I’ve never seen an infographic for “I use arch, btw.” until now.
oh come on. I don’t ever say it outside of meme contexts. I just personally enjoy rolling releases and don’t really like the corporate feeling of Fedora, so i’m left with only really Arch as a good option.
Did you even try void?
No. I’ve never understood the point of it
well, if you were serious in your deduction, one point of it is that arch is not your only option.
Just lighthearted poking, I don’t have anything bad to say about anyone’s choices. I didn’t mean any offense. Sorry if that was its tone.
No, no don’t worry, no offense taken 😅 I should have expected it lol.
Fedora is corporate? I nearly spat my coffee ;-)
I’m flashing back to working with suse on unitedlinux and the challenges we had. If you want a very Corporate distro, it’s right there.
Never again.
I mean… fedora is RHEL, which is very corporate
Other way around mostly…
Fedora trys stuff first.
Funny that it’s not a rolling distro, yet it is often ahead of my cachyos box. It’s astounding how fast fedora puts stuff out yet never any effort on my part to manage it. Unlike cachy or even arch.
I’m getting tired of dispelling this myth, and I don’t even use either 🙄
Do people even read? RHEL is downstream from Fedora. They’re both forks of Red Hat, but Red Hat ≠ RHEL.
Does this need to be on a billboard or something?
Sorry. It’s still corporate, since it’s coming from red hat. Thanks for telling me though.
It’s not “coming from” Red Hat, Fedora is forked from it originally but is directly downstream from the linux kernel, there’s no Red Hat involved between the Linux Foundation and the Fedora devs.
In fact, there’s no more Red Hat at all, there’s only RHEL, which is downstream from Fedora.
Fedora is not downstream from Red Hat. I don’t know how to put that in any plainer terms…
I see. Have a nice day. I still won’t use Fedora.
Fedora is the most corporate not-actually-corporate distro
Or, as honourably mentioned, OpenSuSE, specifically tumbleweed.
OpenSUSE got me onto Linux and was such a great option for a first distro. I still think about changing back sometimes. I’m surprised it doesn’t get recommended more often.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my daily driver. I recommend it to most people. It’s a nice balance of leading edge and stability. Plus, snapper makes it easy to rollback if an update borks something.
Same. It is really nice.
Started with Debian and still use it on servers. Moved to Arch but recently put Tumbleweed on my old laptop to try it out. Fast becoming a favourite. Like you said, rolling release with automatic snapshots is the best of both worlds.
Slowroll is my daily. I like it because most distros preach some kind of extreme philosophy, like Arch is ultra bare, Ubuntu et al are super easy, others are bleeding edge or slow and stable. openSUSE is (mostly) absolutely middle-of-the-road with a get-the-job-done kind of attitude I guess it makes it somewhat forgettable but I need the OS to just get out of the way and let me use my computer.
SUSE has always kind of been of an also ran in the eyes of a lot of users. I have tried the stable versions before Tumbleweed and I have even used Tumbleweed for a while. It’s a solid choice and the user base is awesome.
I really, really, wanted to love SUSE, but there is just something about it that I just don’t vibe with. It’s a good distro and offers a lot. But it’s just a bit uncomfortable like a suit jacket that doesn’t quite fit right through the shoulders.
I had a similar experience. Smaller standard repositories, unfamiliar package manager syntax, a package manager that’s probably even slower than apt (doesn’t matter longterm, but makes learning it more annoying), and I didn’t find using the community repositories particularly smooth. Plus I’m always running custom setups with tiling WMs, which is a bad fit for smaller, desktop-focused distros.
arch btw
Debian is where greybeards go to retire things just work once you configured them and you don’t need the helping hand of the AUR as you can just build your own packages with aptbuild.
Hey! My beard isn’t that… oh, fuck, I guess it is. Where does the time go?
I hear you brother 1998 was just yesterday right?
I sure am excited for gaming this year. I saw some adverts in a magazine for Half-Life, Ocarina of Time, and Resident Evil 2 and I can’t decide.
Shit. I’ve been on Debian for decades now. Maybe I’m just an old soul… Or I’m just lazy. I don’t even configure my DE anymore. The OS install of today will be wiped in no time, so it’s not worth being too attached.
Same, on the XFCE/LXQt/MATE desktops
Same started on OF Suse from a boxed copy I bought in a store that came with a thick manual but then a year later found Debian and have there ever since.
As a youngblood I have heard of the iron stability of Debian, but simply find it difficult to adopt for gaming-related reasons (both hosting and as a game client).
