The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro
It's funny. I've been using Linux since the old Mandrake days (year 2000 I think). I've used Slackware, Gentoo, Void, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch and so on. I love Linux in general, there is not other OS I would use.
Every distro has it's ups and downs and the only one I am content with is Void Linux, but I still don't really love it.
Void uses runit instead of systemd, which I prefer as an init system, but this means that if you want to use a major DE like Plasma you end up with some functionalities not working right.
So I want a minimalish system like Void that has access to the latest KDE Plasma, uses systemd and all the regular stuff, but IT IS NOT ARCH.
Why I don't like Arch? I think it tends to break too often, you have to stay on top of updates and having only one version of the kernel installed bugs me. Void Linux is rolling and NEVER breaks. I'm not exaggerating here. It never broke on me.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed is an alternative, but like Fedora, it does not ship with proprietary codecs so you have to jump through hoops to install the correct packages. It is just a matter of installing opi and typing "opi codecs", but you can bet that in the next weeks some breakage when updating will happen.
This happens to me with Fedora too. I install the RPMFusion repository and install the codecs. Every now and then things break because of it and I need to troubleshoot things.
Not to mention that when you install Plasma with Fedora or Opensuse, it ends up installing a thousand unnecessary things. I can disable the recommended packages/weak dependencies, trim things down and cut here and there, but I always feel like i lost control of things.
Oh and OpenSuse TW always gave me trouble with the wayland session of Plasma not working properly.
Gentoo is out of the question. I used it for years and had fun, but I don't care about all the compilation anymore.
Debian would be a great choice if packages weren't too old. I prefer a rolling release model or at least something like Fedora that is pretty up to date.
So in the end I stick with Void (without using Plasma), but still bitter about it.
I know I'll get blowback from this, but the only reason I don't like Linux is because I constantly feel like I have to futz with it.
It's fine OS and I do like it quite a lot, but every time I daily drive it, I feel like I'm constantly fixing and tweaking things that just aren't "Right"; so much so that I end-up messing with the OS and figuring things out when I just want to do a quick thing on my PC. I just don't have the time or patience to continually adjust things until they're just perfect.
Again, I like Linux and it's satisfying to use, but I often find myself more frustrated with it than actually using my computer for what I need it for.
Mate, one of the most successful companies on the planet literally runs on this premise and it's called Apple.
I've run Linux (It powers my tiny old laptop), and were I not gaming a lot on my PC, I'd probably run it full time. But it does require a lot of fuzzing around with it. There are distros out there nowadays which limit the amount of fuzzing around you gotta do, but they come with their own problems. My laptop now runs Ubuntu Budgie because I just wanted the biggest and most stable distro, but then I discovered flatpacks, which are a new way of distributing software for Ubuntu which seemingly a lot of folks hate and at the very least in my case, made Firefox incredibly slow, but installing Firefox without flatpacks is pretty hard so this is my longwinded way of saying I get it. I get it a lot.
EDIT: I mean snap apps, not flatpacks. The first major order of business on my fresh install was to get a non-snapp version of Firefox (hard, because it's now the default and the other way is not supported anymore officially) because the snap version needed like 4 seconds to open a window.
And from what I've seen, Apple and Windows are also futzy when you want to go outside the bounds they setup for you.
I spend more time futzing with registry keys in Windows to fix breakage and bad UI than I do puttering in Linux.
Every single one of the operating systems is futzy in its own ways.
Linux is an OS made primarily by programmers for themselves. The shell is powerful the best way to roll because programmers use it and that is what they are most comfortable with. Due to this and its decentralized approach, consistency is nearly non-existant, and UX is often not great.
Apple has such a extreme focus on personal at home user experience in macOS that makes it a pleasure to use, up until the moment you wanna do something differently than the Apple Way(TM).
Windows is aimed at a general userbase while also supplying the OS of choice for offices and because of this is bogged down by >20 years of backwards compatibility, but it is generally flexible enough that you can do what you want with it. Less than Linux, more than macOS, and it also explicitly allows you to break it in ways to force it into doing what you want with it.
If all you want from a PC is a way to write documents, browse the web and watch videos, Linux will do that and it will in general be very stable about it. It's great. And it is extremely customizable, if you are willing to engage with it by googling problems like a programmer and all too often paste shit into the shell you don't understand but that's like the one thing that fixes your issue.
I would say Linux is an OS made primarily by companies who run servers for themselves. That's where the vast majority of development time, money, and hours have gone into. Most Linux DEs, on the other hand, aren't commercially backed, or at least not at the level of a Google the way linux's server experience is.
Linux is mostly developed by people who work for companies that run servers so that their servers work better, and it does show.
In case anyone else is troubled by this, ChatGPT (especially 4) is extremely useful for decoding mysterious Bash commands. Don't trust it 100%, but it can very (very) frequently tell you exactly what each part of the command is doing.
It’s pretty decent at other arcane things too, like the workings of an X11 window manager (for a project I had been tinkering with). For anything where documentation is sparsely scattered around the web, it’s useful for quickly synthesizing a coherent whole.
LibreWriter and LibreCalc are worse than Microsoft Word and Excel but still largely useable... but PowerPoint absolutely runs circles around whatever LibreOffice's version is called. It's unusable compared to how good PowerPoint is imo. Luckily I don't really need it these days, between Google Slides and not needing to make slideshows much anymore.
With full agreement that the native office tools are jank, I think O365 has been a massive boon for Linux in general. Even if there’s not full-feature parity with Windows-desktop Office, there’s now at least user-friendly first-party tooling that’s good enough to circumvent a lot of mundane compatibility issues.
To be fair to FOSS office software, the problem with them isn’t necessarily that they’re bad (there are certainly rough edges in pretty much all of them), the problem is that a good amount of people are using are intentionally bad at interoperability with those options. Microsoft was so famously threatened by ODF that they forced OOXML as a competing standard and then it took them something like a decade for them to actually correctly conform to them, and unless things have changed without me knowing Office still doesn’t default to strict compliance by default!
Documents have also increasingly moved to the web, though overall I agree with you. But google docs and office 365 are very good nowadays.
Microsoft no longer sells licenses for the local version of Office. Because of that, to a lot of people switching to Linux won't make any difference in regards to the Office version they use (cloud).
Office365 still has desktop apps, it’s just subscription based
I don't believe that's true. I have Office365. It's installed in my machine. It's just a link to a webpage.
No, it definitely exists. Try through the microsoft app store.
The Office365 for which I pay a subscription and which I 100% installed from the Microsoft Store (which I am staring at right now) is just a local hub which opens up a webpage containing a cloud application whenever I use it.
Don't know what to tell you, maybe you're using in an environment with a special corporate license. If there's anything I can do to have normal local office I'm open to suggestions.
Try download a specific Office365 app. Like don't install Office365 from the microsoft store, install Word from the microsoft store, and then activate the license on it.
I think this is the way, or close to it. I was trying to install Word on my new laptop last year and installed the Office 365 app (from a web download, not the app store) first and got the awful web interface. I searched around longer on Microsoft's site and found the full office installer which after installed I could activate by signing in with my account. You can definitely still download the native apps for 365 though.
Go to office.com and find the link to install office. I currently use local office apps with an office 365 account. It is absolutely possible.
