I’m in the same boat. For a long time I was a RHEL admin at work, and ran Ubuntu at home. Three years ago my workplace switched to Ubuntu servers, and at home I switched to Manjaro. Now I’m sick of Manjaro, and want to move to something else for home use. I’ve been looking at NixOS and Void, both seem pretty cool in their own way.
Are there community packages like the arch repos? I’ve come to rely on those in Manjaro, like I rely on 3rd party PPAs in Ubuntu.
No reason, really. I’m not part of the “hate on Manjaro” club.
I got started with Manjaro because I was looking for an Arch-like experience, but with better distro management, curated packages, etc. I’ve had some of my best PC gaming experiences on Manjaro with Luttis and Proton, it is a great Linux gaming distro.The distro managers have definitely let me down more than once, most notably when they wouldn’t ship KDE Plasma 5.25 when it was released citing “stability concerns”, and then doing the same thing with Plasma 5.27. But those issues are behind us, and didn’t affect me too badly (I just needed to wait 6 weeks until the next release to get my updates). I’ve come to realise through my use of Manjaro that I actually always want to use it like Arch. Often things I want to install are not available in the Manjaro repos, but are available on AUR. Then installing from AUR sometimes depends on things that are not in Manjaro repos. It gets messy, and I should just use Arch.
But rather than moving to Arch, I think I am itching to move to something completely different, and NixOS and Void are about as different as it gets.
What’s the point of AlmaLinux if not for 1:1 RHEL compatibility? Might as well use CoreOS Stream cause the compatibility is good enough. Time to switch to Rocky Linux I guess.
Good for Alma, I say. Why base your business model on RedHat not finding a way to kill it? RedHat is a de facto enterprise standard in part because of the existence of free source-rebuild distributions allowing for small FOSS developers to ensure compatibility. They said so themselves, they want users to either switch to another distribution or pay for RedHat. So let’s give them what they want and abandon RHEL compatibility.
I don’t think that “let’s all abandon RHEL so it becomes irrelevant” is the appropriate response here. It’s a matter of freedom and principles. If RHEL exists, a compatible, free and unencumbered alternative should be allowed to exist as well.
RedHat thinks they shouldn’t exist, and is trying to maneuver within legal limits to ensure they don’t exist. It’s not that I agree with RedHat that the compatible clones shouldn’t exist. It’s that I think RedHat’s actions are duplicitous enough that we should no longer see RHEL compatibility as a goal to care about. Much the same way Google has taken actions to distance itself from a dependence on Java after Oracle went all APIs-are-patentable rampage. Why engage with an entity who has a stated goal of ending your existence?
Also, Alma doesn’t have a business model in the same way that Debian doesn’t have a business model. The Alma Linux OS Foundation is a non-profit organization.
I knew there was a foundation behind Alma but hadn’t looked into them too much, as I was already thinking of continuing to target RHEL compatibility may have poor business continuity after they killed CentOS as a free RHEL clone.
That depends on which “we” you talk about. Personally, yes, I have moved everything that I had away from RHEL-derivatives towards Debian after the CentOS debacle 2 years ago, and I would recommend anyone else to do the same.
So we’re in “violent” agreement.
it’s also a matter of principle: “we”, as in the community as a whole, can’t let this stand.
Right. We just have a difference of opinion on how to stand against RedHat’s actions here.
Rocky has announced their plan to continue as a 1:1 source rebuild. They’re looking at using sources from RedHat’s Universal Base Image Docker images, and also using cloud instances with consumption based pricing. With the latter option you spin up an instance on AWS/Azure/DigitalOcean/etc and it has a license for that instance, so you get the sources for the package versions on that instance. But since the license was temporary, then there’s nothing for RHEL to terminate when you redistribute the sources.
RedHat says they don’t want clones of RHEL. I say give it to them, lets have a landscape where they’re no longer the de facto standard because there are no other distributions targeting RHEL compatibility.
For me the console API is just horrible. Also idk if it is a packaging problem but a lot of things I tried in the past were a lot bugier than my distro package
I love GNOME more than any other DE. I like how it works very well with keyboard shortcuts. The only extensions I use are the weather and the tray icons.
@bahmanm@usb_see Is openSUSE MicroOS out of beta and ready for productive use? Haven’t read any news about it lately (I am on openSUSE Leap, so interested)
I’m not using it myself as am on Tumbelweed but I do know it’s quite similar to the idea OP is talking about. Oh and I couldn’t find any references to it being beta on the website 🤷♂️
it’s been 18 years full time linux/bsd for me and it went knoppix -> ubuntu -> fedora -> arch linux -> gentoo -> freebsd -> void
arch linux in 2008 was really good, and lasted for a couple of years. gentoo was a chore, because it’s fully source based. freebsd is rock solid, amazing amazing system, i would be still using it if it weren’t for aec applications and games. still using it on my homeserver.
void is blazing fast, highly reliable rolling release package system, amazingly simple init system. i have a 3060ti and it’s working surprisingly good on wayland. it’s just hassle-free for me, i love it.
yeah, with wi-fi. i didn’t have any issues using wifi. like i said earlier, some applications don’t have freebsd versions and manually compiling and keeping them update is a lot of hassle. other than that highly reliable system.
@dustyData I have hundreds of thousands of files that need to be backed up locally and in the cloud. I use either Vorta or Pika. Both are interfaces for Borg. Easy to use and their deduplication feature manages to save a lot of diskspace. I tried so many backup solutions and none worked as reliably.
@shapis I agree. I used Gnome for several years before switching to XFCE. Gnome feels like a great DE for people who do not do a lot of things on their computers. I normally have 5 or so workspaces and on each a dozen of apps open. Some apps are workspace-specific, some are available on all workspaces. You are right, multitasking when you do so much is a pain in Gnome. And I really really tried to like it.
Not to mention that you need a lot of extensions to make it useful.
Gnome does great in terms of animations and overall look, but not very practical and feels very non-customizable.
XFCE looks awful out of the box and the lack of animations is quite annoying. But you can make it look good - see our custom distro based on XFCE - TROMjaro. And if you give XFCE a try you will realize how sane it is. You can customize it a ton without being overwhelmed by thousands of options. You right click on panels and apps and you get sane options to move or tweak them.
As for workspaces I personally use them as "names" on the top bar and can switch between workspaces so fast, almost like tabs in a browser.
Not as fancy as Gnome, but boy this is really useful. And practical.
I've also added mouse gestures on my desktop via Easystroke so I can move windows on any workspace via these gestures. So easy.
So I'd say that Gnome looks fancy, and it is very cool for those who do not do a lot of work on their machines and have to switch between many work spaces and lots of apps. And I'd say XFCE is extremely underrated, perhaps because out of the box it looks terrible. Maybe try TROMjaro....see how it goes.
Not really. As I understand it, RHEL is restricting access to the source code of proprietary things they developed. Does it go against open source principles? Sure. Does it make sense from a business perspective? Absolutely. I was actually surprised that this wasn’t the case before.
Debian and Void (and Void is iffy. The TTY installer is easy enough though, and it’s basically good to go out of the box if you get the glibc iso with Xfce). None of the other base distros are super user-friendly in terms of installation, though I’d add Endeavour OS as an honorary member of the group since it’s essentially Arch with a good installer, a friendly community, and nice defaults.
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