I do wish to one day study the greybeards’ work for a future project box, however. That knowledge needs to be part of my generation as well, for at least a few of us.
The thing about Debian is that it’s really not meant for the bleeding edge, not unless you shim a completely different runtime platform onto it, like Docker or Flatpak (or Proxmox). It shines as a very stable very basic host OS that’s limited to just the base functions of the machine and lets the other platform deal with the latest and shiniest releases.
Yeah. I’ve been loving it as a rock solid base for a server. Trying to use it as a desktop though? For basic browsing and such, sure, but once you want to do anything complex and require recent packages it becomes a mess.
Nethack runs fine on my Debian computer.
Debian, but simply find it difficult to adopt for gaming-related reasons (both hosting and as a game client).
I do remember installing a mesa PPA on Ubuntu to play Elden Ring the year it was released, doing the same or similar on Debian stable seems even more of a mess … I kinda soured on AAA gaming since, though.
I’m not a greybeard (yet) but
xbps-srcwould like to have a word.Also, Debian is bad for cognitive abilities since if you use it long enough you forget how to configure things. /j
Every time I have to upgrade to a new release I have to go read the instructions on how to do it…
I would appreciate a big button like in fedora “push here to upgrade to Debian sailwind”
Debian is for my homelab, where things randomly breaking would ruin the day of multiple family members. Arch is for my personal machines, where things randomly breaking is an excuse to learn more about my hobby
I think I may have a favorite.
wow… and what DE do you use with Slackware? I assume you just use pure CLI though
Sawfish WM and a few fbpanel instances
Well that a blast from the past
That CLI music player looks nice, I can’t find it though. Looks like you made it, did you share it somewhere?
Ahh yeah, that’s the music player I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year called Aika. It’s still pretty early on, but it’s mostly usable so far, depending on your needs. I mostly use it as my daily player right now, except for a few odd cases (like Opus files).
Aika is a spiritual successor to my other music player, Benben, which looks very similar, but not exact. Aika has some different features and goals, is much easier to build, and is lighter on system resources. But Benben is much more mature and featured complete. My goal is to release Benben v1.0 by years end, put it in maintenance mode, then focus on Aika.
It’s this https://fossil.cyberia9.org/aika/index
Close! Just the wrong repo link. Check my other comment.
It’s just mayhap, fyi.
What’s up with the text in the wallpaper? I’d think it’s slop, but it looks as if someone deliberately made it look borked.
I have no idea. I don’t necessarily think it’s slop (though it could still be)… I think someone just didn’t know how to read Japanese. 'Cause like the sign that’s advertising coffee and breakfast stuff is correct, and the sign further back labeled “Collisto” and “ブティッ” (rest is cut off, I suspect it’s ブティック) is correct, but the rest are upside down. Though that doesn’t explain the upside-down bottle with “Grape Boutique” or whatever on it.
So yeah, fuck if I know, I just found it and kinda liked it for the mood lol
The coffee one is not correct, vertical katakana should have vertical ー, the same mistake is across the rest of the ad, it also says バン instead of パン.
寿司屋 is technically correct, but you’d never see that on a sign, it sounds more like a description of a place rather than an ad sign, if you know what I mean.
中古 is written like 古中 for some reason? The text under (above) it is barely legible, whatever I can make out of it is just random characters somewhat related to 中古, like 品 or 料, but I can’t string it together into something that’d make sense.
…
Did what I probably should have done from the very beginning, looks like this is the source and it came to be before slop became common. The person who made this has clearly used something to generate it, the sheer quantity for the timeline is kind of insane, but they were probably using the old tools.
Do you have dotfiles available somewhere? I do quite like the window decorations and the rest of what I assume to be of the gtk theme.
Not for everything… but I can point you in some directions:
- GTK theme: orthogonal2, I think I’m using the “darkCold” one with the “dark-darkCold” color scheme. Read through the docs, it’s an interesting customization system.
- Sawfish theme (the window decorations): customized version of the built-in “StyleTab” theme. I just picked some colors for the buttons, really. It’s StyleTab’s “Default” frame and button style, and the “Reduced” color proposals. I believe StyleTab is specific to Sawfish WM.
- Font: Orbitron Medium for the window titles, Avenir LT Std Roman elsewhere.
- Icons: Sours, the Full-Color variant.
- Mouse cursor: Hatsune Miku
- Aika’s theme: the “dark-neon-alt” theme that’s in my repo, it gets installed with
rake installso just choose it in the config file. - Wallpaper: I dunno, I found it while searching for cyberpunk wallpapers. And yes, half the signs are upside-down XD Here’s a copy.
