge the Arch wiki is amazing and ( unlike Manjaro ) it is 100% applicable to EndeavourOS. . For me, EndeavourOS strikes the perfect balance.
Of course, one doesn't have to install Arch manually; archiso and Endeavour are great conveniences and exist for a reason.
That doesn't change the fact that people who rely on those tools not because they want to save some time/effort but because they're unable to follow wiki instructions are likely better off with something other than Arch.
I installed Elementary OS on a computer I built for a friend's kid, because I wanted something that was easy to use and low maintenance. It was pretty good from that point of view, but eventually that release got outdated and I discovered that they don't suppose upgrades between major versions.
That's unfortunate indeed. Currently I gravitate towards installing something like Endless OS for either elderly people or children. Automatic atomic updates from the get go on an immutable distro based on Debian Stable; just good stuff. FWIW, it allows updates between major versions as well 😉.
Perhaps we'll give that a try since we're going to have to wipe his computer anyway.. They live quite far away so the top prio is something that won't require me to go there and fix the computer every now and then :)
"By default, most new installations of Endless OS 4, and systems upgraded from older versions of Endless OS, will automatically update to Endless OS 5, and beyond as further versions are released. Systems must be specifically configured to remain on Endless OS 4"
As it even does major updates automatically, it's almost as handsfree as it gets.
AH, so this is a "tell me your favourite distro" post again. Tribalism isn't cool, man.
Linux Mint. People praise it as the perfect Window replacement yet when I tried it for a week, it didn't do anything better than default KDE Plasma Desktop. And since the devs haven't even started to work on Wayland support, the Distro will soon fall way behind.
I use Plasma and like it. I wouldn't have stuck around or really got started if it wasn't for Mint.
It might. Then we can still switch. For the time being it works just fine. The maintainers are a bit conservative for good reasons though. Mint is supposed to just work and for the most part it does just that.
I hated Cinnamon, I tried to like Mint. but it's a botched patched Ubuntu
Definitely Arch and Ubuntu.
what is overrated about them?
Ubuntu, ootb works, but snap all over, and ubuntu pro ads everywhere.. I can't even reinstall the company laptop into Fedora because of their policy... In the end I wrote a piece interface cli to make me felt at home using dnf masking apt, flatpak masking snap, and any dnf or flatpak behavior, works on snap or apt.. it's nightmare, but at least help me coup with using ubuntu... cope.. COPE...
Okay, but what is "overrated" about them? I don't like Ubuntu either, but I don't think it's overrated. It just is where it is
Easyness, where it's not. Fedora is better for noobs than ubuntu in my opinion.
If you're arguing for ease of use: they're pretty much on a par with each other. If you're arguing for ease of software installation I'd prefer Ubuntu over fedora, as Ubuntu is still the first linux distro any proprietary software company will port their software to (even though it's gotten better over the last few years), which is probably the only thing the average user cares about: does my software run or not?
Mint. Cinnamon is weird. I've had more problems and weird glitches with Cinnamon than any other DE. And it looks like it's straight out of 2004. That's why I'm a KDE junkie on KDE Neon now.
Yeah Mint is really ancient, not shitting on the Devs but everybody is moving to Wayland. While they keep their old project that runs only because of nostalgia. Opensuse TW is better than Neon. The latter is used for testing dunno why people keep using it
As a KDE junkie, I'd still choose Cinnamon as the backup.
And I'm sitting here not understanding why people like KDEs' looks so much.
But then again, looks don't matter when you can theme everything. Nightfox Dusk with Tela Purple icons is a banger
I like a pretty much stock with tweaks KDE, personally. Nice and simple, utilitarian, but not necessarily minimal.
I've never really cared for the MacOS visual style though.
I shouldn't really care, but I may have to change DEs if I get a new high refresh rate monitor.
I'm currently using EndeavourOS with XFCE, so Wayland is a No. Could become a problem. Kinda is a problem already, because I'd like to overclock my main monitor to 75Hz, whereas the second one can only run 60.
