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New to Linux? Ubuntu Isn’t Your Only Option

Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.

cbarrick ,

From an engineering perspective, I prefer Debian distros. Apt is the greatest package manager ever built. For a production server, I’d choose Debian or maybe Ubuntu if I needed to pay someone for support.

But for a desktop, Ubuntu kinda sucks. These days, I think I’d recommend Fedora to Linux noobs.

And for my toys at home, I run Arch btw.

Sidewalker ,

Heard. Debian in the streets, Arch in the sheets!

xor ,

ubuntu uses apt too…

cbarrick ,

Yep. From an engineering perspective I prefer Debian distros. Ubuntu is a Debian distro. I said I would consider using Ubuntu in prod, and this is the reason.

xor ,

well considering the title being “ubuntu isn’t the only option” and you following “i prefer debian” with how good apt is… im sure you can see how that was misleading, then.

nooneshere ,

What can the apt of Debian do that Ubuntu can’t

cbarrick ,

Nothing. They’re mostly the same thing.

The Ubuntu version will sometimes print “ads” to your terminal :P.

For a prod server, I’d choose Debian over Ubuntu if I didn’t have paid support, because I’m not a fan of Canonical. If I needed paid support, I’d choose Ubuntu, because Debian is strictly a community distro. (That community happens to include major companies, like Google.)

n2burns ,

What about Ubuntu derivatives for desktop? My go to recommendations are Pop! OS and Linux Mint (which I use).

los_chill ,

Pop! Os user going on a year now and I can’t recommend it enough, at least as a first distro.

CurbsTickle ,

Linux Mint Debian Edition is my standard recommendation for desktop for those newer folks.

Straight up Debian for everything else. Debian is my desktop. And all of my servers (aside from some things I’m testing for work or something where I need to test against RHEL or something).

And Proxmox for VMs.

Jumuta ,

the de matters more for new users honestly, so I usually recommend: gnome: ubuntu
kde: kde neon
cinnamon: mint
cosmic: pop

and just let them choose what they want

sep ,

I was fighting rpm hell on redhat for the 3rd or 4th time using red hat linux 5 to 6 or perhaps 6 to 7. When i first installed debian potato on my daily driver. We had 20 ish servers, but the constant hunt for the right combo of rpm’s made me distro jump my own machine. A while later i was floored when i could apt-get full-upgrade to the next debian version without rpm hell and almost everything just worked. Never installed another redhat machine and have been using debian + kde ever since. And 99,3% of all servers i maintain are now debian. A few odd ubuntu machines for $$reasons.

nooneshere ,

Is rpm hell gone for good nowadays?

sep ,

I think yum does a better job. But i never installed another redhat machine so who knows. Been thousands of debian machines over the years tho. Luckily now it is right click -> vm from template or terraform apply. and not hours swapping floppy discs ;)

Telodzrum ,

Arch on my PCs and Debian on my servers and VMs.

Thrashy , (edited )
@Thrashy@lemmy.world avatar

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

twinnie , (edited )

Bit of a noob but what’s the practical differences between Apt and the others. I use Fedora and the only difference I notice is that instead of typing apt update and apt upgrade, I just type dnf update.

fxdave ,

Practical difference: Both dnf and apt are slow as hell. Pacman is flying compared to them.

TheGrandNagus ,

In terms of practical differences to normal people, there aren’t many, and it pretty much comes down to the syntax of using them and the speed at which they work.

Personally I like the syntax of using dnf, even if it is kinda slow, especially compared to the likes of pacman.

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Apt is the greatest package manager ever built.

Urgh, no, it’s not. Everything about it is super crusty if you go beyond simply installing packages and adding others’ PPAs IMO.

  1. Packages often enable the services they install right away. Someone told me they got locked out over SSH because they installed a firewall package that locked everything down by default, and the service got started on install. I guess that’s technically more of an issue with the way things are packaged rather than the package manager itself, though.
  2. To temporarily install a package (so that it will get uninstalled with the next autoremove) you need to use aptitude to install the package, or run apt-mark auto after installing (which will also clear the manually installed flag if it was manually installed before), apt has no syntax for it.
  3. dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow, I had to write a wrapper for it that runs it separately for every package and caches the result because I didn’t want to wait multiple minutes for it to rebuild the PPA package index
  4. The standard packaging tools (dh-make or debuild, I think I’ve looked at both) are insane, so much so that I gave up and wrote something that takes files similar to Arch PKGBUILDs which calls dpkg-deb at the very end.

