I know it’s not the same (some would argue worse), but I ran manjaro for a long time and just didn’t have these sorts of issues. Maybe I didn’t update enough, or I updated too frequently, or ?
You probably didn’t have a lot of AUR packages installed. That seems to be a big issue for Manjaro. They hold packages back and the AUR just keeps going so things get out of sync and break.
As far as AUR is concerned, one should be fair. The things that are offered in AUR can be problematic in general. No matter if you use vanilla Arch or a distribution based on Arch. Because not everyone who offers something in the AUR cares about updates in a timely manner or at all.
With Manjaro, I rather see the problem that the team responsible for it apparently does not learn from its mistakes, so that, for example, the SSL certificate of the website has not been renewed several times (web.archive.org/web/…/manjarno.snorlax.sh/). That may not be a big problem in itself, but if even such little things go wrong, then I personally cannot trust an entire distribution.
Thanks for reminding me of paru! I’ve checked and I have it installed already. But I confess that I’m so used to yay that I completely forgot about paru.
I’ve been messing with paru to gauge its functionality against yay.
So far I’m unimpressed. The cli display is somewhat tidier/neat. I like that. But when it comes to actually installing something, it’s less than stellar.
For instance, if I want to skip any confirmation, I can use the undocumented flag --noconfirm. But that only works if I’m passing the flag to install, -S. If, say, I’m searching for a package, simply typing paru <package>, then the interactive menu no longer works. It simply exits with the message ‘nothing to do’.
yay, on the other hand, works flawlessly with the --noconfirm flag.
I noticed that paru has some upgrading/updating features that are nice. I might use it once in a while to upgrade/update the system. But that’s pretty much it for now.
I used Solus for a while on my laptop. One day a minor kernel version bump caused my display to stay black. I reported it to the Solus bug tracker and they told me it’s not their problem, and I should deal with the kernel devs. But of course the kernel devs reasonably tell you to deal with your distribution if they’ve modified the kernel, which Solus had.
So I installed Tumbleweed and never looked back. I don’t miss Solus. It was fine, but I don’t trust it now, the way I do trust Tumbleweed.
The nice thing about a decent sized distro is when something specific about your hardware or config causes you a problem like that there will be others who experience the same thing, and it is easier to get help. And if you want to be cautious, you can even wait a bit for updates and watch the forums to see what pops up.
That said, I used to use a smaller distro (also a Tumbleweed user now) and they were always good about helping users troubleshoot such issues, so your experience doesn’t speak well for Solus. The character of the user forums is an important thing to look at when choosing a disto.
Really? How am I supposed to trust these guys with my data, when they show me a pop-up like that? I guess that this data is anonymous only because otherwise the telemetry would need to be opt-out… oh wait, they explicitly said that:
That said, Fedora Legal has determined that if we collect any personally-identifiable data, the entire metrics system must be opt-in. Since we are only interested in opt-out metrics due to the low value of opt-in metrics, we must accordingly never collect any personally-identifiable data.
It’s completely useless. If they don’t collect personal data, then they don’t have to show a banner. Bad faith compliance with GDPR (including “the GDPR made us show this banner”) should be punished more heavily.
I like that the NixOS packaging system feels like it’s build for Free Software, making source code and Git repositories a first class citizen. You can simply drop a flake.nix into your repository and turn it into a Nix package within a couple of minutes, that’s quite a bit different than the utter headache it is to package something for Debian. Nix packages being free of naming conflicts also makes it very easy to mix and match whatever versions you need, something that’s basically impossible on most other distros unless you resort to containers or virtual machines. NixOS having the largest package collection of any distro is a plus too.
How different (if at all) does Nixos feel as a daily driver, if at all? Is it only about getting used to the system, or does it require to do everything the Nixos way?
Also how does user-level configuration work? Does the upgrade system just ignore your $HOME in terms of version control?
All OS configuration (i.e. your installed packages, services, /etc content) happens in NixOS via a single configuration file in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. When you do nixos-rebuild switch that file gets read and the OS gets rebuild, which in practice means some downloading and changing some symlinks, so it’s reasonably fast, kind of like GNU stow. The partition table isn’t touched here, that has to be setup manually on the first install like on every other distribution. NixOS will also not rollback the file system if you decide to boot into an older version, everything is done by symlinks and environment variables, so you don’t have to worry about your $HOME disappearing or anything like that.
For daily use that means that you basically never edit anything manually in /etc ever again, except for that one NixOS config file. You also can’t since everything will be symlinks into a read-only /nix/store. For permanent package installation you also need to edit the file and rebuild, you can’t do imperative stuff like apt install …. However with NixOS you don’t need to permanently install anything if you just want to try it, you can just do nix run nixpkgs#emacs or nix shell …and it will run it without installing it (everything goes to the /nix/store/ cache and is garbage collected when no longer needed).