Last time I tried to get Wayland on KDE a few months ago, it was a bit of a pain to get it working properly and then it was pretty buggy. Admittedly this was months ago, on Nvidia, and regular updates on making it better have been coming pretty consistently.
They've recently made some changes to the style that make it a lot more modern, mostly switching to the papyrus icon pack and making the accent colors more saturated.
Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It's not bad by any means, but it's a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn't come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I ran Fedora 33, and upgraded it in place through to fedora 36. Ran pretty well the whole time.
I had snapper running for btrfs snapshotting, and did a double hop release jump to 38. Somehow I messed up my high water mark config for snapper in the mean time, and ran out of disk space mid-install without realizing. Symptom was firefox crashing. So I rebooted. Borked.
I agree with all of your complaints about it, and there’s plenty to dislike, but it’s still probably a good landing point for new users.
For me, it was the right amount of itjust.works at the right time, coming from debian (an update in 2018 killed my gdm, and I rage switched to fedora). Next stop is Gentoo!
The third party thing is outdated, you can enable it at install and have access to flathub and fusion repo. So installing Steam or Nvidia drivers is dead simple now. I would still say it's not great for new users because it's ultra minimal.
Nobara fixes quite a few aspects of this.
I really don't understand why backup tools like Timeshift or Snapper aren't shipping preinstalled & preconfigured in all mainstream type distros when you go with btrfs, or at least have an option in the installer for that.
@valentino I know Ubuntu is the meme answer but I’ve never been satisfied when I use it. On servers and desktops where I want stability, I find Debian to be much more reliable and straightforward. I had two Ubuntu pcs recently and the upgrade gui tool would just kill itself when trying to go to the next version so I had to look up the terminal option. And looking up packages only to find out I’m installing outdated snaps where the permissions get in the way
"Overrated" is a very specific word here. Some of the distros he just talks about their users and not the distro itself. Confusingly, he also then ignores the users entirely for other distros. I went into this assuming it would be low effort content, but it went even lower and ended up being just a "what comes to my mind when I think of this distro" list, which doesn't seem very fair towards some of the distros (near the top of the list even!) that don't have real complaints weighed against them.
Mint isn't a bad ditro its just overhyped for new users.
Nobara is very overrated. Comes with so much bloat apps and is confusing for new users. Don't understand why people recommended it.
It has some kernel tweaks and niche bug fixes for certain games but its just overrated.
Ubuntu is decent but definitely lost its touch over the years.
I think Pop!OS is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is now.
Also I definitely agree about Mint. I don't think it really sets out to hype itself up to be fair, it's just a nice-looking, easy to use and stable distro that does exactly what it's supposed to, and people tend to over-sell it a bit.
I definitely agree when it comes to Nobara. I've used Fedora for some time now, and I was curious about how it would be tailored to gaming. I made up my mind within three minutes using a live USB to go back to standard fedora. Too much preinstalled nonsense.
Whichever your favorite one is, that's the most overrated one
Arch btw
It's treason, then
Gentoo. Gentoo users have pretty much supplanted Arch (btw) users in the "annoying poweruser" niche.
I agree with you a bit on Garuda, even as someone myself who uses it. I've had it break multiple times on me, I still use it mainly because it has all the stuff I like by default (and a cool dragon theme, which should be a requirement of all distros).
Other than that, I'm gonna be boring and say Ubuntu. Just a worse Debian.
Nah, Gentoo has always appealed to annoying power users. Arch users have only recently joined us in that niche. 😉
Why do you say that? I still see tons of 'arch btw ' comments and very few 'Gentoo is the be all and end all of Linux distributions' ones.
IMHO NixOS, which is what I'm using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use "a long time ago", which leads me to believe he doesn't fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the "nix package manager", which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it's like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel's, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there's a disconnect between old nix ("stable") and new nix (flakes, "unstable", experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I'd just chime in, because this guy's take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive...