I could probably list more but I haven’t had to touch apt in a while, thankfully. But it is probably the #1 reason I avoid anything Debian-based. #2 is probably their Frankenstein sysvinit/systemd setup.

I do have to say that apt remove vs purge is pretty cool though.

What do you like about it?

cbarrick ,

Packages often enable the services they install right away.

That’s a problem of the package, not the package manager.

Generally this fits with Debian’s philosophy. But regardless I think it’s out-of-scope for why Apt is good. You could make a distro with Apt and not have your packages do this.

To temporarily install a package […]

I’m not talking about apt the CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plain apt tool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.

As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency (“auto installed”) versus packages installed directly (“manually installed”). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager. (Yes, I know other package managers can do this, not all though.)

If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with apt-mark.

dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow.

Are you maintaining a PPA for others?

Frankly, I’ve never run into this problem.

The standard packaging tools […] are insane.

dh_make helps you create a package that adheres to Debian policy, and there is good reason for Debian to have those policies. But if you’re just packaging something yourself, you don’t have to use it. It’s just a template for new packages.

At the end of the day, all you really need to create a deb is to create two files debian/control and debian/rules. These are the equivalent to a PKGBUILD. The control file specifies all of the dependency metadata, and the rules file contains the install script.

The difference in packaging philosophy is that PKGBUILDs are external and they download the upstream sources. On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the debian directory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don’t need access to the network.

What do you like about it?

Mostly that it makes super useful distinctions between concepts. But there are other goodies.

  • Manually installed versus auto installed.
  • Uninstalled versus purged.
  • Upgrade versus Dist Upgrade.
  • Dependency versus suggestion versus recommendation.
  • The alternatives system.
  • Pinning, and relatedly that packages can include version constraints in their dependencies.
  • Interactive configuration at install time.
  • Support for both source and binary packages.

I also do appreciate that Debian pre-configures packages to work together with the same set of conventions out of the box. But again, that’s a property of the packages, not of Apt.

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I’m not talking about apt the CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plain apt tool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.

Sure, but the interface is probably just as important as the actual logic behind it, isn’t it?

As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency (“auto installed”) versus packages installed directly (“manually installed”). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager.

Honestly I would consider that one of the fundamental things a package manager must do, I didn’t think it was a special thing haha

If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with apt-mark.

Yeah, I know. But if you want to manually install a package like that, you have to remember the extra step after it’s finished installing instead of before the install. It’s just unergonomic, for something that could be a flag (e.g. in emerge -1) and that I at least use fairly often.

Another problem with it being a two-step thing is that if you do it unconditionally in a script, it doesn’t retain the flag from before the previous installation command, you need a third step, i.e. checking if the package was installed before. My use case for this was installing dependencies for a package build which should be able to be removed again afterward, while not affecting the subset that were already installed explicitly.

Now that I think about it, it’s probably a good idea to always check if a package needs to be installed before installing it if you script it, though, because otherwise it might be unnecessarily reinstalled. Fair enough.

Are you maintaining a PPA for others?

Yeah, I maintain some software/config/meta packages for the computers at the uni I study at. Before, I’m pretty sure the packages were manually packaged with every update and I wanted to automate it a bit and also make clear how to get from the source tarballs to the final build.

On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the debian directory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don’t need access to the network.

Ahh, the way it’s structured makes a lot more sense knowing that. Coming from packaging stuff for Arch, Gentoo and NixOS, where the packaging process is essentially the same for all three, with you usually supplying source download URLs, I had absolutely no idea how debian/rules would allow me to do anything and felt like I was missing a big thing. I guess it really is just a Makefile that you run directly, and that makes sense if you already have the sources in your tree?

  • Pinning, and relatedly that packages can include version constraints in their dependencies.