As for the dotfiles I can share, I don’t have them in a repo, but I’ll put them here:
- ~/.sawfishrc
- ~/.sawfish/custom (you don’t edit this by hand normally!)
- Top fbpanel bar config
- Buttom fbpanel bar config
- That amigaos-line.sh script referenced in the top fbpanel config
I think that’s everything…
Thank you! ❤️
I might have slipped up on my way here, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
image
Slackware was my first distro
Holy shit i did not expect slack
I ditched slackware in 98 after the validation issue became starkly problematic.
SLSA.dev .
antiX mentioned
Nice meme! Its interesting that you’ve tried more than one distro. Personally, I prefer to pick the best one right away and stick with that. I think one of Zote’s precepts mentions this. I use mint btw.
/jerk
Favorite: MX Linux
First Distro Used: Ubuntu 6.06
Distro You Want to Use in the Future: CachyOS
Honorable Mention: Pardus
Distro You Liked the Least: Mandriva
Distro You Currently Use: Bazzite
The Distro You Used for the Longest Time: Opensuse
Ubuntu -> Mint.
I don’t know why I’d change, Mint just works. That’s all I ever wanted.
I always come back to Mint. Far from just a “beginner distro”, it’s a practical and solid choice for anyone devoted to something other than tweaking, perfecting, and personalizing an OS. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if it’s your passion and you have the time. Personally, I wouldn’t mind making my perfect Arch or NixOS setup, but my free time is limited and there is always something I’m interested in working on more.
All I ever wanted. All I ever needed. Heeeere , in my arms.
Words are very unnecessary
Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.
My first was actually DSL: “Damn Small Linux”, contained entirely on a CD to remove a TERRIBLY resistant malware from my Windows XP machine. (It was awesome for that! Had no idea what I was doing lol.)
Tried Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Studio, but they didn’t like my Wi-Fi devices back in those days, so I didn’t get to do much with them!
Used Mint seriously on my aging laptop and loved it. It’s such an excellent on-ramp and you can hang out with it as long as you like.
Later tried Manjaro for a while but…it started having some controversial project decisions and just didn’t feel like home.
Using EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop and it works great! Considering migrating though: Arch is an excellent teacher, but I’ve had to spend unexpected weekends fixing weird hitches after updates.
Honorable Mention: Puppy Linux! I used to be able to boot it to any laptop from my Android phone, and that was a really neat trick for public computers and stuff.
Hey I resemble that journey. Very few people metion DSL and Puppy. Those lived on a multiboot flash drive I carry around “JIC” (these days I just bring Mint and Tails).
I just commented elsewhere how Mint became home - that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).
Cool! Yeah, they don’t seem to be referenced as much anymore, but they were seriously impressive and had their use cases. :D
that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).
Yeah, Mint is often referred to by folks as a “beginner distro” implying you’ll somehow inevitably skill up and distro hop, and sure, plenty do, but it really doesn’t have to be that way!
(Heck, Eliot the super hacker in Mr. Robot used it as his home distro! Lol 😉)
I mean, it’s stable, you can still get newer stuff and gaming via FlatPak, and it’s just overall friendlier. The community is super helpful and nice too!
I personally jumped to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I like having new features sooner. (I blame Blender haha!), and honestly, I didn’t expect to fall in love with KDE as much as I did. I really like KDE. :p
I’d always encourage people to try other distros just to see if they do something that fits them better or something, but yeah, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to “graduate” from Mint. It’s lovely. :D
Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.
I am actually thinking that a stable-stable distro like Debian or OpenSuse Leap as a base system, and on top either GNU Guix or a VM with Tumbleweed or Suse Slowroll is a great option. Very stable for productivity, and at the same time very current for programming and exploring new stuff.
I currently use Debian stable, and both Gnu Guix and an Arch VM on top.
Kubuntu FTW !
favorite: chimera linux <3 currently using: gentoo least favorite: ubuntu
ever since i tried to apt install firefox and was instead given the snap version without even being asked permission i gave up on ubuntu then and there
Ever since snap arrived, I switched to Debian.
The only thing I dislike about Debian is that there is no “server/headless install image” available, so it’s not a big deal.
I’m spinning up a vm right now just for you, but I think the netinstall allows bare, DE less
https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
EDIT : I did a dump of the 200+ packages it has, but IDK how to get it out of there… oh wait.
