this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Arch is the truest test of how much you're willing to sacrifice for control.

You get control of everything on your system, but you're basically on your own when it all goes to shit... which from how many of these posts I keep seeing seems to be a daily occurance haha

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago

Hardly.

Gentoo is closer, it's like Arch except you're supposed to COMPILE every package...

Then there's Linux From Scratch. You don't download the Distro, you download the manual on how to MAKE the Distro.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yep. Why not take Mint/Pop/etc and actually be productive instead of solving the ever so trivial issues on cmd? Matter of taste

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Exactly. There's no such thing as a polymath in this day and age, so you're gonna have to trust somebody at some point, so why not put a little bit of the control freak away and accept a more put together OS from the community?

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had more issues on mint than I ever had on arch, and I'm in no way a computer expert. Arch is just more simple.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not the guy you replied to but i put Mint on my uncles pc, tried to install some software and it just gave me some errors, tried fixing it for about 40 mins and gave up and just put windows on it. I had an Kubuntu install that just randomly killed itself after a few months as well. It worked fine for a while, then i restarted one day and wouldn't boot giving some drive error, and i ended up moving to arch after that. Arch has been working very well for me and it has had issues but i could always solve them quite easily.

At the end of the day all linux distros are essentially running the same software, the only difference is the version of software you're running, some update faster some slower.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But did you try putting Arch on your uncles PC? Seems like you'd have run into more of the same.

I've been an Arch user on my main machines for years, which is exactly why I'm hesitant to buy that it's "simpler" and less prone to issues than a distro like Mint.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im sure that arch would probably cause more issues than mint in the long run, i was just saying Mint or any other beginner distros are not exactly 100% issue free as some would claim them to be

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's just Linux in general at that point though -- and really wasn't what I was responding to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every Debian/apt based distribution needed a reinstall after some time.
very probably my fault, but with Arch I always could save my install somehow, while with apt it was a lost cause - for me at least.

But I spent much more time with Debian based system in the past and still all my customer production machines are on a Debian variant, for my laptop and workstation, I'm happy with Arch - or if I'm lazy with Manjaro

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go for Endeavour over Manjaro for lazy-Arch. Manjaro is the least stable of the bunch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The choice for Manjaro was quite some time ago, so maybe it's time for a re-evaluation.

Could you tell me, what you think the advantages of Endeavour are?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Endeavour is essentially just a GUI installer that spits out a proper Arch install with a few nice-to-haves pre-installed (like yay for example), and some good defaults (like increased parallel downloads for pacman).

Manjaro, on the other hand, holds back packages from the main Arch repos for testing. Which is reasonable in theory, but it means you can have compatibility errors if you install things from the AUR (which is the main draw of Arch IMO).

The Manjaro team has also forgotten to renew their SSL certificates multiple times (and told people to roll back their system clocks to fix the problems it caused), as well as DDOSing the AUR a few times too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks!

I've read the SSL story, but never had a problem.

Endeavour sounds interesting though, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

After using Ubuntu for a while I wanted to try out Arch once. Grabbed a step by step instruction and followed it.

Around step.. 7 or something I ran into a wall, because the commands simply didn't work. After messing around for an hour or two I finally gave up at that point. Of course that was years ago, so it might be easier now to install.

But overall I'd rather use Windows, Ubuntu or whatever, give me an OS where things just work, as I have actual work to do (instead of trying to fight with my OS). Hell, back in the day (~14 years ago) when using Ubuntu for school I once spent hours to get HDMI Audio to work, it was a nightmare.

Right now I just use Windows 11 on my desktop (as I game a lot and use Visual Studio) and Ubuntu on a server. I'd love to fully switch to Linux as my daily driver, but there's simply too many features that wouldn't work :-/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm often very happy with Manjaro in such a case.
Easy install, nicely pre-configured, quite some variants to choose from (i like i3), and I still have practically Arch running - with some more stable Repos (which could bring some problems with AUR, but I never really had any major ones)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you switch from Visual Studio to Rider it'll make the migration fully to Linux much easier.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol, Rider is paid only. And it's a subscription too!

My work pays for Visual Studio in the office and at home when I want to mess around in my free time Visual Studio Community (which has around 95% of the features of the paid versions) is free.

If I ever work for a company that uses Rider I might switch. But paying over a hundred bucks a year just for the little bit of personal use is insane.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Rider is free for Open Source projects: https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/#support which should cover your personal projects.

Might also be worth asking around if your office have any JetBrains licenses. It's pretty common to have one covering the .NET suite for dotTrace etc

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have nothing against well made paid software but I am not going to use a subscription model to pay for it. I am not looking for software that is looking to rent seek from me every month.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So you'd be OK paying a one time fee in order to own that version forever?

Because that's literally how JetBrains works:

12 months of uninterrupted subscription payments qualify you for receiving a perpetual fallback license.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-

(I promise I'm not a sales rep)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Huh didn't know that and I've never even seeing anything remotely similar, sounds pretty fair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried out ubuntu about as long ago as you did, and for some reason I couldn't get the internet to work. But because this was before smartphones, I had to boot back into windows, look up a possible solution, write it down, boot back into ubuntu, try it, didn't work, rinse and repeat. After 2 hours I just gave up and went back to windows. It's probably way easier now, but I'm still hesitant to give it another try.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Huh? That's weird. Internet always worked for me, both over Ethernet and over WiFi. The only issue I had once (where it took me an extra hour or two) was with a school network that had extra protections, like a login. That one was tougher, especially when I then wanted to route a tunnel through it so I could play games in class.

But usually internet works flawlessly on any Linux distribution.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Gentoo goes even further, you can disable features for individual software so they aren't even compiled in.

And you're not really on your own, arch's wiki and forum are really good and helpful.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

yeah I think I'll just stick with Fedora.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

For me arch was just a fun project that helped me understand how operating systems work and how they interact directly with hardware