This, at least version constraints, is another one I’d consider essential tbh. The rest are great though, I agree.

cbarrick ,

Sure, but the interface is probably just as important as the actual logic behind it, isn’t it?

The logic is why I love Apt. Most robust dependency resolution algorithms I’ve used.

But also, I don’t have any issues with the CLI. Having a distinction between apt-get and apt-cache and apt-mark doesn’t feel weird to me. You’re practically just separating the top-level sub commands by a dash instead of a space. The apt command is really just a convenience thing, and there are specialized tools for the more advanced things. Which is fine by me.

Also, the top level apt command doesn’t guarantee a stable CLI, so for scripting you’re supposed to use apt-get and friends anyway.

Honestly I would consider that one of the fundamental things a package manager must do.

You’d be surprised. Homebrew (the de facto standard package manager for macOS) doesn’t do this. Though, you can at least lookup the “leaf” packages which are not dependencies of any other package.

And, most language-specific package managers can’t do this. E.g. if you install software with pip or cargo.

you have to remember the extra step after it’s finished installing

If the package is in use, it shouldn’t be an orphan.

For example, what if you race with a cleanup job that is removing orphans? (Debian is hyper stable, so I often enable unattended upgrades with autoremove. I’m not so comfortable doing that on Arch ;)

What you’ve described is just an apt-get install when you start and and apt-get remove when you’re done. Or more properly setting it as a build dependency in your source package, to let Apt handle it.

But also, why uninstall build tools?

This, at least version constraints, is another one I’d consider essential tbh. The rest are great though, I agree.

Yeah, version constraints are common. But most other package managers bail with an error when they encounter a conflict. Apt is really good about solving conflicts and proposing solutions. Often it will propose multiple solutions to your conflict for you to choose from.

Again, it’s the solver part of Apt that makes it the best IMO.

silkroadtraveler ,

Fedora’s near daily update and restart cycle is so annoying esp when you have an encrypted hard drive. I know it’s part of the deal and I’m lazy, but all I’m using it for is a Jellyfin client.

nooneshere ,

Same. Albeit I’m on manjaro which suffers from the same issue. Distro hopping on an encrypted drive with no separate home partition is a huge pain in the butt

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU ,

What do you mean restart cycle? You only have to restart if you want to load the new kernel (there’s technically a way to avoid even that). If you don’t feel like installing a better tool for the job like Debian, just update less, most of your packages will still be newer than most distros. Also not sure why you would encrypt if its just jellyfin client.

silkroadtraveler ,

In the Software Manager, whenever there is an update you must press “Restart & Install” in order to update. Never seen a restart not be required. Why would I not update when I would be potentially miss important security patches?

Also I typically encrypt during install for enhanced privacy. Probably overkill but yeah. I don’t really have a specific reason other than that.

My other system is Linux Mint 21.3 and restarts are very infrequent.

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU ,

Ah I am not familiar with the software store, you don’t have to do that from the command line. And thats true, I’m not suggesting to never update, just less. Also if theres not much to steal on your computer, saftey is a little less important. I would personally feel comfortable updating once per month but thats up to each user. I sat on fedora 37 for way too long because Ubuntu made me afraid of major upgrades.

Kalcifer ,
@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works avatar

Apt is the greatest package manager ever built.

What’s your rationale for making that claim?

cbarrick ,

See the other thread.

TL;DR: Useful abstractions and a hell of a dependency solver.

Kalcifer ,
@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works avatar

How do you compare it with Pacman?

Matriks404 ,

Last time I used latest Ubuntu:

  • Default scaling on login screen and desktop sucked. If I had vision problems it would be unusable.
  • Settings application crashed after trying to open half of the menus.
  • Despite user interface looking like it’s made for tablets, the actual touch usability was horrible. I couldn’t even resize windows without being precise as fuck and there was no windows snapping despite it being a feature on Windows for more than a decade.
  • Couldn’t double click on Windows program to run it in Wine despite it being possible 10 years ago.
  • Reliance on snaps, even though installing software from 3rd party sources still being horrible.
possiblylinux127 ,

This article is actually well written. I might bookmark it to send to people looking to switch.