This can become a problem when you are dealing with third party packages that come as self extracting installer files that want to install themselves in /usr or depend on programs being available as /usr/bin/python or whatever, since on NixOS that whole hierachy is empty ( except for /usr/bin/env and /bin/sh). NixOS has buildFHSUserEnv to work around that and provide apps with a normal looking Linux filesystem, but that requires a bit more effort than the usual curl http://…/install.sh | sh hack.
By default $HOME isn’t touched at all and will behave largely like on any other distribution. You can however install packages as user via nix profile install (which behave much the same as apt would, but is local to your $HOME). The other popular alternative is home-manager, this provides basically the same what /etc/nixos/configuration.nix does, but for your $HOME, so you can start systemd services, generate your bash profile with it or install apps locally in your $HOME. Home-manager has to be enabled manually and is probably best ignored until you are familiar with the rest of the system. Home-manager is also less all-or-nothing than NixOS itself, so you can freely chose which dotfiles you want to manage manually and which you want to generate via home-manager.
As for nitpicks when it comes to daily use: Due to everything in NixOS being fully reproducible, NixOS makes little to no use of binary compatibility, meaning if libfoo changes, everything that depends on it has to change too. This requires a bit more downloading than other distributions. After an upgrade, NixOS will also keep two copies of everything around until you garbage collect them. This allows you to just go back to an older version via the boot manager. But it also means that you might need two or three times as much storage as on other distributions, at least until you garbage collect. But generally that’s a worthy trade-off unless you are on an extremely resource constrained system (anything >=32GB storage should be fine).
Finally, if in doubt, install the Nix package manager on whatever distribution you are using right now. You don’t have to go the full NixOS at once, you can install Nix packages on any Linux distribution and play around with it, similar to flatpak.
All package installation and configuration is handled via config files, so it’s easy to keep track of what’s installed. Also makes re-installation convenient and easy (this is also great if you’re fond of unixporn-style setups).
Because it uses config files to manage this, you can also take advantage of VCS.
Instead of having to work with several shitty DSLs to configure your system, now you only have to use one!
Being able to install multiple versions of the same library is nice. With Nix you can just install whatever the fuck you want, really. Want to use DisplayCAL, but can’t because it was dropped from the current release’s repository for still depending on python 2? No problem, just have your flake pull it from a previous release when it was still in the repos; it’ll just work because builds are done in isolation.
The generation system makes updates fearless, since if something breaks you just rollback.
Development is both better and more annoying. There’s no FHS, so you have to set up a dev environment with a flake every time you want to do a project. This is nice because you don’t miss dependencies as everything has to be explicitly laid out in the flake and other Nix/NixOS users can share your flake and get the same exact dev environment (kiss “it works on my machine” excuses goodbye). Annoying both because you’re required to put in more forward planning with your dev environment and also because it breaks language-specific package managers, so you’re limited to supported languages.
You can’t just git clone/make/install stuff from GitHub, as there needs to be a flake first. If the software already has one included, great! If it doesn’t, you’ll be making it. If you need a dependency that currently isn’t packaged for Nix, you’ll be making more than one. If the software is difficult to package, god help you.
Nix documentation can be really lackluster and also assumes you’re Linux-savvy.
Also how does user-level configuration work?
You use a 3rd party tool called home-manager for this. It provides about the same experience as the system config and has more configuration options for software, so should be preferred when it makes sense.
Overall, it’s great if you’re Linux-savvy and is one of the few distros that is legitimately innovative. Said innovation can also be a pain in the ass on occasion though, but still worth it.
Can I use a file in the same place as the nix config to set the configs for i3 for example? Or anything else that would go in ~/.config? It would be amazing to have all the configuration files in one single folder to easily move to new hardware.
Yes, that’s what home-manager is for, your configuration goes into ~/.config/home-manager/ and from that you can generate all the other configuration files that go into your $HOME (either by just copying a read-only version of the raw file or by generating it on the fly from the nix configuration file when a home-manager module is provided)
Just use Manjaro, it’s a great distro. I switched from Arch a few years ago because Arch kept changing the tools from the installer so every time I had to read the wiki to know how to install it, and that’s not fun.
In general people don’t like Manjaro because it’s a week behind Arch, so if you install things from the AUR you’re likely to break stuff (although that has never happened to me, it is a possibility). Also because since it’s simple to install a lot of people without technical knowledge have started using it and they say they use Arch, so they get replies which assumed they read the wiki, and they get angry, which makes them seem more annoying, which makes the whole thing escalate.