There's a song floating around from the early 2000's from a Canadian group; Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called "Every OS Sucks", and I feel it fits this comment perfectly. Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
At least in Apple’s case however, if you can get to the point to where their stuff “clicks” for you the futzing is reduced to a minimum. I can have a new MacBook in a state where I can reasonably do real work on it in around 30m, with a lot of that time being tied up downloading things.
Absolutely agree on Windows, though. It’s easy to end up in a near-unrecoverable state if you want something that involves things like messing with the registry or device manager. It’s why the Windows partition on my custom built tower is used pretty much exclusively for gaming.
Just to counterpoint, I work in software development on a daily basis and my work MacBook is by far more of a time sink than any of my hobby devices. Maybe things are different for people that have different demands of their machine.
Same! I was a full-time Linux user for about 15 years and I just got sick of something always being broken. I didn't even futz with stuff, there was just always something messed up. Maybe I just got old, but when I get a new MacBook, I turn it on, wait for a bunch of updates and software to download, and click a couple checkboxes and that's it. It takes like 30 minutes, as you said.
I think the main adoption issue for linux is how frequently you're "going out of bounds" or stuck dealing with odd failures.
I use windows at work and home and am some lower category of power user. My family uses apple. I can't recall the last time I bothered with registry keys. I can do everything I need to, every time I need to, by just booting up and doing some updates. My family sticks with apple because, to them, that's even more reliable. For the little they use it for (still more than the "average" user, but much less than me) it more than meets its goals.
Now most people probably aren't running
winget update allweekly to keep everything up to date so i'm not bombarded with update messages when I decide to use something I haven't needed in months, but "it just works".I don't love windows constant decision to market everything, and I've so far been able to, through menus, disable whatever ads/features I don't like, but yes I'm aware that doesn't mean they aren't scraping the hell out of my data and selling it, and I don't like that.
However, every time I've jumped to linux, i've run into issues. Discord might die, VS code or whatever editor isn't working quite right, some application I need has no linux alternative, an update seems to have broken something, and so on. It probably doesn't help that a main use for me is coding in F#, which is a niche dotnet language so i'm a little more confined than most in my choices.
Some of this is just the growing pains with linux being a small and fragmented environment, but too often I've found the linux attitude is either "well you do that anyways" when, no I do not. It's why I'm complaining about it.
Windows 11. Less than one hour in.
Needed to add this registry hack because I wanted the correct right-click menu results, to queue up a VLC playlist.
Discord wouldn't break nearly as often if they gave a couple-week leeway for old versions to connect.
Sure, but why?
I didn't like the new right click menu at first. I've grown to like it. I don't think even if I didn't it's annoying enough for my workflow and process to bother with a registry hack.
I'll just use the hotkeys if needed, but I can't think of anything I so desperately needed from the more options menu that I mind the extra click. Further, I believe these days, Shift + Right click does the same thing, or if not, at least gets enough context for the few things I'll ever need (copy as path and open code here or whatever)
Edit:
Yeah looking into it Shift + Right click gets you the old menu. This comes down to a total lack of learning tools and bad information presentation, but at the same time, this is why every single time i'm anywhere close to touching the registry I tend to look at dates on things, because a hack from 3 years ago probably isn't needed?
Well, for one it turned a 2-click operation into a 3 click operation with more moving. Or requiring keyboard+ mouse instead. Very annoying if you're trying to make a playlist.
I use a steam controller exclusively on this windows box, as a media pc. So I'd either have to remember to hold shift in every single context that the new default doesn't do right, or I could just bring back the old right click that does exactly the same thing as the new one, except with a more consistent UI.
And yea, basic users learn to deal with crap because they don't realize the fix is often just a search away.
Not to defend Microsoft, but having a whole new context menu may be the path of having a centrally customizable one. Based on this article, it's seems it's a huge dumpster fire of a undocumented mess.
That's all well and good, but not having that customization baked in for the 1.0 seems a massive oversight...or I guess just another symptom of today's "ship now, fix later" culture.
Considering that's just one gripe I have among many....switching sound devices is also a major regression in usability between 10 and 11 for me.
Microsoft's biggest problem IMO is that they always half-ass their UI changes which almost always ends up requiring falling back to the old UI or registry hacking. I'll give them credit that Windows 11 did much better than their previous attempts....but sometimes it feels like that telemetry data is being used to make my use of Windows even harder, because everything they claim to make easier is stuff that I don't use at the expense of the stuff I do.
Used to be:
Rick click speaker, click device, click new device.
Now is:
Right click speaker, click 'Open Sound mixer', wait for the settings window to load, change the device, close settings window.
I do this frequently as this is a media TV, so most time sound is routed through speakers, but for video games I want to route sound to the headphones. And we have a 'zone 2' speakers to route to as well.
Bluetooth is also slightly more annoying to deal with, and when using joycons and ps4 controllers it's just one more frustration.
My understanding is that the context menu is a complex beast with multiple point of entry to configure it and no central place for the user to filter out stuff they don't want. So building a new one with known interface from scratch but still keeping the old legacy one somewhere somewhat accessible seems a decent compromise. Of course it's probably going to be [XKCD 927] https://xkcd.com/927/) like a lot of stuff on Windows (don't they have like 5 API for managing windows?), but one can hope.
Of course
I gave up on the Discord electron wrapper and have just been running “installed” PWAs of the web versions on most machines. Works just as well as far as I can tell and if it ever gets cranky just reload and it’s fixed.
I understand the struggle with dotnet. I did some F# scripting in VScode, but larger dotnet/C# projects just don't work right yet. It's getting there, but not today. It is pretty much my only reason for using Rider.
Yeah my projects are generally smaller so I'm not dealing with the heavy teething pains, but if you're doing F# your options are pretty much Visual Studio, VS code, and Rider, and it gets rough fast in the Linux world.
As the guy who configures the Windows OS for an 2000 strong org yes it requires "futzing". It doesn't really come out of the box ready for enterprise standards and cybersecurity min requirements, at least not for orgs with stricter requirements.
Idk. For just daily things in both Windows and Mac, I don't find myself futzing around too much. I'm typing this on a new M3 MBP. I had to do some setup when I got it of course. Getting it the way I want it to be. And I had to find (and buy) some software: Side note: I don't understand how MacOS doesn't allow native management of menubar status icons. Same goes for audio output. Both of these are native in Windows.
But once that was done, that was it.
Like ButteredToast said, for Windows, it's definitely more initial setup. But again, once it's at a decent point, I don't find myself messing around with things too much day to day.
Maybe it's just the difference in how we're using our computers. My usage is mainly basic productivity and then gaming (on both Windows and Mac). I'm not setting up dev environments and such.
The linux futzing is also relative to how bleeding edge you are. Non-rolling distros tend to be better in that vein.
Of course you're gonna have to futz at least sometimes if you're updating 2000 packages a week. It's called 'bleeding edge' for a reason.
Agreed. It's been so long since I last used the registry on Windows that I don't even remember when it was. I wouldn't be surprised if it was almost a decade ago. But when I used to use Linux, I was always futzing around with almost everything. It can be great, but it can also be the kind of thing where you get on your computer to make a post on Facebook (not that I really used or posted on Facebook for years now) and spend hours trying to fix some minor problem that has caused major issues.
