I’m not trying to start a flame war, but I’m genuinely curious. Why do people like btrfs over zfs? Btrfs seems very much so “not ready for prime time”.
btrfs is included in the linux kernel, zfs is not on most distros
the tiny chance that an externel kernel module borking with a kernel upgrade happens sometimes and is probably scary enough for a lot of people
Features necessary for most btrfs use cases are all stable, plus btrfs is readily available in Linux kernel whereas for zfs you need additional kernel module. The availability advantage of btrfs is a big plus in case of a disaster. i.e. no additional work is required to recover your files.
(All the above only applies if your primary OS is Linux, if you use Solaris then zfs might be better.)
I’ve only ever run ZFS on a proxmox/server system but doesn’t it have a not insignificant amount of resources required to run it? BTRFS is not flawless, but it does have a pretty good feature set.
One of arch’s things is it’s a rolling release distro, which means that every bit of arch is updated as soon as an update is available for it. Mint on the other hand tests the package updates before they release it to make sure its stable, but this results in the packages being out of date.
Arch and Mint target a different user base. Mint is more appropriate for the beginning Linux user who wants to wade slowly into using Linux. It’s for somebody that is coming from an entire GUI experience like Windows. This person may have no understanding of partitions, filesystems, bootloaders, etc. Arch is going to be more appropriate for either an intermediate to advanced user of Linux that wants more control over their installation or a Windows user that understands the more complex topics around the way a computer operates.
The above said, it is very possible to do advanced things with Mint as well and I have in the past. I just want to have a leaner system that does not make assumptions about what I want or need. I want fairly strict control of what goes into my installation but not strict enough that I would need to do something like Linux From Scratch. Both Mint and Arch are excellent distributions! In fact, I would go as far to say as I like all open source operating systems and software by the nature that they’re open sourced. They can be customized, expanded, etc. I would also advise people to mix some FreeBSD and OpenBSD in their homelabs if possible because the more you can learn, the better. OpenBSD is my firewall and advanced router. FreeBSD powers my blog. Arch powers my desktop and Mastodon and Lemmy instances.
Mint is more appropriate for the beginning Linux user who wants to wade slowly into using Linux. It’s for somebody that is coming from an entire GUI experience like Windows.
Mint is also great for the experienced Debian sysadmin who just cannot be bothered to care about customizing every damn thing up front, but wants a responsibly managed package system under the hood.
Same can be said for Pop! which is what I’m using now. You don’t have to be a noob to want things to just work out of the box.
Yes. I’ve been an IT professional for the last 20 years. I started out experimenting with all kinds of distros, but as the need increased just to get stuff done, I went to Mint and stayed there. The more I had to do, the more I became a Linux user who just wanted the thing to work so I could get on with it. Mint was great for that. Recently I’ve started using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which strikes me as a kind of middle ground between an Arch-like distro and a Mint-like distro. It gives me that nice sense that it’s only doing what I ask it to, without the need to build everything from the bottom up, and it’s much more up to date than Mint.
Hey, I can get behind anyone that goes all in on open source! Doesn’t matter what distro they’re using. Doesn’t matter if it’s one of the BSDs. You’re all good in my book. 😁
I use mint and I really like it. It’s an easy familiar transition from windows.
Arch is for user’s who want to start with a completely blank slate. Like there’s no file system when you start, as far as I know. Think of arch like windows but nothing is installed, not even explorer.exe
For those using tbsync with TB, and any companion extension, like its provided for exchange (office 365 and the like), TB broke tbsync and its companion extensions… That said, there’s an issue, and apparently some developer releases for those wanting to try…
It’s been several times TB breaks extensions with such changes. TB devs don’t have to care, but that means for the users, to be extra careful, and to avoid upgrading until finding out required extensions have caught up…
I use Pika backup, which uses borg backup under the hood. It’s pretty good, with amazing documentation. Main issue I have with it is its really finicky and is kind of a pain to setup, even if it “just works” after that.
The way pika backup handles it, it loads the backup as a folder you can browse. I’ve used it a few times when hopping distros to copy and paste stuff from my home folder. Not very elegant, but it works and is very intuitive, even if I wish I could just hit a button and reset everything to the snapshot.
I don’t like other distros that include lots of programs out of the box. I might need an office program, a music player, etc. But I want to choose it all myself.
I like KDE, but I also like some gnome applications, and it’s difficult to find a distro that only installs one or the other.
I find it easier to start from scratch: Give me a basic desktop environment, a terminal, and I know how to take it from there.
The rolling packages are a nice touch. As a linux gamer, any bit of free performance I can get from simply installing an update is appreciated.
Arch and Gentoo have IMO the best documentation ever and you learn a lot when you try using either of those distributions as you have to do everything from scratch starting from a minimal system. Since you’re saying you’re new to Linux though, I’d say you should start with something more user-friendly like Mint or Ubuntu (or even Manjaro if you want a rolling release distro) and stay away from Arch and Gentoo in the beginning.
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