Things in the AUR are built for Arch, so they use the libraries that Arch uses, which means that whenever Arch increases major versions of libraries AUR packages get rebuilt for that version and fail to work on an older one. If you use the packages that build from source you’re less likely to be affected, also this is not such a huge issue because AUR packages take a while to get updated and most of these changes are backwards compatible (so they don’t break on Arch), but I’ve seen it happen plenty of times, almost every week someone using Manjaro would come to the arch subreddit to ask help because a package from AUR had stopped working. And if you don’t believe me, at least believe the guys who wrote the Manjaro wiki
When Manjaro is updated, AUR packages might stop working. This is not a Manjaro issue
EndeavourOS is just what I needed when I started to DualBoot with windows, besides being just easier to install, some games I play still require Windows, like most dx12 games since they’re currently broken due to some driver error in the latest Nvidia drivers.
I love Arch and can’t see myself using anything but it, but I don’t have the patience to do a manual install every other week or so because I got bored or am to lazy to actually fix my system, especially while dualbooting.
There are multiple types of people “hating” Manjaro to various degrees.
There are the “It GoEs AgAinsT ThE ArCh PhiLoSopHy” guys - those you should ignore without a second thought. Because duh, that’s why it’s its own distro and not Arch. They probably also hate Endeavor, Garuda and all the other great Arch based distros and have no idea what they are talking about.
There are the ones who, like myself, tried Manjaro briefly, realized there was something broken right out of the box, thought “lol stable my ass” and then invested way too much time in Arch on another distro. You should ignore us as well.
There are the ones who at least claim to have proberly used Manjaro for a while and say there is no noticeable benefit, if not disadvantages. They might have a point (shout out the the guy or gal who mentioned their frequent certificate fails lmao).
And finally there are those who have decided Manjaro just isn’t for them and moved on. They can probably give an actually balanced and fair review of Manjaro.
But then again, there are also people maintaining and liking the project, so there seems to be at the very least some perceived value to it. Maybe it’s worth it, maybe it isn’t. Frankly, I don’t care whether people this distro. And why should I?
I also don’t get why a couple dozen DEs exist, when I hate everything but Plasma and Cinnamon, maybe GNOME. But if people want to use them and go as far as to maintain them, there is probably a reason and I have better things to do than stop them.
@UnfortunateShort@jackofalltrades I'm a noob Linux user and I have used Manjaro in the past for about 3 months, i liked it very much. I think people should try it out.
But what did you like about Manjaro compared to other distributions? If I introduce someone who’s never used the internet before to Internet Explorer 6, they might claim to like it very much as well.
@BaconIsAVeg I agree with your statement. I liked Manjaro because it felt a little bit more faster on my potato PC and it that it looked nice (i know you can customize every distro to your liking, but I'm the kind of person that just uses the defaults). Before i used Fedora, Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux mint.
For a few years now i am using openSUSE for my daily tasks and windows for some light gaming (i still have the same potato PC, but upgraded with SSD)
Haha when I saw the cert issues it eroded any confidence I had; I wouldn’t say I know a lot, but I think I can keep a certbot up (unless it was running on Manjaro)
@Anolutheos@Lolors17 I use Mint Debian edition. I got fed up opening my laptop and having to update when MS said so, so switched to Ubuntu, then Mint, the LMDE and have stayed for 4 years. It's not exciting, cutting edge, etc but neither am I! It just works all the time. Updates are easy and everything is boringly reliable - I love it!
Hopefully LMDE6 is a game changer for the most popular first Linux distro. If the CosmicOS by System76 doesn’t win that title.
My grandparents were 1,5 years with Mint but LMDE5 has now been for 10 months and it is awesome. Literally 0 issues since day 0 whereas Win7 and Win10 caused constant headaches for me over the phone.
Unfortunately I’m not. I’m running numerous Thinkpads until System76 releases their in-house produced Virgo laptop with hot-swappable mechanical keys and open source bios (Coreboot). It’ll also have the trackpoint from Thinkpads.
This is what I recommend for Linux newbs. And they can stay with it if they’re happy with it. It’s also a decently competent Linux distribution which is a hell of a bonus.
Gentoo. Great rolling release that is stable and had timely updates, but has the flexibility to configure my system down to the tiniest details, with a great and knowledgable community. I love source-based distros and Gentoo is definitely the best.
Yes, though there are some prebuilt binaries for large packages. I use gentoo on a desktop and updates don’t take too long, minutes. Big updates that cause lot of packages to rebuild can take hours.
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