I've definitely had to fix way more things on Linux than I did on Windows. But on Linux that was always a solution and usually not a difficult one, whereas with Windows I've had and still have issues that seem to be simply impossible to solve, at least through normal channels like googling, reddit threads and official Microsoft support.
I think that's the thing. I'm OK fixing things so long as they stay fixed. Microsoft does their damndest to undo all the things I fix. Samsung pulls the same thing on my S21 (Are you sure you want Bitwarden to work?), and it drives me nuts.
I do have some janky half-ass scripts I have that fix a few (self created) recurring issues in linux. I could implement it properly, but the time I spend doing that will take 5x longer than the time it takes to just run the script.
As a hobbyist (thought I've spent time in development roles) my preference is
OSX >= Linux > Windows
OSX just feels like a good jack of all trades. I can quickly spin up a dev environment for whatever language I'm experimenting with. For daily driving it has a fairly consistent UI. Apple have done the work to make sure hardware and software play nicely.
I enjoy Linux but it reminds me more of a project car. I'm going to get my hands dirty frequently and that's part of the fun. If the system is a server or development platform it's stable enough and it's simple to modify for whatever my specific use case is.
Windows is just the minivan of the group. It exists in my house to play games and it's the OS at work so I wrangle spreadsheets, emails, take calls on it. If I'm developing .NET it's a decent platform but outside of that I'd prefer to be on another OS.
I'm afraid the minivan comparison doesn't work, because I absolutely love my minivan...
I mean yeah, I have my project car, which should theoretically be more fun, but it's more often sitting in need of repairs while my van is getting me where I need to go and hauling anything I can fit into it. Plus, it's like driving my couch, which is especially nice considering I'm, most of the time, not going anywhere fast due to traffic...
I love minivans...
Oh that was the intended interpretation. They're great daily drivers, comfortable, you can take out the seats and haul stuff. But changing spark plugs? I still remember having to take most of the dash out of our family astro van to get to the rear spark plugs. I think that is pretty analogous to windows.
Hey, I'd rather edit the registry than take off my windshield wiper assembly to access the rear plugs.
Though honestly, that wasn't all that bad. Taking out the dash in your Astro sounds like misery. I actually need to do the same in my project car, but I've been putting it off because I have no idea if I'll ever get it back together once I have it apart.
I always feel like I'm diffusing a bomb whenever I need to take apart anything with plastic. I have yet to find a foolproof way to determine before the fact whether attempting to open will break it permanently.
I really refrain from modifying my car because otherwise my essential transport will end up in the neverending pile of half-finished projects. And I dare not get a hobby car simply because it's not easily stashed in a cardboard box.
The side piece of the driver seat of my Ford "New" Fiesta 2017 broke recently (I live in Brazil) and I ordered a replacement for like a million moneys (Ford does not make cars here anymore).
I changed it myself, but the way it is fixed is absurd. You need to put extra force to fit it in place and bend it in a way that it feels like it will snap. No wonder this piece breaks often.
Pretty much on the plastic part, especially on something older.
But yeah, I leave my daily alone, no modifications for the same reasons. I'm done being a teenager/early 20-something and desperately trying to get my car back together over my days off so I can get to work the next. Not to mention, modifying something out of parameters just means stuff breaks and that's a headache I'm not willing to deal with. Even my project car, the mods are kept as close to factory spec as possible (my lift is not much more than what you could get from the factory.
Honestly, part of my project car was to prove to myself I could see something all the way through and not abandon it halfway. So far, so good, though my engine rebuild has been going on for 4-years now, though there has still been progress on it, even if it's currently languishing because I'm focused on another project that will be over this week, finally.
Plenty of people love minivans, and plenty of people love (or at least prefer) windows as well. In fact, it's probably the majority or at least plurality of people.
How much is genuine preference, and how much is it being conditioned on the default from as young as can be remembered?
I understand and don't disagree, but when I used Windows I ended messing with it pretty regularly too.
I think it's just how things are when you use your computer a lot.
I think the OS I've had to fight against the most was MacOS... A fresh install is unusable for me, it lacks so many things. I have to install so much software just to make it a fraction as useful as even Windows, and that says a lot. The other "OS" i've had to futz a lot with was actually a DE, namely Gnome. Useless out of the box.
I can be most productive with either KDE or Windows (10, haven't tried 11). And I know these things are subjective and relative to what you're used to, but I think even things like "program launcher does not have ability to show separate icons for different app windows" make a OS objectively less productive.
TBH if you're someone who cares about productivity, using a DE at all is questionable - any time you have to use the mouse to navigate spatially you're losing time. It's far faster to just launch applications with text search like dmenu or spotlight on macos and manage application windows by workspace
Not sure I can get on board with this, imo the fact that it's a unix like system with a bash (zsh) shell innately makes it more useful than windows
Dual screens with sets of programs assigned to workspaces on each feels a little like a superpower. It more or less reduces the amount of mental energy put into window management to zero, since that was all taken care of when originally arranging the workspaces. Instead you just switch workspaces to get the set of desired programs.
This unfortunately doesn’t work on Windows however, because its workspaces feature is a bit hobbled in that you can’t switch workspaces independent of screen — it seems like under the hood, workspaces in Windows are a bit of a hack that splits a single virtual screen between two monitors, and as a result switching a workspace on one monitor switches it on both. Linux and macOS on the other hand have had fully independent workspaces for 20+ years.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not touching the windows terminal unless it's absolutely required. I use wsl so I can get the linux experience on windows. Even there, I have an alias which basically can run any windows command line from wsl. (
alias win='powershell.exe'for anyone curious)I would say even the example in the last paragraph is subjective. It’s a big deal for someone most accustomed to Win9X paradigm, but not someone who’s used macOS for most of their computing over the years.
I'm really curious, because I use win/lin at home but macOS for work. HOW does one switch directly to a specific window efficiently in macOS? In win/lin I can set the taskbar to display an icon for each separate window, so I can directly click on the one I desire. As far as I know, in the apple world this takes at least two clicks.
If the window belongs to the currently active app, ⌘-` cycles through the app’s windows similar to how ⌘-tab cycles through programs. Otherwise, assuming the window is open on a currently active workspace, activating Exposé (⌃-↑ or three fingers swipe up on trackpad) will give you a bird’s eye view of all your windows from which you can click the one you’re looking for. If the window is on another workspace, you can switch workspaces while Exposé is open and it will remain open. You can also switch to any of a program’s windows by right-clicking its icon in the Dock and clicking its menu item (which can be reduced from 2 clicks to 1 by holding down the right mouse button and releasing once the cursor has been moved over the menu item for the relevant window).
What I find works best though is to have several workspaces and group windows by workspace, and if there’s a second monitor available have “primary” window groups (documents and programs that are primary points of focus) in workspaces on the primary monitor and “secondary” window groups (chats, music players, etc) in workspaces on the second monitor. With this, there’s a little bit of time spent arranging each workspace in the beginning, but after that you’re almost never looking for or managing individual windows — instead you just switch to the relevant workspace. It also allows mixing and matching workspaces between monitors so you can e.g. instantly have your chats and IDE alongside each other without messing around with window snapping or moving windows between workspaces or anything like that.
