I use NixOS. Was a kinda rough start since it was annoying to install apps through a config, but after getting my config fully fledged out I love it. A declarative system is a dream for a dev, I can just copy my config to a new system, run one command, and I have my entire system back! Very stable as well
Im running arch on my Desktop. Mostly just to Experiment a bit, nothing to serious, Laptop is ubuntu, and both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).
The Main reason to use arch was to play around with Windows Managers like hyprland. However I get the feeling that some stuff is simply missing and or configured wrong on the System.
Is it a better idea to start with something like endeavor with sway and start ricing from there?
Ubuntu usually provides you with system working out of the box. Same goes for Fedora and its spins. Arch is DIY distribution, which means that the “missing” stuff you have to install/configure yourself. archinstall gives you just a basic start.
If you don’t know your way around bare window managers, then yeah, it would be a good idea to try with things preconfigured: EndeavourOS should give you that, Fedora Sway spin also.
Or you could bite the bullet and try to provide the missing things yourself and learn in the process. What are you missing?
Its more among the lines of “oh shit, this should probably work” but does not work. For example copy and pasting, some audio stuff. It just feels like a lot and i often feel like im just bruteforcing until something works well enough until it doesnt.
I like most of it, but some stuff just feels very time consuming, just to get basic features working. I want some of that, but some basic comforts would be nice.
Indie games ive tried work well, which is pretty good. A big factor for using windows is Gamepass and my slow internet, where it is more convenient to play the downloaded games under windows.
Other than that its a bit of sim racing in/and VR. Im also doing a bit of CAD Stuff with Fusion 360 and my experience with Free CAD wasnt very good.
Most of this is probably a simple getting used to it process, but so far dualbooting works quite well.
I tried the Manjaro Sway image and liked it a lot. Felt much nicer than i3. But… there is no alternative to Barrier that works with Wayland and that forced me to go back to i3 and X. And please don’t bother to list all Wayland alternatives for Barrier, because I tried them all and none is comparable.
I’ve either never dealt with RPM specs before or it’s been so long that I can’t remember. Therefore, I can only make a statement about PKBUILD files.
Such files are relatively easy to create and read, as they are basically shell scripts. Thus, if you use AUR, for example, you can easily check them before an installation or an update to see whether the creator has done everything correctly or whether he has changed the file with malicious intent.
For example, a typical PKBUILD file looks like this.
Such files are relatively easy to create and read, as they are basically shell scripts.
I agree. I lean towards writing in Bash script instead of learning yet another special-purpose language. Nonetheless, the RPM spec doesn’t seem to pose any additional difficulty.
Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.
I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I’m very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I’m afraid I will spend too much time on it.
What I’m missing from wayland, it’s not really something from wayland itself. Examples are several needed electron based applications, which some will refuse to properly work (for meetings, desktop sharing, etc), wine, gtk4 applications not respecting GDK_DPI_SCALE (not sure if already addressed) when not using gnome (wayfire being used as compositor), no proper support for conky (or eventually equivalent wayland functionality) yet, and several nuances with waybar, and some other tools. Major issue is my work dependency over some non floss electron binary blobs, like teams, slack, and so on, which particularly for desktop sharing and meetings don’t yet work properly, no matter the electron options one can use for them, and some floss I use like signal, freetube, jitsi. Wine has a horrible hack, which I might live with, but it’s horrible…
So I’ll have to wait further for non wayland stuff to truly support wayland, and it has taken ages for that to happen, :(
I haven’t tried labwc, andit sounds interesting, though I don’t like openbox configs, and I really love fluxbox ways, which are also text files, but I never got used to openbox configs, perhaps just because I got way too familiar with fluxbox, which is what I use with Xorg (fluxbox + picom + tint2 + conky).
GTK does not use env vars for configuration, those are for development. There are some GSettings that control scaling like org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor.