PotatoesFall ,

It’s good but Fedora or at least OpenSUSE should definitely take the place of Manjaro.

possiblylinux127 ,

I wouldn’t use openSUSE. It is way to obscure.

PotatoesFall ,

True. Although I would say the same about Manjaro

caesaravgvstvs ,

Fuck, now I wanna distro hop

nooneshere ,

No need to unless you can’t achieve the same from your current choice

sentient_loom ,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

distrowatch.org

PoliticalCustard ,
@PoliticalCustard@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Garuda gets a mention, as a gamer I can highly recommend Garuda, a lot of work has gone into it and it looks great too… especially if you like neon. 🥰

Pogogunner ,
@Pogogunner@kbin.social avatar

I'm not a fan of all the gamer aesthetics, but Garuda works so well out of the box.

I tend to recommend Linux Mint (cinnamon) for newbies to start with so they can get over their initial shock, and then Garuda when they're more comfortable and want something exciting/better gaming performance

Rayspekt ,

Only last year I've switched from Windows to Linux and I choose Garuda because I wanted to learn Arch from the beginning. Boy am I happy how well it worked out of the box. The most annoying issue was to get the xbox gamepad dongle to work but aside from the it's so good.

WeAreAllOne ,

No one ever recommends OpenSuse…

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

I am kind of afraid of the corporate influence on OpenSUSE. Same for the relationship between Ubuntu and Canonical

drndramrndra , (edited )

Is any popular stable distro free from corporate influence aside from Debian?

Adanisi ,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Not that I’m aware of. Debian is really an outlier, it’s strong community and motivation for software freedom is what makes Debian, Debian.

nooneshere ,

It also makes it more resilient in the face of hard times. Point to be noted

Kualk ,

It is not bad, but slow after Arch.

drndramrndra ,

Tumbleweed is recommended often here.

I occasionally try out Opensuse since like 2007, but I always find the alternatives better. Why Tumbleweed over Arch, why Leap over Fedora/Debian, why suse over RHEL?

atzanteol ,

Correct.

possiblylinux127 ,

It is problematic in my experience. I think it comes down to Suse as a company lacking direction

nelov ,

Yeah exactly this. Not only lacking direction but the Upstream SUSE recently decided to move away from traditional desktop. Instead, they now offer ALP, which stands for adoptable linux platform. So OpenSuse has no real dekstop products to build of, and the community has to do much more work in order to produce a stable desktop distribution. I was a happy user for a almost 2 years, but in that time the community had discussion about many “small” things, many of which were about “principles”. This made ne very uncomfortable in using it, since it felt that every moment the “community” would decide something that would significantly change everything.

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

openSuSE is cool. It was the first distro I installed way back around 2010 and still the one I would recommend to new people.

Sina , (edited )

There is a shill on YT called Linuxcast. (I like his content, but he is defo a Suse shill) Personally i’d rather fix some arch fuckups, then to not have the AUR. (or if I don’t have the AUR, then just use Debian)

z3rOR0ne ,

Well as a psychopath, I always recommend beginners start with Gentoo. Guaranteed they won’t go back to Mac or Windows. /s

cbarrick ,

By starting the switch to Gentoo, they either learn Linux well enough to never want to go back, or they fubar their system so bad that they can’t go back.

possiblylinux127 ,

It would of been funnier if you left out the /s

bunjix ,
@bunjix@lemmy.world avatar

Back in early 2000s I ran Gentoo as daily driver for a year, while almost a Linux noob, but eager to learn. Installation instructions were long, but excellent.

It was fun, and worked well, but in the end the long compilation times got the better of me. Now I heard they are including binary packages, so the itch is coming back.

Right now running opensuse tumbleweed, which works fine, sometimes too smoothly.

Evil_Shrubbery ,

Right? I’ve been on Tumbleweed a few years - never actually expected it rolling so effortlessly.