That approach works really well for me. I find it to scale far better than Win9X-style alt-tab and taskbar, which becomes a mess with large numbers of windows open. In fact, that this pattern can’t be replicated on Windows due to its terrible virtual desktop implementation is one of the reasons I find that OS difficult to be productive under.
Absolutely no blowback from me. I was on the Linux desktop path for about 4 years in the oughts and by the end I was just cycling through distros and getting nowhere. Got my first Mac and never looked back.
That said, I ran a Linux home server for 15 years. It started as Ubuntu and ended as Mint. Now I just use a Mac mini because of power consumption.
Use cases vary wildly. I got tired of putting the car up on blocks and climbing under it every few weeks. Some people love doing that, and I thank them for it and appreciate their talent. I might even get into it again if I ever get to a place where my day job isn’t using a computer.
Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but I like comparing cars and computers. Some are daily drivers, some are showpieces. Some are tools, and some are our babies. It works.
I think the metaphor is apt. I'm also a hobby mechanic and I enjoy fixing my cars, but I hate tinkering with them and a fix, as fulfilling as it is, can be a burden when all you want to do is have transportation. Fixing cars and computers are both hobbies for me, but secondarily so to the primary modes being Gaming and needing to move my family around or using my car to facilitate fun. I'd much rather be spending time on my primary hobbies than the secondary ones.
you know, this explains a lot. I drive a stick by choice (and had to hunt it down, manual transmissions are surprisingly hard to find!) and i'm using linux for pretty much everything except gaming since i haven't been able to figure out the right proton version to use for some of my games yet. I think it comes down to familiarity. I've been both driving stick and using some kind of linux since i was a teenager so now that i'm an adult, i don't find either of those things onerous, it's just How The Thing Works (if that makes sense).
Good analogy!
I agree with you completely. I stopped using Linux and Emacs on my day to day partly because of that. I'm way more productive with a text editor and an operating system I cannot easily alter.
I’ve been running Linux for gaming for several years not precisely because I felt this way about windows.
My solution has been an extremely barebones arch install that just has a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment. In my experience it has been very stable, I haven’t had to reinstall a single thing in 2 years and only had one issue that took more than 15 minutes to resolve (due to shitty nvidia drivers)
Never have been able to do tiling WMs, they just don’t click for me. They also tend to be a bit too minimal. About the leanest I think I can do is something like Openbox paired with tint2, but even that’s a bit too barebones because you end up having to install random packages to get basics like tray items for wifi, bluetooth, and audio volume all of which are more likely to break or act strangely compared to with a DE.
My current Void setup is like that. River wm and not much else, not even a lockscreen. nnn is my file manager, foot is my terminal, iwd to connect to WiFi is way better than WPA_supplicant + NetworkManager. It's stable and rock solid, but I miss a lot of things when comparing to Plasma.
Krunner is spectacular, the sync between clipboard with Android using KDE Connect, the notifications from your phone, file manager navigation integrated with the terminal. Okular and Gwenview are two incredible softwares. The integration between all the things provide a really good experience.
I can install those apps without using plasma, but it feels out of place and doesn't quite work as expected. Specially KDE Connect.
The funny thing is when I am using plasma I always miss my light and barebones tiling WM setup.
The grass is always greener
PopOS has been my lowest-futz experience (and it's what I run on my home PC) but it's not zero futz for sure. I will say my only problems with it have been self-inflicted (e.g., fucking up my .profile while trying to change shells for no good reason), so I think it's one of the better out-of-the-box experiences.
Far from me to dismiss or diminish your very valid complaints. That said, I feel compelled to ask: is this maybe a case of a car mechanic that is unwilling to simply drive as everyone does? I understand the impulse to look under the hood, but maybe it is a case that, once you look hard enough, every distro is terrible?
I'm just a regular Linux user, and in my experience most distro for consumers are kinda okay :/
EDIT: Re-reading your post, you have always used advanced distros. Despite being clearly an advanced user, you might be better served by something meant to a broader audience.
I agree that I accumulated a lot of specific ways of doing things and it's hard to revert back and just use things how they are intended.
I don't like things breaking either, so I use NixOS. But I don't mind Systemd.
+1 on NixOS, as a longtime user of Linux and went through hundreds of distro hops this is the one I have stayed the longest on in terms of personal usage without any want to try something else.
Knowing that anything I change can be reverted back (sometimes as far as back as a hundred changes), and that it's incredibly easy to just... Reimage and start again with a singular configuration file is excellent. Immutable operating systemsare definitely the future.
It has its problems, primarily how hard or cumbersome to develop your own package, but their package manager has to have one of the largest and nicest running out there.
I don't use NixOS, but I'm always intrigued. From dipping my toes in the docs though it's a lot of mental load to take on and I'm not sure what the benefits would be for someone who's using btrfs and can already rollback hourly snapshots whenever I need to.
It seems like it, but it's a lot less of a mental load than you would think. Once you set your basic configurations, you tend to just forget about fiddling with the operating system.
Your files are preserved, but your configuration is able to be rolled back, meaning that you can roll back at any time and keep your file structure up to date.
Seriously it's mind blowing of a concept, I would suggest just finding a quick 15 minute explaination video on YouTube (and steer clear of Home Manager for now). The docs are all a lot at once since it's a totally different paradigm.
Only for packages though, right? Rolling back is indeed a super power, I will agree with you there. I'm still not sold on the benefits though -- I think cow filesystem snapshots are the future and replaces what NixOS does for the average user. It seems really useful if you're managing a bunch of machines you'd like to keep in sync though.
I have been loving btrfs. I use it and btrbk to send snapshots to a btrfs raid1 volume on another computer. Between the local and remote snapshots I keep a handful of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots I can roll back to at any time. This is great if you accidentally nuke whatever it is you were working on, or if you want to try something that might be a lot work to revert. You also get transparent filesystem compression, my disk usage dropped by ~35% when I moved everything to btrfs.
I use both NixOS and btrfs, and frankly you can pry NixOS from my cold dead hands. I'd rather shove everything on a terrible fat32 partition with NixOS than btrfs without.
I feel like anybody who is doing rollbacks of any kind is probably already not an "average user", so I dunno. You're probably right that the approach NixOS / Nix takes will never be mainstream for the typical Linux person, and that CoW filesystems will slowly migrate into the defaults for more and more distros over time, and if package managers and grub or whatever automatically handle snapshots then people will probably use it pretty transparently (though ideally the average user is on a stable enough distro that doesn't break everything all of the time, but you know... nothing's perfect, lol).
But, average user or not, Nix / NixOS are huge wins for me personally and more game-changing than btrfs was for me. Rollbacks are one big benefit for sure, but they're not the only one. Personally I'm happier with NixOS for rollbacks and "system 'backups'" because it's much cheaper to backup and ship around a small configuration file than all of the binaries (but NixOS also lets me cache all of my binaries too, and distribute them to other machines, even custom-built binaries). The NixOS configuration contains everything so it's trivial for me to get a new machine, plop the config file on it, and have it build everything exactly how I want it, without going through the painful process of figuring out what directories and things I actually want to copy over to the new machine and permissions and whatnot and waiting hours to copy over every little thing from an external hard drive or whatever. If you have multiple machines (even just a desktop and a laptop) NixOS is a game changer for keeping everything in sync between them, and it makes having additional customizations feasible because I don't have to worry about copying things over and maintaining the configurations manually (a good example of this is maybe my wireguard configuration, normally it's kind of a pain to set up all of the peers in wireguard, but my nix configuration just has a list of hosts and it automatically generates all of the connections between nodes in the wireguard configuration for a given machine so everybody can connect to each other and be merry). It's also often easier to make big sweeping changes with NixOS, like when I wanted to try pipewire it was basically just a matter of replacing
services.pulseaudio.enable=truewithservices.pipewire.enable=trueand everything happened like magic. But honestly, the biggest thing for me is that it's a godsend for development environments, especially when you need multiple versions of the same package for different projects.Nix definitely isn't perfect, and it's no sweat off my back whether or not you try it, but if it's something that works for you it's absolutely game changing in so many ways.
