Almost every interaction with a boomer involving their computer/phone
The zoomers and gen-alpha aren’t doing much better. Just ask the average teen what a filesystem is and how to find a file without it being organized in some sort of media gallery app.
As a millennial, I often feel like I’m surrounded by tech illiterates on both the upper AND lower sides of my age bracket.
It’s dumb as hell to most here, but ordinary users their own ideas on what a desktop should look like that often doesn’t agree with the intelligentsia. Just let them have it.
I don’t even notice Debian, which is exactly how an operating system should work.
And yet…
Here’s the thing. When I talk to friends interested in Linux, it’s always Debian or Fedora that I suggest. I think they draw a good line for what the average user wants and needs and they’re stable. In fact, I used Fedora for a long time, and all my homelab stuff runs Debian. It wasn’t until computers themselves became a hobby that I switched to Arch. And I think that’s likely the cutoff. If you’re a computer user, stable distros are great. If you’re more a hobbiest… Well, the Arch wiki can own your free time.
NixOS has entered the chat
Normal distro -> arch -> gentoo -> nixOS -> QubesOS -> Debian pipeline.
The only problem with Debian is that I want packages from this century.
Thats what you think you want but by the time you’re at the end of the pipeline you just want a computer that works.
In my experience that means packages from this century. Eventually you do need a new software for something. Trying to get software from 10 years ago to agree with software released in the last 6 months leads to breaking things or finding myself doing Linux From Scratch on top of debian or ubuntu.
It turns out if everything is new everything really does just work. That’s why I use Artix (child of Arch). It’s less pain. You just have to ignore the myth that these systems are “hard.” Graphics cards and Steam work out of the gait. There is a reason why StreamOS is built on Arch.
No more compile hell in the rare case you need to compile because the AUR does the same thing, but in a single command line resolving all dependencies. It’s like compiling without the experience of compiling.
Just make sure you always
pacman -Syubeforepacman -S {package}. No exceptions. Or in rare cases you may have to chroot from a live disk andpacman -S linuxto fix your initramfs. If you do that one thing nothing ever breaks.
Debian is where the jaded users end up when they lack the will to flash another usb stick.
“I’m good, fuck it.”
The funny thing for me is I swapped to fedora after my last attempt to use arch failed spectacularly.
I’ve found I’m at a point where I just want my device to work and work well
Just means your over 25
/me a 42 year old that uses Arch
I take that personally.
/me adjusts my knee high socks.
42 and wearing long socks like that? You need help bud’
Once you hit 40 your knees need all the help they can get.
Unpopular opinion: install community distros, not corporate ones. That way you can support the developers for their hardwork. Redhat doesn’t need our money, they already make enough of it. I use CachyOS, btw.
I just switched to CachyOS and I’m really enjoying it so far. My journey so far has been Mint > Bazzite > Kubuntu > back to Mint > CachyOS and for the first time I don’t have any real complaints. There’s a voice inside my head telling me to jump to just standard Arch though. Not really sure why. Have you tried standard Arch? If so, how does it compare to CachyOS? I probably won’t end up switching, I haven’t had any issues yet and I’m a computer problem magnet and certified idiot, so I’ll probably stick to what works, but something draws me to pure Arch.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed sends it’s love.
Hi, Tumbleweed 👋🏽
Install Guix
Guix’s FOSS stance is cool, but Nix is much more mature
Guix’s FOSS stance is… cool… I guess… but can be very impractical. The main channel only ships linux-libre which will give you problems on most modern hardware. I immediately had to add
nonguixto get my laptop working.No, the reason I went with Guix is because their tools and APIs seem/feel a bit more polished than Nix. I also feel better about learning Guile Scheme because it’s a more general-purpose language than Nixlang and I just personally found it more intuitive.
But yeah Nix is definitely more mature, has more packages, and has more documentation scattered about. Also, Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of systemd… which… I don’t know how I feel about that yet…
How do you do Flakes with Guix? When I tried to use it, the closest I could get was a script using time-machine to output a lockfile, and it was still missing many other important features such as inputting other Flakes and their dependencies. Also NixOS/Home Manager have tons of configuration options that integrate with each other (i.e. Shell integrations, stylix) that Guix doesn’t have so with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful. Also on aarch64 Guix is way bugger and like half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time, their lack of quality control was also one of the things that pushed me to Nix.
The one thing I do miss from Guix though is the containerized shells.
How do you do Flakes with Guix?
Good question. I haven’t gotten there yet… but I hear yeah, something with
channels.scmandtime-machine? I haven’t tried that workflow yet. Also, something about inferiors?NixOS/Home Manager … with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful
I actually found that I like using the
home-dotfiles-service-typebecause I already have everything in dot files. Although, I have a very simple setup, so I’m not sure more powerful features would be useful for me… maybe? idk.aarch64 Guix is way bugger
Ah, ok. I haven’t tried this.
half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time
Hm, weird. Maybe this has gotten better? I haven’t had a problem with anything compiling yet. I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
Guix is definitely lacking manpower for sure, but I’m vibing with the foundations so far. So I’m hoping things get better over time.