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

Disappointed Cricket Fan meme with Debian and Slackware logos, underneath screenshot of linked article saying that Ubuntu was one of the first Linux-based operating systems

qaz ,

one of the first

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

there were dozens of others in the 11 years between the first and ubuntu

prettybunnys ,

“Targeted at regular desktop users”

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

foundation.gnome.org/1999/…/gnome-1-0-released/

prettybunnys ,

I really feel like you’re missing the idea of that sentence deliberately.

What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?

cypherpunks , (edited )
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?

There were a bunch of distros advertising ease of use; several were even sold in physical boxes (which was the style at the time) and marketed to consumers at retail stores like BestBuy years before Ubuntu started.

Here are four pictures of the physical packaging for three of those pre-ubuntu desktop distros designed to be user friendly and marketed to the general public:

Photo of the cardboard packaging for Caldera OpenLinux Another Caldera box Packaging of SuSE 8.1 Mandrake 7.2 packaging

Ubuntu was better than what came before it in many ways, and it deserves credit for advancing desktop Linux adoption both then and now, but it was not “one of the first” by any stretch.

vzq ,

Yeah, no.

It was one of the first that didn’t make you to want to tear your hair out, I’ll give them that.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

That’s what I interpreted from the “targeted at regular desktop users” part.

Certainly not one of the first distros. But one of the first that almost any normal person would actually be able to install and use? Absolutely.

There were multiple before it that claimed to be easy for anybody to use, but most of them still weren’t by a long stretch.

TheGrandNagus ,

I don’t think that’s particularly wrong, tbh.

The key words being targeted at regular desktop users.

Obviously far from being one of the first distros, or distros with a GUI. But targeted at regular desktop users - i.e. “normies”? Absolutely.

People need to remember how crappy and janky the desktop was before Canonical spearheaded a lot of usability improvements.

If only they had continued along that path :/

lemmyvore ,

There were lots of distros that tried to target regular users before it. Mandrake/Conectiva/Mandriva, Corel, Mepis, Lindows, Linspire etc. just off the top of my head.

Hell, Lindows came preinstalled on Walmart PCs at some point.

corsicanguppy ,

Mandrake/Conectiva/Mandriva

That’s two.

(And hey, thank suse for killing Conectiva)

survivalmachine ,

targeted at regular desktop users

While Slackware and Debian are the oldest still-maintained Linux distros, I don’t think either had a desktop-first approach.

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

I considered putting logos of some of the many more user-friendly pre-ubuntu distros in the meme but was lazy.

Debian was intended to be for regular desktop users back then too, though.

ethd , (edited )

…Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.

philpo ,

SUSE?

ethd ,

I forgot about Corel Linux and Lindows as well now that I think on it.

1993_toyota_camry ,
@1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.org avatar

Mandrake is another

nooneshere ,

Slackware is a garbage distro purely because it doesn’t have a functional package manager supporting dependency resolution

Pantherina ,

Ubuntu is not even good in my opinion. At least not as a normie Distro.

Yes they have lots of docs online but “it is good because people think it is good” is not a good argument.

If you dont like GNOME I guess you will have a harder life anyways, as Distros with KDE are just a really hard task. Like anything stable is not a good idea, I at least reported 30 bugs that will never get backported fixes.

The fact that appimages are broken on Ubuntu is like the only thing that I completely understand and dont care about. Appimages needs to get their stuff together.

I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak

github.com/…/Appimage-To-Flatpak

survivalmachine ,

I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak

They seem like different projects with different goals. Appimages are portable executables.

Flatpak, to me, is something you install on a system and run with a flatpak runtime that is installed on your PC. I think its a fantastic way to sandbox programs with differing dependencies, but you still install programs and run them on your PC.

Appimage, on the other hand, is a wholly-contained executable. It is less efficient than flatpak in every way if you are installing apps on a system, but it is more portable. I can throw a handful of appimages on a USB stick and carry them from machine to machine (or mount an ISO in the case of VMs). I can plug in my “troubleshooting and development” stick to an otherwise barebones server at my datacenter, fix an issue with a comfortable set of useful apps, then unplug and leave the machine untouched.

Appimage is not a replacement for flatpak, but it has its own purpose. Snap is more similar to flatpak, but inferior in every single way. If we must get rid of one, can we phase that one out?