I modified my reply, here’s the rest of the packages.
spoiler
openssl-provider-legacy/stable,stable-security,now 3.5.6-1~deb13u2 amd64 [installed] os-prober/stable,now 1.83 amd64 [installed] passwd/stable,now 1:4.17.4-2 amd64 [installed] pci.ids/stable,now 0.0~2025.06.09-1 all [installed,automatic] pciutils/stable,now 1:3.13.0-2 amd64 [installed] perl-base/stable,now 5.40.1-6 amd64 [installed] procps/stable,now 2:4.0.4-9 amd64 [installed] qemu-guest-agent/stable,now 1:10.0.11+ds-0+deb13u1 amd64 [installed] readline-common/stable,now 8.2-6 all [installed] sed/stable,now 4.9-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed] sensible-utils/stable,now 0.0.25 all [installed] shared-mime-info/stable,now 2.4-5+b2 amd64 [installed,automatic] sqv/stable,now 1.3.0-3+b2 amd64 [installed] sudo/stable,now 1.9.16p2-3+deb13u2 amd64 [installed] systemd-sysv/stable,now 257.13-1~deb13u1 amd64 [installed] systemd/stable,now 257.13-1~deb13u1 amd64 [installed] sysvinit-utils/stable,now 3.14-4 amd64 [installed] tar/stable,now 1.35+dfsg-3.1 amd64 [installed] task-english/stable,now 3.81 all [installed] tasksel-data/stable,now 3.81 all [installed,automatic] tasksel/stable,now 3.81 all [installed] tzdata/stable,now 2026b-0+deb13u1 all [installed] ucf/stable,now 3.0052 all [installed,automatic] udev/stable,now 257.13-1~deb13u1 amd64 [installed] usbutils/stable,now 1:018-2 amd64 [installed] util-linux-locales/stable,now 2.41-5 all [installed,automatic] util-linux/stable,now 2.41-5 amd64 [installed] vim-common/stable,now 2:9.1.1230-2 all [installed] vim-tiny/stable,now 2:9.1.1230-2 amd64 [installed] wamerican/stable,now 2020.12.07-4 all [installed,automatic] whiptail/stable,now 0.52.25-1 amd64 [installed] xdg-user-dirs/stable,now 0.18-2 amd64 [installed,automatic] xkb-data/stable,now 2.42-1 all [installed,automatic] zlib1g/stable,now 1:1.3.dfsg+really1.3.1-1+b1 amd64 [installed] zstd/stable,now 1.5.7+dfsg-1 amd64 [installed]I think you can also just uninstall them… or not.
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing! perl-base Summary: Upgrading: 0, Installing: 0, Removing: 112, Not Upgrading: 0 Freed space: 249 MB Error: Removing essential system-critical packages is not permitted. This might break the system.IDK. I’ve done enough with this stuff for a bit… and I am able to say I tried out DWM to post this after :D
I really think Ubuntu is the most common first distro people try. A common reoccurrence here is the inability to see what an average person, in terms of tech literacy, knows and are willing to put time and effort into. Ubuntu has been the face of Linux for a long time (obviously not based on people who know and use linux). I wish Mint took that place as it’s so much better.
I was gonna say that “and put effort into” is important.
I admin various Linux Servers, been through most distros at work and at home. I’m an experienced Linux admin/user. I’m settled on Mint at home for the foreseeable future.
After a long day/week/career doing IT, the last thing I want is for my primary PC to be a project-home. Mint Cinnamon ended up being the home I fell in love with - honestly was expecting it to be another kitchy distro that I would maybe reccommend for noobs (I mean it is also that). I couldn’t be happier - LMDE is the only thing that makes me wonder about greener grass.
I haven’t gotten to 95% perfect since Ubuntu pre-unity, and that one very long Arch build I did that one time. Even Debian, the home I grew up in, wasn’t the home I wanted to live in forever.
No shade on any other Distros/DEs out there. Everyone has different homes and it’s their home and I love that people have them and that they’re all different, and I want many options to keep existing. Past me would not understand present me’s choices.
Similar situation, experienced professional user but I’m running kubuntu at home. I just posted to another user about not wanting a project pc. I want to use my computer, not fix it or tweak it. It’s not other distributions are bad, it’s that this one is fine for me right now and it’s not windows.
Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)
First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)
Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)
Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)
Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown
Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)
Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu
Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)
Over time, I’ve used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.
Are LMDE and stock Mint close enough in versions and features that you can always efficiently support stock Mint users?
Also, is the base Mint software updated regularly, or does it depend on the Debian 2-year cycle?