The env var works fine on Xorg though. And yeap, several applications need to catch up. That’s what I meant when I said it’s not wayland fault itself. However it’s been years things have been trying to catch up. Every now and then I try, but a couple of months back I couldn’t routinely use wayland, given all missing functionality plus additional nuances… The hard part is that if not using gnome, or plasma for that matter, getting things working take a lot of time, just to find out some things, I depend on for work, don’t work yet. At any rate, I still pay attention as well, to forums like this, to see if there’s some news that might trigger another retrial…
It inspired me to move on. I’m running OpenSUSE now. I don’t really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I’m out.
While I know it’s not the best distro, I don’t care to re-image, I left that life behind with Windows.
Manjaro-
I love the fact that I can have “Stable” and “Unstable” kernels installed simultaneously. It’s a nice handy way to recover or narrow down if an issue is related to the kernel. They’ve done an excellent job with the default Grub settings to allow this as well as side-by-siding with Windows if I want (which made transitioning from Windows to Linux easier).
Let me preface this with the fact that I still love and am not switching off of Manjaro.
Manjaro’s been kind of a contentious distro, it uses more bleeding edge than Debian-based, but opts to hold its own release schedule and repo separate from Arch’s which Arch fanboys will swear to the moon and back is just as stable. To their credit, Manjaro’s released some bad updates in the past.
It’s also had some security issues with SSL certs not getting renewed, however to my knowledge, your computer would default to not making unsecured calls like that, and secondly, ended up fixed by the dev soon enough. What really pissed people off was that the devs decided that instead of updating the cert (which would be a quick and easy process), they would demand that everyone changed the date on their computers to a time prior to the cert’s expiry. I didn’t run into this issue because I don’t update the day of, I usually like to give it a couple extra days anyway just in case of situations like this and because, frankly, I get on to use my computer, not watch updates run. I agree their response was in poor taste, but I also kinda figure that’s not exactly out of the norm from Linux devs (ie. Gnome and Linus Torvalds).
Lastly, a lot of people talk about how the AUR handles installs based on Arch versioning, so if you install AUR apps, there’s a chance of incompatibility in Manjaro since Manjaro is usually behind Arch a little bit. I can’t say that I’ve had this issue at all, but
You have to specifically enable AUR
When you do, it warns you of this potential incompatibility
If possible, I’d be using something in the official repo or flatpak far sooner than AUR for sake of support, security, and not having to way for AUR to Build
These are valid complaints folks have had, but none that have really been deal-breakers to me, and not worth the trade-off of a more minimal OOB experience. You have the people that are more used to more stable distros that don’t like it being “less stable”, and you have the Arch folks that don’t like that this isn’t as minimal and DIY as Arch. Way I see it, I like to game, I don’t like having to fix my computer, and it’s struck a nice balance for me. I’m sure Garuda or Nobara would treat me well, but I’ve already customized my environment to suit me, and tbh, distro’s aren’t the end-all be-all of Linux, would you do with it is - kinda the whole point of its modularity 😊
Do you know what the browser test is called or how to run it?
I didn’t run glxgears and I did run glmark2 yesterday but I stopped it half way through. If I remember correctly, the frame rates from the test ranged from 80 to over 1000 fps depending on the test but I have no idea if that’s good for the GPU or bad because I don’t remember the results I got on my old computer. If someone knows GPUs well enough, my old GPU was an intel HD Graphics 3000 and the GPU in this computer is an AMD Radeon R2 Graphics.
Also, I looked into Phoronix but it looks like it just benchmarks CPUs.
I did find it but it is just a VSYNC test thing. Not sure how to diagnose these things. The only time I had major issues was when I installed the wrong drivers, so user error. Maybe the distro you’re using has an IRC or Matrix chat room that would be willing to help out?
I’m using Linux Mint and I’m just using the drivers that were preinstalled by the distro. If it’s possible that Mint installed the wrong drivers somwhow, I wouldn’t know where to look to get help with that.