Pantherina ,

I mean, in theory you could also put flatpaks onto a usb stick and symlink the directories. But nobody really does that.

But really, I think this could be a cool GTK app.

You would copy selected apps to the stick and include a program, maybe even with a GUI, that can then symlink those apps to the system you are currently using.

ProtonBadger ,

Just be careful about trying to run your AppImages on a distro with for example only FUSEv3, because there are system dependencies.

Montagge ,
@Montagge@kbin.earth avatar

Weird as my AppImages work fine on Ubuntu 22.04LTS

PotatoesFall ,

why are distros with KDE a really hard task? users who want customizations will have a horrible time with gnome

Pantherina ,

That are two unrelated or even contradictory scentences.

Gnome is waaay more reduced, so it has less bugs. It will work way better on stable Distros.

Also because of some things (KDE 4.0?) GNOME became the default Desktop, and Distros orient at its release cycles.

KDE has so many bugs and fixes that I think calling 5.27 “stable” is misleading.

PotatoesFall ,

KDE is default on some distros and is supported directly as a variant on most major distros so I wouldn’t say GNOME is the default.

But my point is that at least some of the appeal of desktop linux is customization, and GNOME will be a disappointment for the users looking for that.

Otherwise I agree vanilla GNOME is rock solid and great for new users!

Pantherina , (edited )

I meant “shipping a KDE Distro is a hard task”, that should be more clear. For sure, KDE forever. GNOME is either CLI-only (even for basic settings) or install tons of apps that only do one thing (ThE UnIx pHiLoSoPhY) or dont change anything.

oscardejarjayes ,
@oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net avatar

Manjaro? nah, don’t

panned_cakes ,
@panned_cakes@hexbear.net avatar

nice color scheme tho

ShortN0te ,

Manjaro: Reliable and Cutting-Edge Features

Rarly laughed that hard. Reliably is by defenition wrong. Manjaro delays packages a few days in their main compared to Arch this can cause issues and makes them not compatible with the AUR which one of the most advertised and enabled by default feature.

You can read more about other problems here, github.com/kruug/manjarno

Evil_Shrubbery ,

Yeah, that one made me chuckle as well. But I guess the article ‘had to be written’ for reasons & it does actually have some overview value & nice pics … which I guess is what new users have to go on before they actually dive in.

darkphotonstudio ,

I like that they hold the updates back. Manjaro is as reliable as any other desktop Linux I’ve used.

nooneshere ,

AUR is unsupported on Manjaro. Go back to Arch if you want that without issues

wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

ProtonBadger ,

I tried out Arch for a while. The AUR is a bit of a wild west and at least I found it important to vet packages before installing them. It was a hassle. The same reason I only use one package from the OBS on Tumbleweed now.

TheGrandNagus ,

Imagine putting Manjaro as reliable and cutting edge over, say, Fedora.

lemmyvore ,

I mean, why not? Manjaro has recent packages and actively focuses on a user-friendly experience. Which includes things like a nice installer, good automatic support for hardware out of the box, a nice GUI for the package manager, GUI managers for drivers and kernel versions, it’s based on the stable Arch branch and it comes with the LTS kernel etc.

Back a few years ago when I was looking to move my desktop away (from Ubuntu, ironically) I downloaded a bunch of distro ISOs (the usual suspects, we all know them, Pop, Mint etc.) and tried the live version to see how it goes. I picked Manjaro because it was the only one that did everything perfectly. Recognized all my peripherals, network shares, played all videos and music, printer, whatever.

(I know the usual arguments against it, btw, but it’s mostly unrelated stuff or outright false.)

giacomo ,

People lose their shit about Manjaro pretty frequently. It’s pretty much a meme at this point.

anon232 ,

There’s a huge hate bandwagon for Manjaro and I don’t really understand it. I don’t consider myself a linux expert and maybe that’s why but I felt like Manjaro was very accessible to someone new to Linux who wanted to use Arch. You have the ability to install what you need while also having a relatively stable system. I enjoyed that it came with software that I would normally be using but I know there’s a lot of diehards who want just Linux and to install things themselves, in that case they should just use plain Arch or Endeavor, but I think for others Manjaro is perfectly fine.

nooneshere ,

Manjaro Xfce was the chosen one that managed to attain my trust for Linux. I’ve been running manjaro for 1.5 years. Not a single unexpected breakage to count

PainInTheAES ,

Do you have proof of Manjaros usual arguments being unrelated or false? The things I’ve read over the years seem like valid criticism.

lemmyvore ,

There’s generally three “arguments” that keep being quoted.