NGL, I really wanna try either free or open bsd
I worked at a company filled with BSD zealots. Their burning hatred for Linux was all-consuming, bad really put me off of the lot.
Why did they hate Linux?
Lots of different reasons.
Some hated the GPL, viewing it as less free (which is kind of true depending on who’s freedom you care about… personally I care about freedom of users and protecting society from large corporations, but you do you BSD fans).
Some disliked the crappy network stack (the superior UDP performance and IPv6 compliance were much touted at the time… although my own benchmarks didn’t confirm the BSD folks beliefs there). It may be hard to imagine with all of the innovation in networking layers that continues in Linux now, but that was the situation 20 or 25 years ago.
Further on networking, some disliked the ipchains/iptables (now nftables I guess) firewalling and whined constantly about how much better pf was. My firewalling needs have always been simple (except for whatever horrors Docker forces on me), so I never understood the rage
Some complained about the terrible threading model in Linux (back before this was essentially solved in Linux, leaving Linux threading far superior to BSD threading).
Some pointed to the plethora of distributions as inferior to the obviously better model of the OS shipping with a blessed set of tools (think FreeBSD “base” or whatever).
Some bemoaned the lack of “jails” in Linux (essentially a primitive form of containers).
Anyway.
I think basically it was just annoyance that people used Linux instead of their favorite.
I’ve messed around with Dragonfly BSD a bit… it mostly felt familiar to me, and I can potentially see myself using a BSD in the future if I ever needed to jump ship. The multiprocessing and the HAMMER2 filesystem on that one in particular seemed neat. Though obviously I didn’t have good GPU support on that particular BSD since I have an nvidia card XD
The only real reason to use a BSD is if you use a dedicated system for something like serving files, or some embedded stuff that requires to poke at its innards. As a general purpose machine, it’s way, way more limited than Linux. You’ll find yourself very constrained by the hardware and some of the software support. But there are lots of nifty toys, so if you have a spare machine and want to play with it, by all means, it’s certainly worth your time.
same but the drivers though 😓😓
I did a tour with OpenBSD about 2000-2004. It works just fine, with a much reduced ecosystem of pre built packages, just because of the quantity of devs around.
I saw Dragonfly when it started and I’m glad to hear it’s still going. The idea held a lot of promise.
I think that most Arch users that want to move to something stable are considering NixOS or GNU Guix rather than Debian.
Well, maybe i’m not your average Arch user then… Don’t see the appeal in Nix, honestly, and i’m too lazy to learn. What is GNU Guix? Never heard of it.
I’m kinda tinkering with Debian Sid atm.
Guix (pronounced “geeks”) is like Nix (declarative, functional, atomic) but more Emacs (niche, lispy, Free)
I’ve been a Debian guy for many years and it’s unlikely I’ll move away in the foreseeable future.
Nix is a package manager and nix-os is an OS built around that package management system.
You can install nix the package manager in debian. I don’t use it for installing desktop apps like a browser or office suite, I prefer AppImages for those. However, it’s absolutely fantastic for CLI stuff, especially the things you might want as a once off. You can just
nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool>and it’s just magically there in a new temporary shell, and then cleaned up once you quit that shell. No more adding weird repos to apt, or downloading from github and building, or piping scripts to bash.There’s also home-manager which allows you to define packages and their configurations, and just roll out that state on any machine.
These fancy package management tools (flatpak, AppImage, and nix) have dramatically changed the Debian experience. I used to be forever struggling with the trade off between stability and old versions of things. That’s really not the case any more because you don’t have to interfere with Debian’s conservative methodical ideology around stability in order to install and use all the shiny new things.
You can just
nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool>and it’s just magically there in a new temporary shell, and then cleaned up once you quit that shell.🤯❤️
Yeah so “cleaned up” wasn’t completely true.
Nix basically works by installing packages in a store or cache, and then soft linking to the binaries in the cache.
When you exit the temporary shell, the link will no longer exist but the cached package and its dependencies are still there.
You can easily clear that cache but it’s not gone instantly when you exit the shell.
That’s actually what I figured/hoped. As long as they’re making an effort to keep that secure, sounds like a good approach to me!
That sounds like a good compromise. I am really enjoying NixOs, but I miss the simplicity of Debian. I’ll think about your method.
You just installed Nix from APT, I assume, but are you still rebuilding a config.nix every time you make a “permanent” change?
Agreed on nix-shell -p, that’s extremely handy.