Wow, thanks for the response.
That's actually pretty cool, I hadn't considered that. Although really the only time you're shipping around your entire rootfs with btrfs is the first snapshot, everything else is just deltas but yea, you have to store a bunch of what is essentially useless data.
I have a wireguard VPN as well, that sounds pretty awesome. I had to hand configure every device which yes, was a PITA.
This has me thinking it might be worth it. I work from home and I rely on virtual machines to isolate work environments which is a huge pain in the ass because they have to live on an ext4 drive and I have to manually backup important stuff with shared folders and it's pretty gross.
So I think time permitting you have probably convinced me but I have kids so it's going to sit in a todo.txt for a while lol.
Sounds like you could use some nix in your life! On the plus side you don't have to install NixOS in order to use the nix package manager for development environments on your main machine, it can exist alongside your current distribution, so you can try it out incrementally pretty easily :).
It should be much more lightweight than having a bunch of VMs O_O. I had a huge amount of pain dealing with projects with different dependencies before... I also frequently had to backport fixes to older versions of a project and it was super painful to keep track of all of the valid dependencies from the past and the valid dependencies in the present. Now all of the dependencies are pinned in the git repo using nix so when I switch branches my shell automatically picks up the new dependencies for everything and switches everything over... If I've used that version of things before it's cached locally so I don't have to download anything or build any dependencies and it's instant. It's actually amazing. No VMs, no containers, nothing in the way... I can just use my normal text editor and access everything directly from my normal operating system.
Plus, even if you do want VMs or docker containers you can use nix to build those! One cool thing you can do with nix is build a VM of a nixos system to test it before you even reboot. There's so many nifty things nix lets you do.
Nix looks weird and seems complicated at first, but fundamentally it's not much more than funny looking JSON with recursive functions for specifying dependencies / build steps for a project.
That does sound nice. I work with AOSP and it seems like someone has already done some of the setup work: https://github.com/nix-community/robotnix so I'll definitely check it out at some point. Thanks!
I don't do android dev, but it always seems super painful. I hope you find a solution lol.
Nix can be very finicky, but the important part is that it's only finicky once. And everything is reversible.
There isn't a /lib/, which will however break just about every single normal binary looking for libc, so if you go NixOS, go all the way. Which is genuinely quite easy for most normal PC things at this point.
You can use nix-ld to solve some of those problems, right? I'm new to NixOS, but that was one of the selling points for me. (Along with appimage-run, and flatpaks just working.)
Yes, and there's more workarounds too, patchelf is a very cool tool indeed.
+1. I've used Void for years, like @crdpa, but I knew it wasn't the best choice for something like Plasma, which I want for a general-purpose desktop. I'll live with (meaning try to ignore) systemd to get the reliability of NixOS updates/rollbacks.
An alternative was Kinoite, but it has the downsides of Fedora mentioned above, and it isn't as tested as NixOS.
Tried, but NixOS feels the opposite.
I have to learn a lot of things that are scattered around and messing with it BEFORE getting things to work.
I still need to waste a lot of time, just in reverse.
I personally don't really feel that way whatsoever. At least, not for my use cases. You install it, choose a desktop environment and most settings are one
service.<thing>.enable = trueorpackages = [ <things> ]away, with most of their service settings described on the online package search if they need customization.Although, getting the most out of Nix (flakes!) and its syntax is very challenging compared even to other distros due to a lack of good documentation.
The main issue is that it's completely its own thing, and the declarative (and functional) paradigm from the syntax can be quite confusing when you start using it as more than a strange JSON-lookalike.
I've been using NixOS on my Linux box and Nix-Darwin on my work Mac. There's a steep learning curve because the documentation is dreadful, but when it works, it just keeps working. That can't be taken for granted on Linux is what I've learned.
Since I don't have to be on the bleeding edge, I've found Mint to be a stable experience. And that's all I want, stability. The occasional issue I run into is usually related to the fricking Nvidia drivers.
Also a Mint user here. I've run it for my desktop for... maybe a decade now? Yeah, I think it's been close to a decade. Very reliable, minimal issues.
I love Mint! I run it on my home server and converted my laptop to it as well. It has been rock-solid.
My laptop is from 2018 with an i7-8550u and it is snappy as hell. I just replaced the battery and upgraded the SSD and it runs like new. No complaints at all, even with 8GB RAM.
My server desktop uses a new-ish chipset, and updating the kernel to the latest version via Mainline got everything squared away - 0 issues related to Mint.
My gaming desktop still runs Windows 11, because I had a 10 license and because I literally only use it for gaming. I have been seriously thinking about switching it to Mint as well with all of the good things I hear about Proton. It runs a 6700xt so I won't have to deal with NVIDIA weirdness either. I just haven't sat down to test out how it works and re-download all of my games yet. Windows doesn't get in my way quite as much when all I do is log on and immediately load a game, then shut down as soon as I'm done.
Mint is the only distro that I've been able to stick with on the desktop, mostly because it requires very minimal fucking around to make things work... my Intel WiFi 6E issues notwithstanding.
My Arch experience is wildly different to yours. I've been using some form of Arch for five or six years now and it's broken once or twice and always been my fault (mostly fiddling around with the bootloader) and easy to fix in a chroot. I've also had the linux, linux-lts, and linux-zen kernels installed at the same time and they all showed up in systemd-boot with no hassle.
I see comments about Arch breaking/being unstable a lot but I've never experienced it myself. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with it? In what way was it breaking?
One time I went on a trip for almost 3 weeks and when I came back an update broke it. I don't really remember the problem since it was quite some time ago, but maybe I'm just biased because I heard this a lot and when it happened to me I just internalized it.
I think I'll give it a try next
Very occasionally I've had a situation where Arch developer keys change or rotate and I don't update within the expected interval. That makes updates break, but updating
archlinux-keyringby itself resolves the issue.I admit that is a blemish, but for me, it's basically the only one.
Seconded for Arch stability. I've used it daily as my desktop since 2013.
Real issues were encountered ~4 times in those 11 years, and I could fix them after booting from live usb, downgrading in chroot, then waiting for/applying a fix.
For me, such stability is plenty good.
Also, you CAN have multiple installed kernels on Arch
I had a similar experience when I left my computer alone for a month. It was a quick fix, but fussing with updates was the reason why I quit using windows. Still, I didn't think the fussing about I had to do on Arch was all THAT difficult or tedious until I switched to void. As much as I miss the convenience of the AUR or the default-ness of systemd, nothing beats out how stable void has been for me. It just hits that sweetspot of stable, up to date, and efficient.