...though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you're trying to do out of the box, then it's very nice, or you'll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS's altered file structure. You don't simply add a
.desktopfile to the xsessions folder.Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don't intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.
I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it's a game changer no doubt.
Manjaro Zorin Garuda Nobara. Any Gaming Oriented distro except SteamOS. These 3 especially feel overbloated
Mint works and you can recommend it, but it is a mess with its two versions. The "normal" version is based on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is already an user friendly distro. Mint also has LMDE version, it makes more sense because directly based on a "rough" Debian, but it seems less popular.
Yes, but Ubuntu has snaps. Cinnamon is preferred by many to Gnome. It has clear differences.
RedStar OS
Nope, it's better then anything else here hands down.
Double checks for Hannah Montana Linux... Nope not listed... Yep it's the best here
Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.
And arch too.
I don’t do derivatives. Arch based distro? Just use Arch! Ubuntu, Mint, Pop or the hundreds alike, go Debian!
Eh, you're being lazy. Just compile the kernel from source.
Real men write their own OS in assembly!
Arch in general. As well as Manjaro (the most unreliable distro ever)
6 years on my manjaro install, zero problems.
Lucky guy.
Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it's still one of my favorite distributions and the one I'm using usually. I'm comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).
Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.
I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I'm a bit lazy to explore other options.
A nice introduction to Arch might be EndeavourOS.
Currently my answer is ubuntu. I tried to use lubuntu recently but just so much wasn't working out of the box like nm-applet wasn't running on startup. The apt package manager is really tedious to use too.
This could also be boiled down to my general incompetence when it comes to Ubuntu based systems though :p
Fedora is highly overrated.
Flatpaks never worked properly on Fedora for me.
I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.
I think workstation is overrated and silverblue is underrated.
Everything other than Debian :D
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I've never used Mint so wouldn't want to comment but it does seem to get a lot of praise and I can't see why.
EndeavorOS would be my vote. Arch with a GUI installer and horrible theme.
ZorinOS is definitely overrated, their update cycles are too slow (two years between major releases) and its unique features like
ZorinConnect,Windows Software Tool, and their Zorin customized GNOME 42/XFCE isn't good enough against its sibling Mint.Debian (Testing) I used it for a good month, and man was I disappointed. Only some things are actually up to date and packaged correctly. The nvidia drivers don't load the drm module because it's not called nvidia-drm on Debian (testing) it's called nvidia-current-drm. Also apt is the worst package manager
Use nala instead of apt, it's mostly a different frontend that looks way nicer, but also has vast improvements such as simultaneous downloads and a controllable history
Nala is even worse, so few commands
why do you say apt is the worst pm?
If you need to install a package that the author messed up the dependency lists for your shit outta luck. Other than manually unzipping and installing it you're stuck. Searching for a package is hell cause it's a massive list with like 4 lines per package. Yay/pacman is the best package manager, because it's got quick commands and when you search for something you don't have to make a mental note of the names you can just type 1, 4, 17, etc to choose a package to install. Oh and there aren't built shorter commands for apt! You can't say apt in package you have to write out install every single time
I'm using ZorinOS with Windows 11 Pro. It's good enough for everything I do.
All the distros that let you install packages from other distros. What's the point?
How many distros is that? Just VanillaOS and Blend? Or anything that hosts Distrobox?
I have been wanting to try Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch. Stable base with the largest and most up to date package repository sounds like a match made in heaven.
The point is your first sentence?
Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn't have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.
I think Elementary OS a bit. It's not bad necessarily (although I do think they're a bit over-aggressive about monetization which I don't really like) but I always see people talk it up about how functional and beautiful-looking it is, whereas when I tried it it just seemed like a pretty standard Ubuntu-based distro themed to look like a Mac.
Unless there's something amazing in there that I just didn't catch on to, but it just didn't really click for me.
@valentino All of them; they're mostly the same! /jk But seriously try another OS: OpenBSD, Haiku, Serenity, Plan 9...