It is using the integrated GPU, it’s a laptop that only has an integrated GPU. Also, lshw is having the same problem it had with my old computer, where it doesn’t seem to list the right clock speed and just says it’s running at 33Mhz. I know this is wrong because on my old computer, other software would state the clock speed was much higher. But another thing I’m noticing that’s wrong is the GPU is listed as an R3 when the GPU is actually an R2, so unless they share drivers, It’s possible that Mint (I’m using Linux Mint) installed the wrong drivers.
Unigine-heaven was available by itself and it worked but I’ve never benchmark tested anything before. The settings I used was low graphics, full screened to the custom resolution of 1360x768 (the resolution of the monitor I use) and everything else was disabled. The frame rate ranged from 12 to 26 (or at least somewhere around that), does that seem good for an AMD Radeon R2 Graphics?
Also that command returns this: `WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
Single users really don’t need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it’s not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you’re a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
Never wrote RPM specs because I generally dislike RPM-based distributions (Fedora was a really bad experience when I tried it), but from a quick Google search they’re very similar.
I kinda like the format at a glance, seems pretty comparable in terms of what you put in there. Definitely less painful than debhelper.
I guess one of the advantages of PKGBUILD is that they’re essentially bash scripts that gets sourced by the tools, so they’re incredibly simple and don’t require parsing a custom format. You can:
That comes with disadvantages in that reading the PKGBUILD is inherently unsafe, and it was the cause of many concerns back in the days with tools like yaourt, which pretty much just blindly sourced it to get the variables out, which means immediate code execution just loading it from the AUR.
I haven’t really given those a try, ArchLinux happens to have ended my distro-hopping 10ish years ago.
Started with Ubuntu 7.04, bailed when they released the first Unity, went through a few Ubuntu spins, then Debian, then Fedora 15 (that one had lots of issues, the installer repeatedly crashed on me and all, it corrupted my partition table forcing me to testdisk to recover, they didn’t have Chromium or any proprietary codecs and apps). I ended up back on Ubuntu for a bit and then took the Arch dive, and been happy ever since and never felt the desire to learn another distro if it doesn’t have significant advantages.
My next distro will probably be something like NixOS, the concept is quite appealing but my VM experiments so far haven’t convinced me to get rid of Arch just yet. Might start using it on my servers for that sweet immutability and centralized config.
Haha I’m right there with you. The timeline isn’t as vast but Arch ended my distrohoppong and NixOS is the only thing really catching my eye these days.
I jumped around various Ubuntu spins, settled on Linux Mint for a while, tried out ElementaryOS for a brief moment, went back to Ubuntu spins then eventually went with Arch in 2019 and haven’t looked back.
The immutability and configuration of Nix seems so appealing but at this point I’m really comfortable with Arch and it does everything I need in a pretty sane way so idk if I’d switch anytime soon.
The immutability and configuration of Nix seems so appealing but at this point I’m really comfortable with Arch and it does everything I need in a pretty sane way so idk if I’d switch anytime soon.
Back in 2018, I had the experience of using NixOS. At that time, I noticed that the Nix language had a striking resemblance to Haskell, which stirred up feelings of anxiety within me.
I did not know you could just source a PKGBUILD. I’m certain I’ll remember this instead of the correct makepkg flag to run this ot the other stage only.
I mean it’s not going to make you a package if you just do that, the real tools do other things in-between but it shows the general simplicity Arch went with there.
That comes with disadvantages in that reading the PKGBUILD is inherently unsafe, and it was the cause of many concerns back in the days with tools like yaourt, which pretty much just blindly sourced it to get the variables out, which means immediate code execution just loading it from the AUR.
However, the AUR helpers in question, which are not official tools, were to blame. Some developers of these tools could not or did not want to solve the problem. According to wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers, almost no AUR helper sources the files automatically nowadays.
I think while yaourt was called out for it, there are still issues with doing it this way; it’s the reason the AUR requires a .SRCINFO file nowadays wiki.archlinux.org/title/.SRCINFO
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