I've been using Arch on multiple systems since ~2004. I have a server that I have been running for decades. I've brought the same install of Arch on a server for over a decade across a few different systems. The last time I reinstalled was during the rc.d to systemd change, and I only did a clean install then because I wanted to, not because I had to. I have never had a breakage that didn't have a fix on the homepage. I subscribe to the mailing list, so I get an email about any potential upgrade fixes before they hit the repos.
It’s the need to pay attention to those fixes that is an issue for many. It’s not uncommon for people to not want to put that level of active thought into their operating system.
That's absolutely fine, and an operating system like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Windows, Mac OS, or RHEL would likely be a better fit for that type of person. If your goal is to never thing about or engage with the OS level beyond click update, then the type of distro that /u/crdpa is using is going to cause problems.
I'm not even good at it and I've never had problems. I've remember to checked my pacdiff for config updates once a year, if that.
Run Debian, but track testing not stable. It's perfectly stable, it's just not Debian stable, which I've always considered "server stable" rather than a desktop. In testing you're usually only a few weeks behind bleeding edge and frankly that's plenty. Stuff breaks much more in unstable. Also if you really need bleeding edge you can apt-pin stuff from other repos. Although that can get a bit wobbly.
I agree. I've been running testing for decades and the last time there was a serious issue it had probably something to do with something ancient like X11 modelines.
I've pinned Firefox to unstable, and sometimes there are dependency problems because of that. But they are very easy to resolve with aptitude.
I don't love Debian. It has its issues. It's like my dinner table: I don't love it, it has some spots and marks, but it does what it's supposed to do and I don't see a reason to replace it.
The main thing for me with old packages is that significant lag between the Win/Mac versions and version shipped by my distro can cause issues, especially with a lot of apps self-updating on the commercial platforms these days.
I think maybe the most ideal setup for most people would be for the “system” stuff (not just init, kernel, drivers, etc but also DE) to lag behind by a month or two while all user-installed apps track parallel with their commercial platform counterparts. The problems with “unstable” tracks have almost entirely to do with “system” stuff, not end-user apps.
As far as I’m aware though, no distribution makes this distinction out of the box.
I'm not sure how you could meaningfully draw a line between "system" and "user" stuff with the way Linux works. What do you when the latest version of "user-app" Firefox needs a feature which is only in the most recent version of Mutter, and that feature depends on a GTK hook which is currently only in the nightly builds and is seriously unstable? You can't update Firefox without updating it's dependencies and then you're introducing instabilities over other areas of the system. That's why package maintenance is hard, and why unstable/testing/stable tracks exist at all!
AppImage and FlatPak and Snap and so on attempt to bypass this by bundling everything into one big package but I'm not aware of a means of keeping them up to date automatically, although caveat to that is that I haven't looked into it because I don't need bleeding edge versions of everything.
In that hypothetical situation, Firefox should be able to deal with the absence of the Mutter feature for some amount of time — at least until the majority have upgraded.
This happens in the proprietary software world all the time. In iOS apps I’ve worked on there’s feature availability checks all over the place, because the world being perfectly up to date isn’t a luxury we have and so apps have to deal with it.
AppImage, etc might do the trick but they all seem a bit overwrought, in my opinion. Aside from sandboxing, app bundles do all the same things while being less complicated (and it’s always seemed weird to me that a distribution format is in charge of sandboxing rather than a system-level layer).
I suspect there is a reason there aren't any distros doing what you want. It's a buggerload of effort on the part of developers and package maintainers for something a lot of people just... don't care that much about. Most people simply don't need bleeding edge versions of everything and if you do, there's always compiling your own.
I agree about AppImage and so on, fwiw. Handy sometimes but I dislike using them on the regular.
Yup! And a ready to go Plasma desktop experience for this is available via the distro Siduction.
I'm finding a lot of the comments...non-resonant with me. I'm a lifelong Windows user, since v3.1, mostly due to parents, later school, and later work. I used every version along the way. But I started with MS-DOS, liked non-windows interfaces, and went through phases of GeoWorks, Windows with alt-shells like LiteStep, Linux Mandrake, RedHat, Puppy, Ubuntu, Mint, and lately ZorinOS.
I finally have my home PC solely with ZorinOS, and I get all I need out of it, including my 13-yr-old using it as a gaming station. He doesn't do a lot of graphics-heavy play, but so far that's been by his choice. Minecraft, Celeste, Among Us, Mindustry, and any number of flash and itch.io bundle games have been enough for him. They all work with Steam and its emulation options like proton. To do work stuff I just use Office 365 on the web, and because it's Linux I can use better neuroimaging analysis software than if I were on Windows. We've been doing this for more than a year with daily use and no problem. Sometimes I do wonder if the "not quite perfect" issue or "always have to tweak issue" is less that things break out of nowhere or don't work out of box (as in the old days) and more "I wish the defaults were what I would have picked" and even moreso "things break when I customize the system."
I get all of the above kinds of frustration, but maybe more optimistically, it sure seems to me that unless one of your sources of joy is tinkering a lot with your setup while also expecting the ultimate satisfaction of never needing to tinker after a certain point, there is probably a distro out there for you. I like my setup because it does what I need with just a brief refresh of my old Linux knowledge and a couple weekends of initial tinkering. I'm not saying anyone here is asking too much--I'm saying that there is a tradeoff between retaining control and getting headaches that should be accepted and optimized for each person.
You're probably already aware, but just in case: if you end up going back to Windows at some point, WSL may be useful to you for things like this.
Thanks! WSL has saved the day a few times when I had no Linux box running, but because all my Windows machines lately have been managed by my employer, it can be fresh hell every time I need to activate/install WSL. If my kid starts to want to branch out into games that we just can't get to run well with Steam/Proton on Linux, we may need a Windows PC at home, and WSL is a great idea for making it useful for both of us.
Hello fellow LiteStepper! I went through a whole geoshell phase as well. Ah, to be young and free to spend hours tweaking again. :)
It really was so fun. I remember using the shell to bind an extra "Fn" key at the top right of my clicky Tandy keyboard to a lightweight VOIP program called Roger Wilco so that my friend and I could basically walkie talkie any time we were in our rooms. :)
The best I’ve found so far is Fedora, but it has its warts too. Like on the Fedora partition on my tower, at some point I did something that totally breaks KVM and VMWare Player and fixing it is probably going to involve a wipe and reinstall.
Arch indeed breaks too easily, especially if you’re not staying right on top of updates. If it’s a secondary partition that only gets booted up sometimes and you have to apply a month’s worth of updates, there’s probably several patchnotes you’ve missed about how the config file for X now resides in Y directory and uses Z format and if you don’t migrate it something will break, resulting in a mess.
Fedora, or eat the minor Ubuntu cruft and use Neon + flatpak or Kubuntu six-month releases. I set up Neon because I couldn't get NixOS running right on an old macbook I bought and it's been a distro I wanted: Stable base, new KDE, not-too-old packages. It doesn't install any snaps, so you can remove snapd, and has flatpak preconfigured so you can get newer app versions that way. I don't hate snaps, but only want one non-distro package manager and prefer Flatpak.
Kubuntu can take new KDE versions via their PPA which is a pretty good solution as well.