Windows
I got my slacks on with dramatic music Slackware Linux! crowd gasps
I really really enjoyed this video. Matt is great, every video of his is a different type of gold, great content.
As for the distros:
Mint (my first distro, favourite beginner distro; when I tried using it a few months ago, however, the facade was stripped: it's not good for my use case anymore and that's fine)
Zorin
All the *buntus, but especially Kubuntu for some reason
Arch (I say that as a bit of an Arch fanboy)
NixOS (I say that as a NixOS user)
Most, if not all of the Arch-based distros (literally just Arch with an installer, some preinstalled stuff, and extra repos, except Manjaro which is a failure, but that's a different topic)
I haven't really heard anyone speak highly on Elementary OS or Solus so I don't exactly agree about them being overrated.
Extra (that will piss off a lot of power users, also rant and story time): Void Linux. It just feels like it's weird for the sake of being weird. And a lot of times I tried to get river working, to no avail, and that is literally my greatest issue with Void, as well as the fa t it tries to be like Arch, but more stable. Don't het me wrong, that's literally the type of distro I want to run, but I just find it to be a bit of a mess for some reason. Arch has always besn smooth sailing, with Archinstall or via a manula install, while with Void I felt like I was fighting the system to make it do what I want it to. So yeah, Void. Love the "Enter the Void" marketing, and the idea, as well as the logo. The installer was fine, xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated, and I had a hard time getting river and sddm working properly. Runit was weird but I could get used to it if it actually worked well. The main issue I was having was that at first, the river session did not appear. I fixed that, but then I couldn't het sddm enabled on Void because it didn't have a service file for runit! Cue me trying to get that set up for an hour or two, until I gave up and moved on to Tumbleweed (where zypper broke on me and I had to depend on Yast to manage packages, sighs). And then I gave up on Tumbleweed, went to Arch, where things were ok, but I didn't really want a rolling relese so when NixOS 23.05 launched, I jumped ship and have been there since. It's a bit crazy to me that this system has been on my laptop since the start of June, but it does all of what I need in a good way, and that's without even taking advantage of the full capabilities of NixOS. I only use Home manaher to set my gtk and icon themes, and have not even touched flakes yet.
OpenSSL is such a pain in that regard. Want the info of a TLS certificate?
openssl x509 -text -noout -in /path/to/file.pem. Single character flags? What are those?Laughing in agreement at your list... then I get to Void. Instant angry.
But I understand your perspective. I would rarely recommend Void to someone, coming from a daily Void user. It is a lot. Paradigms are different. But I love it. It works when you figure it out, and I've never had a broken system with Void. It is truly stable. (Obligatory "in my experience".)
I DID warn you! And it most certainly is a lot. It felt very overwhelming to me.
And the same could be said of OpenSUSE, NixOS and Arch, but it takes time and effort from the user to figure it out, and Void caught me at a time wherw I was pissed and wanted a working system. I just thought "I'm hopping anyways, might as well tried Void. It can't be that different. And if it fails, I'm off to Tumbleweed". The system didn't fail, my getting around in the system and trying to figure it out, after being exhausted and frustrated, failed. If those rhings did not happen, I might have saved myself many hours of Tumbleweed and Arch, but hey, it is what it is, and I found a distro that fits my needs and works well for me. I'm glad you have done the same.
Edit: Overall Void is an INCREDIBLE project and I have a great deal of respect for its developers, creating their own package manager and init system, which is no easy task, but it is greatly overhyped, in my opinion, as are most distros. After all, they're just that. Distros. They won't change your life (unless you get a Linux job offering for one, like the guy that got a helpdesk job for running Arch, some company using RHEL or clones giving you a role for being familiar with Fedora, or the company that seeks NixOS Engineers) but overall, they likely won't change your life. They might offer a better and more efficient workflow for your needs that's not possible elsewhere, but even then, distro fanboyism, (saying that as an Arch fanboy, and a NixOS enjoyer) is kinda stupid, as your workflow can likely be replicated on other distros.
