I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Every couple of years I think to myself “You know, I can’t actually remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I’ve got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they’ve had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?”
And then I download Ubuntu.
And then I remember.
And then I remember.
Can you share with the rest of the class?
Admittedly, it’s been a few years and I’m coming due, but let’s see what I can remember…
- apt will brick itself if it gets interrupted mid transaction with no clear recourse apart from a total reinstall, so try not to get greedy and Ctrl+C if it looks like dpkg is hung
- trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile
- snapcraft, need I say more? Firefox takes several minutes to start up, we don’t talk about disk usage, installing a package with apt will sometimes install the snap version anyway requiring a Windows-registry-edit-esque hack to disable, and the last time I checked in, the loop devices it creates didn’t even get hidden in the file manager.
- I’ve also definitely encountered my fair share of bugs and broken packages which are always fun to fix
Ubuntu when they first switched to Unity. I had been running Ubuntu for 2 or 3 years at that point, but I was already thinking about switching to Debian at the time. I hobbled along for a few weeks on that first version of Unity, but I didn’t like what I was seeing. I took the plunge into Debian, thinking, “If I’m going to have to learn something new anyways, I might as well try switching.”
Ubuntu. It has become so shitty over time, it’s oretty sad.
Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability
then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷♀️
Honestly everything besides Debian and Arch after distro hopping for years.
Arch: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.
I have to give credit to their documentation though!
Zorin OS, which was the second distro I ever tried, I hated how outdated their repos were since they were using an older Ubuntu LTS repository for packages. It was quite painful to install software that would otherwise have worked out-of-the-box on Ubuntu. I hope this is no longer the case today.
As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.
I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don’t wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.
NIXOS is definitely not for me. The documentation sucks and there are less cumbersome ways to restore a system.
Honestly, if you’re not using nix to deploy systems or need it to create reproducible environments across systems, then NixOS is a bit overkill.
I want to use NixOS for servers and embedded systems as well, so I run it on my laptop. But the user experience gives Gentoo a run for it’s money for being the most finnicky bastard in the distro world. They would both contend if there was a Razzy award for usability.
tails
I liked tails more than any other Linux distro lol.
tails
Tails is one of those things where you aren’t supposed to daily drive it unless you are a paranoid weirdo.
Most of them.
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Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it’s surprisingly bad at that.
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Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
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Opensuse world - I’ve only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn’t really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn’t click and I’ve left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
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Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I’ve never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.
I’ve got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel
~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with
I highly enjoy using EndeavourOS. But then again, I wouldn’t classify it as a spinoff, it’s pretty much vanilla Arch, but purple.
Now Manjaro on the other hand… Tried it and understood why so many people don’t like it within the first week.
Mind to elaborate a little bit more about the Manjaro problem? I am driving it since a couple of years without any issue but I keep hearing this… now I am afraid :)
I hope it works for you forever. I am not going to get in an argument with the other Manjaro users here that will come to argue with you.
Just keep in mind that most of the people warning you away from Manjaro have a story that basically sums up as “I used to love Manjaro until, one day, it totally broke on me. Now I won’t touch it.” Sadly, this includes me. Will you join us one day? I hope not.
Now Manjaro on the other hand… Tried it and understood why so many people don’t like it within the first week.
I see this a lot and nobody really ever explains, properly, why.
I have used Linux off and on for many years (mainly server OS such as RHEL and CentOS). I have now migrated from Windows desktop to Manjaro KDE. Using it for a year. Had one issue (wouldn’t boot after a kernel update), which I sorted quickly. Other than that it’s been rock solid.
But this isn’t a ‘I have a great experience so you’re all just haters’ post.
I know the stuff about it being a week or behind Arch. I remember something about the maintainers (can’t remember specifics) but they seem to be minor niggles that don’t affect most people.
Genuine question.
Why do you dislike Manjaro? I also know it’s a common theme to dislike it, so any other insight there?
Not the guy you asked, but my 2 main gripes are:
- holding back main repos and not aur? That’s dumb and just asking for trouble.
- sheer incompetence. Remember their certs expiring? Remember their public recommended workaround? That’s webdev level of bs. They absolutely do not understand their own setup.
What’s the relation between opensuse and microsoft?
In 2014 some wrote that there is none https://forums.opensuse.org/t/what-relationship-between-opensuse-and-microsoft/104583/5
It is that deal from 2006(?) or so. Agreeing to not be sued for an exchange of money is dodgy. Add the competition which was not offered the same deal; add in the environment which was drastically different; it was a shit thing to do. Purely a business decision. I understand why the shareholders wanted that, but that doesn’t make it right nor desirable for me.
Granted, nothing came out of it in the end and Linux managed to get itself established in a way where one could argue is close to impossible to get rid of it, but I feel like this deal is similar to getting stabbed - the one being stabbed will always bear a scar and remember, while others will forget over time. People growing up after this deal will never have experienced the mood and environment of that time which only makes it more difficult to understand why it was a big deal.
Instead of providing apple’s chips to everyone, they keep them to themselves.
I’ll support suse as that’s not really an issue in my opinion.
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All of them, so I’m still on Windows
Anything that isn’t Arch.
- Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
- Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
- openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
- Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
- Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
- Debian’s packages are too old.
- Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
- The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won’t consider trying:
- Gentoo is too much work.
- Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
- I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
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