SuSE Leap isnalso pretty good and not super old, as each point release is a major update. 16 aims to provide immutable and conventional options as well.
I used Endeavour for a briefly period and found it quite amazing. It installs a clean and working system without having to mess around too much.
The only problem I had was with the installer. I have two SSDs and want to put /home in the second one (or have one filesystem spanning both disks like Fedora does), but the installer couldn't do that.
I had to install everything in one ssd and later mess with partitions and fstab to put /home in another drive. Maybe it changed recently.
I'll +1 Endeavor. I gave it a spin when I went to refresh my Tumbleweed install from scratch (had run for 4 years, wanted to see new defaults), and it's ended up sticking around.
A lot of the same benefits, but faster turnaround on Discord updates made it easier for my daily driver.
What do you mean by break? I have been using Arch for the last seven years and I've had only one instance where I couldn't boot after an update. And the solution was just to check arch news and realize I needed to update grub which was easy enough to do chrooted in from a live usb.
I've had some amount of small problems here and there but nothing that was more than a few minutes of troubleshooting. Usually it's just all my extensions breaking for a few weeks after every other major GNOME release that cause me headaches -- which is more of a knock on GNOME than anything else.
You can also definitely run as many kernels as you want. I have a 1GiB /boot so I can run linux, linux-lts, and a linux-mainline I build myself.
Have you looked into Debian unstable?
Debian unstable is still quite old.
I'll take a second look at Arch or EndeavourOS. I'll wait until Plasma 6 is there and give it a try.
At this point, it feels like distributions are defined by three items: init, package management, and 'support'. The first two are obvious. The last is cheating, since I mean everything from snap vs flatpak, to popularity on forums to software support, but I've had too many experiences thinking "this distro is perfect!" only to have something undocumented break or be unable to run programs supported by Debian, Fedora, and Arch without essentially doing all the packaging manually to not lump nonarchitectural barriers together.
But, ignoring 'support', you can always get a program that'll run on Ubuntu to work on NixOS, you can always make something work. Heck, look at Void continuing to package GNOME! That whole thing is a huge mess, but it can work. This isn't a suggestion that you force Plasma 6 to function, though. My point is this: where is the issue with each of these distributions? Where is the pain point for you, what's a breakpoint and isn't? With Void, it's the init. With Arch, it's essentially the package manager. With Fedora and Suse, it's the 'support' bucket.
Since you don't want to spend the time to run Gentoo, it does seem like the only distribution that might satisfy your cravings for Plasma on a stable rolling release might be NixOS. Which is basically "shove everything into the package manager, the distro". Your instinctual fear response is only reasonable in the face of the insanity of "want to install a package? first define the world", but I'm not sure there's any other solution. Arch's dev team and community will continue to excuse the endless breakages under the pretense of minimalism, Suse is going to be bloated and targeted at office workers until the end times, and Debian unstable is all the chaos of Arch breakage without the accessible documentation, and using testing is like trying to put together a Lego set where half the bricks are replaced with kinetic sand, in my experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: "fuck if I don't empathize".
The lack of defining traits in distributions makes me wish that some of the more divergent distributions were more popular. There’s so much to experiment and find better solutions for in a Linux desktop but you see so little of that.
I use Gentoo. It has drawbacks, some are minor, some are huge.
Compilation times got out of hand in almost 15 years I use it. Sometime there are strnge dependency conflicts which keep me from updating for some time (until new packages come out). Building your own kernel and sping your own GRUB setup can be lain in the ass... Some packages are not available at all and you have to somehow bend them to work on Gentoo.
But you also get kinda bleeding edge experience where you don't have to wait for package becoming absolutely stable thus getting new packages faster than other distros.
I'm so used to Gentoo that I don't want to even try another one. If I was at a gunpoint and had to change, I would try Arch.
Really it's the desktop environments. I have the same experience with you - even as someone who literally works with linux servers every day their job, I get immensely frustrated with my experiences with linux desktop.
There's just not enough time and care put in, and much of that is just the economics of open source development. I really, really tried to full time desktop linux during the period when macs were really getting shitty (circa 2016), but it was such an awful experience I just jumped back to the macOS ship when apple silicon came out.
Man, I identify with this post. All OSes have little problems. I'm on ubuntu, but I always have to change a bunch of defaults for the OS, my DE, and my terminal before things work the way I would prefer, and I still don't like the age of the packages. Void sounds interesting, I might give it a whirl as a weekend project one day.
You might be interested to know, gentoo has expanded the number of binary packages it provides, so compilation at this point is probably completely optional.
When you say Arch breaks, how do you mean? I've been itching to move my gaming rig to Linux and have held off for HDR support, which is imminent with Plasma 6. I was planning on using Arch to benefit from Valve's investments for the Deck.
I had it break when i went on a trip and didn't update for 18 days.
This never happened with Void.
Here's how I update arch after an extended period of not getting updates. I've never had any problems and I usually let my server lag a few months at a time.
sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyringto make sure your keyring is up to date. If you don't do this you'll likely have problems.sudo pacman -Syuand proceed as required by number 1.Edit: This is how the wiki says it should be accomplished:
pacman -Sy --needed archlinux-keyring && pacman -SuIt is my impression that, when someone says "Arch is stable, it never breaks on me", they mean it's stable after doing things like you describe. Which, I suppose, is a valid definition of "stable", but not what most consumers have in mind when it is applied to a Linux distribution.
For sure, there are different definitions of stable people are working with.
FWIW, I would not recommend Arch to most people but anyone who has used Gentoo should certainly be able to get a 'stable' experience out of Arch.
I feel like Gentoo is actually more stable than Arch and does a better job at avoiding basic footguns. The archlinux keyring update issue is just embarrassing, and in my experience there's a number of similar issues with Arch. It's not completely unmanageable, but some small quality of life improvements would be very welcome.
Yea I have never understood why pacman can't just manage arch-keyring itself. Every reason I've heard is nonsensical.
The only justification I can think of is that they might want to keep things minimal and not have a special case to update the keyring first or something... But frankly, I just don't respect that line of reasoning. This is constantly a problem for everybody, and it feels like the package manager is broken if it doesn't take into account the fact that updating any package depends on the keyring. I think they finally addressed this by adding a systemd timer to update the keyring recently, but it just feels like a kludge and the fact that it took YEARS to do that is disappointing. I was a Gentoo user, and I switched to Arch temporarily when I got a new computer because I needed to get set up fast and didn't want to compile everything... But I was pretty disappointed with my Arch experience to be honest. It just feels like there's a bunch of places to stub your toes because Arch users want to have a couple of manual tricks they have to do every so often to feel smug about. It's like the Linux equivalent of having to add eggs to cake mixes so you feel like you're doing something.