This was the closest I managed to get to a Flake with Guix. I’m bad at Guile so there might be other things I missed.
With Nix I made a Flake that automatically configures a text editor that can be imported into other Flakes for my own projects which is easy to do with Nix.
For system configurations, the flake-parts based configuration makes it easy to mix and match modules for different systems that edit parts of program configurations that I need (i.e. different modules add different aliases to Nushell). Idk how Guix handles this since I haven’t figured out Guile well.
I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
I’ve experienced this with Nix before for a different program, although once I made an issue request it got responses immediately and I didn’t even do anything else. Meanwhile for Guix, I tried contributing a package that I spent several hours working on, and I asked multiple channels for support and didn’t get a response, then when I submitted it no response for a year before it was finally rejected, so my experience with the maintainers wasn’t great either and this made me hesitant to invest more time into the ecosystem.
The literal ArchWiki says you may not want to use Arch if you are happy with your current OS.
based
i was happy with Arch on my server.
then, i installed NixOS on it.
update: i’ve set it up to a usable state, it’s a minecraft server
Arch on my server
Sane people usually go bungee jumping or cave diving to get their irrational danger kicks.
Installing Arch on a server is certainly a choice
I’m happy with Arch (BTW) and have the same thoughts about NixOS.
Tried it all and ended up with Mint again. Forever the best distro.
Hell yes! Mint 4 life!
I am convinced that I will try Arch or similar some day in the future simply because of SteamOS switching over to being based off of it. But for now, I develop software for embedded Linux systems all day at work. When I get home it’s either family time inside or it’s playing “engineer turned farmer” in my back yard. Literally digging in the dirt and building stuff out of wood. Feels good man.
Arch is for new users, experienced ones use Gentoo
Calm down there Satan.
Every time I’ve tried using Arch, something breaks.
So you fixed it with a simple search and a bit of research, r-right?
No, I fixed it by shutting down the PC and restoring from my backup. Plus, how can I search or research when the first thing to go is my Internet access?
You people don’t have phones?
Why should I have to use my phone, when I have a whole computer sitting there like a lump of chips and random stuff?
There is a lot of propaganda for Fedora these days. Something I see much less frequently for Arch and its derivatives. Isn’t that meme based on old facts?
It’s not propaganda. Fedora’s just that good. Been using it since 2019 myself. Never felt the need to distrohop after.
I was a fedora boy until I met endeavoros and kde.
Now I’m a straight up hoe.
But are you a well loved and taken care of hoe? Cause you deserve to be.
And I thought all Arch users already switched to Nix OS (BTW)
I want to switch to Nix… the idea of Nix is compelling. In practice every time I try and test it out I remember that I’m an idiot with a keyboard and I should stop.
Nah, I looked at it and it doesn’t interest me. I like arch because, contrary to popular belief, it is quite stable (as in non crashing, not package versions) if you only install exactly what you need. I had way more stability issues on the more standard distros since they had so much extra stuff. Debian for servers every day though.
Nix looks interesting in theory, but is a lot of work and too opinionated for me. Far from an expert though and have nothing against those that like it or any other distro.
As someone considering getting Arch, what is unstable about the package versions? I thought the rolling release was a selling point, but does it actually make things more unstable?
“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).
I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.
So the updates don’t tend to break things? Is it just annoying to constantly update?
It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.
Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.
Not the same person, but my updates take like 30s (if I don’t go looking at what changed) and happen whenever I want. We’re not talking windows updates here, just
sudo pacman -Syu, seeing the list of what’s changing (etc firefox went up a version? Cool), and then saying “sure” if it looks good to me. Don’t even need to restart all the time, although I tend to do updates before turning my pc off anyway so I nearly always do.Packages tend to use the latest stable version of their software, unless you choose a beta branch instead, so if anything I think I’ve run into less broken software than on Debian-based distros because you don’t get bugs that were fixed a week ago but haven’t made it into the official apt repository version yet. If there is a bug, you can just not upgrade that package if you know about it in advance or just downgrade it until they release a fix (I’ve never had to do this but iirc you can pin a version in pacman).
Not suggesting to jump ship if you’re happy with your current distro, but arch is a great learning experience to set up and once you have a good system running it’s absolutely rock solid. Just don’t expect to install it in fifteen minutes like other distros, if you want a good install you have to do all the reading yourself (arch wiki is priceless) to make informed choices because you’re entirely responsible for piecing together your own OS.
Thank you! That makes sense. I’m on Windows 11 and therefore not happy with my current “distro” 😅 I know Arch isn’t recommended for beginners, but I hope that if I take it slow and read a lot, I might survive.
If everything is the way you like it, you are winning. Keep on winning.