Ever heard of
alias?For me it's
alias pks='xbps-query -Rs'andalias pki='xbps-install'(package search and package install).I don't want to sound like a jerk, and I say this with all due respect for Void, which I kind of like, but...
If your argument against a command needing too many keystrokes is "use alias" then you've already lost. Even you think it's too long. Thats why you use alias...
Before Void I was using Debian (then Devuan), and I used aliases for the package manager commands there too.
Anyway, I think the "the program name is too long" argument is even worse.
I use aliases too, and I (mostly) use Fedora. Alias is a great tool. I also think "the program name is too long" is a pretty silly argument. We're on the same page there. All I meant was that "just use alias" isn't really a rebuttal to that particular point.
Debian Hurd
Huh, TIL Debian Hurd exists. Thought for sure you confused debian Hurd with gnu Hurd.
Arch
definitely ubuntu
Debian
" Sorry, in a community about doing your own thing and enjoying your own experience, you're opinion does not fit in. Enjoy the downvotes" - /Linux
I think Debian is a bit overrated too.
I've got to go with Endeavour. I'm not sure it's so much that it's overrated, but more that the community talks about it as a replacement for Manjaro which is far from the case. The installation may be easier than arch but once it's all up and running you're going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out. The documentation for endeavour is incredibly lacking too. It's an unnecessary middle step between a "beginner" distro and arch. If you can't follow the arch installation guide on the wiki then you're going to have even more trouble when it comes to endeavour
The tagline of the distro is "A terminal-centric distro with a vibrant and friendly community at its core" So I'm not sure that is something to complain about, and is by design of their team.
To me it isn't designed as a beginner distro just a preconfigured arch with a nice gui installer and defaults that work for nearly everyone.
Yeah I completely agree, my issue is more with the amount of people that try and push it as a manjaro alternative. It doesn't in the slightest work as a manjaro altrnative for the reasons you've mentioned yet a bunch of people seem to think it is. I've seen endeavourOS recommended to beginners a bunch of times when they ask about manjaro
NixOS for sure, it's poorly documented and even worse designed.
Although I like NixOS, I have to agree with the documentation being crap. Which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so damn different. I mean, other distros have bad documentation, I just read some man pages or check the Arch or Fedora docs.
Do you also feel this way about Guix' documentation?
Guix's documentation needs a lot more work for sure, but it's definitely better.
NixOS does have poor docs, but why don't you elaborate on why you think it's poorly designed?
I have an entire writeup on the issue. https://github.com/CuBeRJAN/nix-problems
I have read that in the past, and I do agree with points of it, but I don't agree with the conclusion that Nix is poorly designed. A lot of the issues are in my opinion fairly minor considering the scope of Nix, and many of them are a matter of opinion.
Build system issues Nix uses builders, which are functions that exist for different languages and frameworks. These build packages for these frameworks in consistent ways, they are documented in the Nixpkgs manual. Nix and Guix seems fairly equivalent here.
Language issues I can agree with some parts of this, Nix is not a fantastic language imo. I don't think that it is a problem that Nix packages use shell scripting, as it is simpler to me than writing these parts in Guile and any Nix contributor is almost certainly familiar with bash already. I think the upcoming alternative language Nickle looks promising, mainly due to its static typing and improved standard library. I personally find Nix's json like syntax much simpler for basic configuration that Guix, and Guix is not enough better at more complex tasks to be worth it for me.
Debugging Nix errors aren't great, but errors like infinite recursion are avoided by following good practices. I personally haven't had any errors that I found difficult to debug with a stack trace.
