The more time I spend with Linux the more I realize that Distro doesn’t matter, GUI doesn’t matter, experience doesn’t matter.
Distro doesn’t matter because you will inevitably come across something that you need that doesn’t work on your distribution.
GUI doesn’t matter because no matter what you do you will %100 have to use the terminal and if you can do it once you can do it again.
Experience doesn’t matter because if you’re inexperienced you have to go outside your Comfort zone, if you’re experienced you got there because you like going outside your comfort zone and you will constantly stay in that state.
WTF are you guys doing with your PCs??? I’ve been running Mint for over a year now and the only time I’ve used the terminal was to open a port for Chromecast. I browse, I game, I watch shows, etc. maybe I’m just really lucky, idk, it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.
We have become philosophers of our own, as tweaking Linux has been a way to meditate our stressful mind to overcome the difficulty of touching grasses.
I personally use it to run a headless docker on fedora 40 server with containers holding jellyfin, filebrowser, pia, qBittorrent a desktop in noVNC a pfsense server, and probably some stuff I forgot.
Why is that not a standard use case?
But in all seriousness I guess I get your point.
That huge chunk of learning required for arch when you’ve never used Linux before is really hard to imagine when you have years of experience working Linux under your belt. That does not mean it doesn’t exist for new users though.
That shit’s complex and long. Much as I appreciate the sentiment of “the distro doesn’t matter” I really can’t agree.
Instructions unclear. I’m running Gnome on Mint.
The mindset of a true Slacker.
The mindset of a true Slacker.
Experience doesn’t matter because if you’re inexperienced you have to go outside your Comfort zone, if you’re experienced you got there because you like going outside your comfort zone and you will constantly stay in that state.
I was experimenting a lot during my early Linux months but then I found what works for me and settled with it. I don’t leave my comfort zone much anymore.
Well your arch broke, didn’t it?
It’s arch… of course it broke 😂
Arch is the distro that did hold the longest against my torture yet, maybe because everything is from the same repo 🤔😂
Yes and no for me
Distro doesn’t matter because they only differ in package manager and initial configuration, you can always compile things if you really need it.
GUI doesn’t matter because you’ll end up with all KDE and gnome dependencies installed anyway because your applications need it.
Experience probably matters, but if it doesn’t, it may be because there is just so much there to know.
Distro starts mattering a tad more once you starts experimenting with more esoteric stuff such as Guix, NixOS, QubesOS…
NixOS:
a whistle is blown, people start running out the trenches rifle in hand. Shouting while bombs pounder around, you stay still, disoriented. The general grabs your jacket and starts screaming. You cannot figure a single word of what he says, he just puts a monad into your hands.
Gentoo: you compile your mother from source, and then give birth to yourself.
Not an accurate depiction of birds…after the helpless phase birds become fledglings where they leave the nest but are still dependent on their parents for food. Social structures vary a lot by species but many remain with parents for quite some time.
I mean, some bird species have mothers that essentially drop their fledglings to predators to distract from themselves (and their insecurities), or just simply don’t feel bothered to actually help raise them to maturity.
And I fucking soared
(Btw)
Time for Gentoo
LinuxFromScraaatch
The thing about arch, is that if you have a basic understanding of the terminal and computers, the arch wiki can get from that level to a real expert.
So if you ask me, anyone with a basic understanding of the terminal, and a goal to improve, should go with arch.
Can you define a basic understanding of the terminal?
Your basic and my basic could be wildly different.
Having completed “Hacknet”, the hit 2015 hacker simulator video game.
(Only half joking)
I played 2 hours of that game. I wondered how close it was to reality. Do those programs that you call in game have real life counterparts?
Mostly yes, but they’re in general oversimplified (for obvious reasons)
But it’s more about offensive cyber security than necessarily the Linux part. The Linux part is just file system navigation and not much more, the rest is the “hacking” part, and that’s what I’m talking about
Disclaimer: I did not complete it, but I got pretty far, and I worked in the cyber security area.
I would however say it’s not a good place if you want to learn as that’s not really the game’s focus. There are better resources out there like overthewire and linuxjourney for that
Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.
It’s more like a turtle and its shell.
Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!
and snappy!
Yes, Debian packages are old. Tell me again when your arch install breaks for the 4th time this week.
and you have a choice with Debian. You can run:
- Stable if you want stability, meaning it doesn’t change often (minor updates only).
- Testing if you want newer packages that have at least gone through some level of testing. They’ve been in unstable for at least 3-10 days with no major bug reports.
- Unstable/sid if you want to assist the Debian project by reporting bugs (which is always appreciated!), or want the “breaks all the time” experience of other distros.
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho.
Yeah, it was just a response to the Arch memes since I’m sure Arch doesn’t break all the time either.
I mostly use Debian and Fedora, so you’re preaching to the choir
I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but I was dual booting Debian and Fedora for around a month, and ended up sticking with Fedora.
The main benefit of Fedora is that packages are much newer than Debian (even if you run Debian unstable/sid). Some examples I hit:
KDE Plasma 6.0 was released in February this year, and Fedora got it shortly after release. Debian sid still doesn’t have it - it’s in experimental but isn’t in a fully working state yet. Debian doesn’t focus on completing large upgrades like that until it’s closer to the deadline for the next release.
Until last month, the AMD graphics firmware (and in fact, all non-free firmware) in Debian stable, testing, and unstable was a version from over a year ago (June 2023) that had a bunch of bugs and didn’t support newer GPUs properly at all. See the version numbers here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-nonfree/news/. On laptops like the Framework 16, you hace to manually download firmware from a repo on kernel.org and place the files in the right spot. Fedora comes with the latest firmware in each release.
Fedora also has some niceties, for example it comes with Plymouth (graphical boot-up and shut-down screen) installed out-of-the-box instead of showing a bunch of scrolling text.
The Debian approach is fantastic for servers. Servers have hardware that generally doesn’t change during its lifespan, and need to be stable. A server you set up today still needs to be working the same way 2 or 3 years from now, without worrying about major breaking changes. You can install
unattended-upgradesand get automatic security/bugfix updates with very little risk of anything breaking.On the other hand, for a desktop environment, running the latest versions can have some benefits. Hardware and can change often (especially GPUs and their drivers), desktop environments fix bugs and add new features weekly, etc.
I don’t mind Debian on desktop, but IMO Fedora is better. I’ve been running Debian on servers for over 20 years though, and I’ll continue doing so.
One thing I can’t stand about Fedora is the installer. It might be because I’m more familiar with debian-installer, but I find partitioning in Fedora’s installer much more difficult. I was trying to set up a fairly standard layout on my laptop (EFI partition, /boot partition, LUKS encryption partition with LVM in it, then / and /home ext4 LVs) and I got so frustrated that I set it up in the Debian installer then rebooted into the Fedora installer lol
I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.
Arch is unironically easy.
You only need to know two commands:
archinstall
and
sudo pacman -Syu
PS: If my 60 year old mom can do it, anyone can.
I installed Arch using archinstall and my system finished with missing KDE and important packages. I was also missing secure boot…
Staying on Debian.
How long ago was that? I have installed Arch with archinstall on ~10 different PCs over the last 4 years without any issues. Maybe I just got lucky, though.
A few days ago.
Problably because I’m used to Debian.
The amount of uninformed, stereotyped memery in this comment section is actually unreal
The fact that most people assume Arch is a broken mess because of a meme is wild. Same people would think Linux is impossible to use if they used Windows still.
Misinformation can spread like wildfire, especially in an environment, when people take someone’s statements as fact, instead of evaluating anything themselves. Very easy to echo bad takes