I think my other major gripes (which may be wrong, it's been a while) were 1) when a kernel update happens Arch removes all of the old kernel modules immediately, so if you have a USB device that needs a module that you haven't loaded before and you plug it in after running an update it won't work (yes, you should reboot after a kernel update, but no, I'd like it if you don't break the current system while updating), and 2) downgrading packages wasn't a great experience when the packages broke (rollbacks with btrfs or whatever would help, but iirc you just had to hope you still had the old version in your pacman cache, because I think the Arch repos only keep the latest version available? Annoying when the intel wifi drivers break lol). Maybe this is just another "get gud" situation, and you can certainly manually put things in place to ease these problems, but doing that always makes it feel like a hack (and you have to manually do this for every machine, ugh). I also never really understood why 3rd party packages from AUR couldn't be added to pacman, so you have all of these unofficial package managers like
yayandaurato install things from AUR... I get that it's slightly different because you have to build the packages from source, and AUR is an untrusted repository... but it feels like it should be integrated better. I'm probably just bad at Arch, but I honestly don't understand why everybody uses it... I guess it's the main option for a binary minimalistic distribution, but it just feels unpolished to me. It's easily the distro that I've had the worst experiences with personally, but other people love it so fair enough, I guess!I was gonna say, the keyring thing should just be default behavior that you could optionally turn off with
--no-update-keyringfor the 5 users that don't want it.And the 5 users that claim they don't want it will inevitably never use
--no-update-keyringbecause there's basically no reason for anybody to ever do that.Yea I can definitely see that, I think it's a valid observation lol. The issues you've pointed out are definitely pain points I've run into in the past as well, although there are indeed some manual tricks to feel smug about ;)
paccachescript to clean out your pacman cache, which leaves the latest three versions of each package by default.PKGBUILDbefore usingmakepkgmanually. Which of course doesn't reflect reality at all but there are aur package managers likeparuthat at least make you read thePKGBUILDbefore building them for you. I think integrating these into pacman is ultimately a non-starter though because you need to run pacman as root and you really do no want to run makepkg as root.I'm running my arch install for 5 years now I think, it broke on me once.
Ditto for Tumbleweed here. The only times I had major breakage was when AMD drivers were fresh in the 5.x kernels. That has since passed.
Even then the answer was 'boot into recovery, rollback, wait a week then try again'. Not bad for an operating system that replaces half of it every couple of days.
Nvidia drivers are worse...but that's why I don't buy Nvidia anymore.
Recently switched over from Ubuntu Budgie to Debian 12 (Wayland). I'm not a power user by any account but I just love the stability. The tinkering here and there is what can be annoying but ultimate makes you connect with the product too, to make it your own.
Bottom line is, we'll always be bitching about Linux or any other OS for that matter. Things are never perfect but that is how we improve and make progress.
I ran OpenSuse as my distro of choise for 4 years now, But due to work reasons I recently switched to Windows 10.
And not to shit on Linux of have a Windows rant (tough the touch pad, WiFi and sound drivers where hell to install on Windows), but I can imagine that people feel that every different Linux Distro just has to much sludge to go trough every time you setup a machines.
And learning something like NIX for you config might not be worth it for everybody ( of course it is according moi ;) )
By the way I must say that wsl2 now is pretty decent, and eventough I need Windows for work I'm still 80% of my time just typing away in the terminal where I have WSL2 + OpenSuse tumbleweed running.
I have to do a netsocket reset every single system reboot to get WSL2 to work. I'm not alone in this one, but I have yet to find an easier way to get it operational.
WSL2 is a great step up from WSL1, but god it's still such a mess to deal with, especially if you want to do something as simple as sharing SSH keys between the two environments.
I've been using Linux since ~1993 on a 25MHz 386SX, starting with one of the first Slackware releases. I was one of the early adopters for daily use back when it was VERY hard to do so -- very little software support, completely manual configurations (that could destroy your monitor if X was misconfigured, been there, done that), very limited hardware support, etc.
I now use Linux for work and don't feel like I'm missing anything. I'm also tired of futzing with it, so I use Ubuntu with the i3 wm (which did require some futzing initially, but have been using the same basic configuration for about 4 years now), and it "just works" -- I get support for basically every software package, all of my hardware works just fine (I use Thinkpads, which have good support), and basically set it up once and forget about it. I'm done with messing around with compiling custom kernels and fighting dependencies (my first Slackware version had zero dependency management, you had to choose each and every package individually)
It's not necessary to go through all of this -- you can just use it and not worry. :)
You've got a lot of responses, so I'll keep it brief: I still think you should go back and try Gentoo so more. You say you don't want compile times, but: If you need package X today, compile it yesterday. i.e. plan your system updates a bit -- or be a bit more patient. I can start an
emergeand go do something else for a few minutes before that application is ready to use, and that's okay with me. Only the very very largest of packages take many hours to compile (chromium, libreoffice, and a handful of others), but these tend to be the ones that have-binalternatives, and right in the official Portage tree, even.I have plenty of free time this weekend so I'll take a closer look at Gentio again. Maybe it is time to go back to it or learn something like NixOS.
There’s always a minimal Debian install using testing or sid repos? I haven’t run sid daily in a long time but I can only think of a few times it went really sideways with updates.
For what it’s worth, a decade ago - slightly more than a decade at this point - I was not a fan of systemd. I knew sysv, I liked it, I could shave 30 to 60 seconds off my boot times fiddling with it. But at this point systemd is fairly ubiquitous and I don’t see any noticeable performance or stability differences, so I gave up and just use it. And I haven’t personally had Arch break during updates in about a decade.
Mildly unrelated to distros, but the more I use Linux, the more I dislike it (for everyday use).
Yesterday was the last straw for me Fedora 39. My biggest issue was Bluetooth. What feels like a basic use-case, but it refused to cooperate. I connected my AirPods, then my PS5 controller via Bluetooth. My AirPods disconnect. I try to reconnect but "can't connect". I disconnect my controller, but then the same thing happens. Sometimes it works. Who knows what stars have to align.
That's not to mention the X11 vs Wayland issues.
I gave a genuine effort, a months-worth of dealing with the bugs. But death by a thousand cuts. Now I'm back on Windows.
Not positive but I think the behavior described there might be because the controller is technically a Bluetooth audio device too thanks to the speaker on it, and so it Linux might be disconnecting the AirPods thinking you’re switching headphones. I’ve seen similar weirdness with DualShocks/DualSenses under Windows.
It’s still silly though, I won’t argue that.
You're right about the problem on Windows; I'm currently experiencing it. Unfortunately it's not audio switching devices. Whenever one device connects the other disconnects. Bluetooth is fubar regardless of OS it seems. My Linux complaint is unwarranted.
If ypu like Fedora except for the proprietary codecs that are missing, you might like Nobara OS. It is a version of Fedora which focuses with a good out of the box experience and includes RPM Fusion and lot's of custom patches by default. The default build is a modified version of KDE, but it also has vanilla KDE and vanilla Gnome. I am thinking of installing it myself.
Nobara looks cool but it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t have secure boot support. That was one of the reasons I went with Fedora, since it makes coexistence with Windows 11 easier, which is important since some games don’t support WINE/Proton or virtualization.
I might be able to move one of my laptops over to it since it could feasibly be Linux-only, but the secondary partition on the gaming tower is going to have to remain something that supports secure boot.
I didn't know that. That's good to know, thanks
The problem I have with these small projects is that in the end they get abandoned.
They should do something similar to EndeavourOS where in the end all you have is a regular arch install so if the project dies, it does not matter. It's just regular arch.
I understand your concern but Nobara is different IMO. It is maintained by Glorious Eggroll whom you might know from Proton GE. If he can maintain consistent updates for Proton GE for years, I trust him tokeep the distro up-to-date.
I see. I'll take a look. Thanks!