It’s strange to see someone move from Ubuntu to Arch, like it, and have aspirations of Debian. Ubuntu to Debian is fairly straightforward, didn’t you have to do a bunch of shit to get on and learn arch?
Do you wanna hear the whole backstory?
I’m in Ur thread, reading Ur posts.
Yes I want free entertainment.
Well, you asked for it.
I started my Journey on Mint. The Install broke, but I wasn’t gonna give up that easily. So I used AI to troubleshoot it (not my best times, but I was desperate). I customized mint, I cherished it and loved my escape from the grasps of Microsoft.
Eventually, I noticed you couldn’t do rounded corners on Cinnamon (I didn’t understand DEs at the time, thinking you could only use the DE that came with the Distro).
It pissed me off so much that I went and tried something with Plasma. I went with OpenSUSE, in part cuz I liked the Chameleon, in part because I did like the concept. Bluetooth and wifi didn’t work ootb and for me as a beginner that sealed the deal, I wasn’t able to fix it.
Next, I went to Kubuntu, thinking it’ll be stable and have Plasma. And it was. It was all i’d ever hoped for. Stable, many features, super customizable. I even messed around with config files etc (mind you, this was like 3 weeks into my journey). I loved it. Even disabled snaps eventually.
But eventually I got bored. I started trying out other Distros, not hopping but just trying out their live installs. I no longer liked the corporate backend of Canonical. I wanted something new.
I also watched a lot of Linux content at the time, and I was confused and annoyed that I wasn’t getting the newest updates to stuff. That’s when I really started learning about DEs, Rolling releases etc.
I didn’t even really think of Debian as an option at the time, I kept hearing it was old and outdated, which I didn’t want.
That’s when I fell down the Arch rabbit hole. Cool logo, cool concept, hacker mode.
I wanted that, So, I tried Cachy and Endeavor. No. It wasn’t enough. I wanted that Arch logo natively in fastfetch. I wanted to say “I use arch btw”. First, I messed around in VMs. from 3pm to 3am, all I did was try and install arch in VMs. Manually, of course. I decided it was the only way to get the experience needed.
I was able to do it eventually. The Step to bare metal was… not as smooth as expected. what the hell is NVMEp02?? And stuff like that. It look a long time until I was done. And it was buggy, I had messed up. Shit didn’t work. I decided, well, it works except for weird stuff, strange issues I didn’t care to troubleshoot. So I used Archinstall, and no I don’t feel guilty, I can still do it manually if I wanted to I was just lazy.
Aaaand here we are. Arch is amazing and fantastic. But Debian Testing is almost as fast in terms of releases and I like the extra stability. Using Cosmic on Arch, actually. I love the tiling functionality. We shall see what the future brings
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Be careful with Debian Testing, it is prioritized last for security patch frequency of the 3 Debian versions. It is possible to daily drive but not really meant for that, and even Arch has more safeguards.
idk, is it really that bad? I’ve heard of many people using debian sid for daily
Ah ok, you wanted something new and to experiment and wanted the most up to date thing without going into “side branches”.
I also really understand wanting to use a mainline Linux, I’m prouder of using main vanilla ass Debian since it feels more official and respected to present myself professionally saying “yes, I use Linux, my distro is Debian” instead of “I use mint because I need more handholding” or “I use Nobara/Pika because I am a 420 blaze it gamer”.
I did similar stuff to you, if you’re interested you can check out my journey. However, during this distro hop I did come more to terms with understanding distros are basically DE + package manager + bundled software, with a few differences and outliers.
Which led me to having the fun situation where I hated MATE, uninstalling it from my Ubuntu mate install, putting on KDE, distro hopping and when I went for Debian net install, repeating the KDE install after being shocked that a bare bones Debian install has no DE.
I did it again for a trashtop that I have, removing LMDE’s default DE and installing XFCE because I didn’t like… Cinnamon?
I mean I see the appeal of both. I used arch for a bit then went back to Ubuntu-based actually. Arch is cool and all, but I had some major functionality break a few times. I got tired of tinkering with it. Ubuntu “just works” most of the time. Interested to see what op writes about it too…
Have you thought about trying Mint, specifically LMDE?
Nah, not really. Pop_OS has been my favorite so far. Been on it about 5 years now.
Gentoo is how you upgrade from here
Been considering giving Guix a spin as an alternative to Debian, I’m used to freebsd but would like something non systemd linuxish
Either that or Void
Im a long standing debian user and i just recently installed arch in a separated disk mainly for gaming. I like arch, but debian is just beautiful.