  1. There’s the criticism about them messing up their website or the bug that DDoS’ed the AUR. While valid, it has nothing to do with the stability of the distro.
  2. There’s the people who claim it “just broke” on them. This is people new to Linux who get bad advice and do things like switch to unstable, use non-LTS kernels, install drivers from AUR etc. and of course it breaks, as would any distro where you do foolish things. And if you said “it just broke” about any distro you’d get asked things like “what did you do” or “this kind of stuff is not for newbies”. But it’s cool to say it about Manjaro.
  3. There’s the argument that Manjaro holding back Arch packages for 2 weeks breaks AUR, because when you try to compile an AUR package it might not find the super-new version of a library it needs. While this is technically possible, the chances of it happening are super small. AUR packages are often not that recent, some are years-old. Secondly, if this were such a common problem it would affect everybody on any Arch distro who didn’t upgrade in 2 weeks – and it just doesn’t.
PainInTheAES ,

I think it does. If you make the choice to poorly manage your distro’s tools/website it shows that you aren’t responsible enough to manage the distro. They also had the laptop purchasing issue.

I’m not saying every distro needs to be super organized and testing shit but they should be before I recommend it to someone. Especially when there are other Arch based distros that don’t have the issues.

The newbie stuff is fair enough. I do think they get extra flak here because the distro was marked as Arch for noobs.

I don’t think that would be the case. The AUR helper would pull the updated dependencies from the Arch repos which would not be available in Manjaro’s repos

They’re valid arguments and people should be informed about it mainly because of how it was recommended a lot for beginners.

Rossphorus ,

During my six month usage of Manjaro (my introduction to Arch-based distros), my desktop broke four times and booted me to the terminal. Almost once a month. I told myself this was the price you paid for living on the edge, using a rolling release. I switched to EndeavourOS and have not had a broken desktop in two whole years.

Manjaro’s handling of AUR packages is fundamentally wrong and with their design decisions it cannot be fixed. You either give up the AUR entirely, or resign yourself to constantly breaking AUR packages and having to try and fix them.

Manjaro’s handling of kernels via a GUI sounds good until you realise it’s entirely manual and if you don’t keep checking you will end up running an unsupported, out of date kernel with Arch packages that expect a newer one. Again, Manjaro violates Arch’s golden rule of avoiding partial upgrades by holding your kernels back until you manually update them in their GUI. If you’re running an Arch-based distro 99% of the time you want the latest kernel and an LTS kernel as a backup, but these are already in Arch as packages (and are thus updated in lockstep with your packages, as designed) so you don’t need Manjaro’s special GUI. Now if you wanted a particular kernel for some reason then sure, but Manjaro’s GUI doesn’t even let you pick the exact version you want anyway! All you can pick is the latest version of each major release.

If you’re anything like I was at the time, you think you like Manjaro but what you actually like is Arch. Manjaro just gets in the way.

lemmyvore ,

my desktop broke four times and booted me to the terminal

How did it break? It never broke for me once in the last 4 years.

You either give up the AUR entirely, or resign yourself to constantly breaking AUR packages and having to try and fix them.

I constantly have dozens of AUR packages installed. I have 70 right now. They don’t break. Everything you’re writing here is false.

Sometimes dynamic linking fails for an AUR package over 6 months or more but that’s because I don’t update them automatically (because none of them are critical). A simple rebuild fixes that.

Manjaro violates Arch’s golden rule of avoiding partial upgrades by holding your kernels back until you manually update them in their GUI.

It’s not holding kernels back. The version you select receives updates. It’s not bumping major versions of that’s what you mean, but that’s exactly how I want it. I don’t want the distro doing that for me. I do not need the latest kernel.

you think you like Manjaro but what you actually like is Arch. Manjaro just gets in the way.