Grafts I know that Nix does have a similar feature, but I don't know how it works and what its capabilities are in comparison to Guix. I think the amount of package rebuilds some updates cause is a problem, but we currently have the infrastructure to handle it and in practice it has not been a problem for me.
nix-env Nix-env does not have a proper replacement because the community really doesn't have much interest in improving the UX of imperative workflows.
nix profileis meant to replace it, but this will take some time as the nix3 cli is stabilized.Bad UX I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion on the deprecated tools. The nix2 vs nix3 cli debate is quite controversial unfortunately. I disagree though that the current nix3 cli is a bad experience. I find the
nix [command]syntax easy to use and understand.To me this write up seemed like more of an argument that Guix is better than Nix, rather than Nix as a whole being bad. Guix seems great, but I chose Nix over Guix for one major reason, software availability. I prefer free software, but I'm not willing to not use proprietary software and not discuss it in Guix communities. Nix still has great support for things like Nvidia drivers and Steam, which seam difficult to use in Guix.
Also, does Guix have a feature comparable to Nix Flakes? The ability to manage projects and multiple systems with Flakes is Nix's killer feature for me.
I recently switched to NixOS and GNU Guix was also a possible option, and while in retrospective, I can agree with your points, there were two things NixOS does that I want that Guix doesn't offer:
I don't think the assessment "it's badly designed" is fair and your conclusion
(emphasis mine) is misleading ; it's not better despite being newer, it's better because it is newer and was able to learn from Nix and improve upon it. Also what would you call the Nix whitepaper if not the design behind Nix?
Seeing a lot of Manjaro here, what's the deal? I installed it just yesterday on a test machine to check it out as I plan on steering over from windows long-term so just browsing what's out there. Don't really have issues and it ticks the boxes of a more user-friendly installation and comes out of the box with Plasma. I may try out pure Arch or the GUI fork just not to have the hassle of setting up the DE
On top of what other already said they accidentally DDOS'd the Aur repos and took it down for couple hours one time.
Hmmm.
Manjaro is a really good distro to start with. It has very nice defaults including the correct zsh plugins. Should make your transition to Arch whenever the time comes very smooth. It does have a bad reputation because they don't seem to manage it well (e.g. keys keep expiring), and the said defaults are implemented in a very hacky way (if you see the code). Also they follow a delayed release which is really unnecessary given Arch is stable already; and in fact the delay can cause issues if you use AUR (which you will, eventually discover and learn about and love).
You have to manually manage new kernel branches with the
manjaro-settings-manager.Lots of people get told "it's arch with good defaults! Just
sudo pacman -Syuand you're good!"...which leads to them eventually breaking their systems and blaming manjaro.
No rolling release is appropriate for people who can't RTFM.
Gentoo. There's way better methods to learn Linux, compiling, and the filesystem hierarchy standard. Start with Linux From Scratch and go from there.
LFS doesn't give you a usable system in practice though. A distribution is nothing without package management.
Gentoo gives you a thorough course in Linux fundamentals, and has lots of other benefits. Forget the mild gains of compiling for your specific CPU, it's really all about the incredible flexibility of Portage.
Exactly.
I know people running systemd AND OpenRC on their Gentoo installs. Gentoo is a metadistro. It gives you the tools to build your own distro. SO in comparison to LFS, Gentoo is pretty similar. It's just the tools that differ (although one can use Portage with LFS...)
I basically learned everything Linux related from using Gentoo.
I can't imagine why someone would want both init systems; that's awesome.
I also know few cases of runit+OpenRC.
IIRC one of those support having an external service manager...
There are also few s6 users. I've kepts things quite simple with OpenRC+openrc-init.
Yeah but which one teaches you more about how Linux works, versus how this distro works ? Linux isn't a package manager.
The kernel isn’t, but distros, as people think of Linux, kind of are package management projects.
LFS surely teaches more, but not by much.
Portage lets you see down into the proper guts of Linux deployment. It's much more applicable knowledge than almost any other distro. Plus, the install and maintenance teach non-specific fundamentals as well.
LFS gives a bit more learning and an utterly impractical OS for real life.
Gentoo teaches slightly less, and gives you an extremely robust and flexible OS.
Why are you implying using Gentoo only makes sense to learn Linux?
I'm not implying that. I am implying that Gentoo is overrated as a distro. See, the title of the thread.