Wrong again. I do not like several decisions in Arch and it requires more attention than Manjaro. Manjaro attempts to offer stability and low maintenance and actually does a good job of it.

I’m an experienced Linux user but I’m lazy and I want my cake and to eat it too. I want recent packages but I don’t want the risks associated with bleeding edge everything. Manjaro gives me that. You can call it “Arch for lazy people”, I don’t mind, it’s true.

Rossphorus ,

My DE broke because Manjaro added untested/beta patches from upstream, sometimes even against the developer’s word. This is something that Manjaro is known for. Guess who inspired dont-ship.it?

Also I would appreciate you not calling my statements on the AUR false. I have personal experience on the matter so we can play my experiences against yours if you like, or we can listen to the official Manjaro maintainers reccommending that it not be used, as it is incompatible with the Manjaro repos. By design Manjaro holds back Arch packages, which means AUR package dependencies often do not match what is expected. This is not false. Can you use the AUR? Sure, but you must keep in mind that Manjaro was not designed for it and it will break AUR packages sometimes. Sometimes it’s as simple as waiting a couple weeks for Manjaro to let new packages through, but sometimes you can’t just wait several weeks and you need to fix it yourself.

And yes, Manjaro does hold kernels back because you have to specify when you want to move off a major release. You can accidentally be using an unsupported kernel and not even notice. Ask me how I know. Manjaro literally requires more maintenance than Arch on this front.

I can’t comment on what maintenance Arch requires that Manjaro doesn’t, as I run EndeavourOS. I’ve found it to be everything Manjaro wishes it was - a thin, user-friendly wrapper around Arch.

Just remember that Manjaro’s official response to them forgetting to update their SSL certs was to roll back your clock, putting everyone at risk of accepting invalid certs in the process.

lemmyvore ,

My DE broke because Manjaro added untested/beta patches from upstream, sometimes even against the developer’s word.

What DE? What patches? And isn’t Arch the upstream for Manjaro?

By design Manjaro holds back Arch packages, which means AUR package dependencies often do not match what is expected. This is not false.

The possibility that AUR dependencies may not be met is not false. What is false is the claim that it’s a common problem. The chances of it happening are tiny. If it did happen to you please mention what AUR package(s).

It’s very hard to argue with people who claim “it broke” but never give concrete examples of what broke. They make these outrageous claims and put the burden on you to prove them wrong. It’s either disingenuous or done by spiteful, clueless people who genuinely don’t know what they did wrong but then shouldn’t go around throwing mud.

And yes, Manjaro does hold kernels back because you have to specify when you want to move off a major release.

That’s a feature, not a bug. I’ve already explained that I dislike any distro that forces major kernel changes on me. Forcing people to switch major kernel versions is dumb and dangerous. That’s high maintenance for me, waking up one day to find out I’m on a different kernel and that shit doesn’t work.

everything Manjaro wishes it was - a thin, user-friendly wrapper around Arch.

That is not what Manjaro is nor wishes to be. It’s a derivate distro with its own goals and I find it unbelievable how much some people can hate that. It’s not the first distro in history that’s downstream of another, Debian has dozens of distros using it as a base and you don’t see this kind of extreme reactions. I’m baffled by it.

Manjaro’s official response to them forgetting to update their SSL certs was to roll back your clock, putting everyone at risk of accepting invalid certs in the process.

Ah there’s the old chestnut. Thank God this irrelevant fact exists; what would people bring up otherwise when all else fails.

Rossphorus ,

When I say upstream that’s technically upstream of upstream - I mean the application repositories. Manjaro has in the past applied their own patches on top and broken functionality. The example that comes to mind is the most heinous one where a Manjaro maintainer patched in three pull requests (including CLOSED ones) and pushed the result to their stable repo: source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/…/986 source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/…/1035 source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty/-/…/1060 forum.manjaro.org/t/…/11 . Applying patches to upstream is not unheard of, but you don’t do it without contacting the developer, because they are the ones going to get the bug reports. Manjaro did not notify the developers. It’s this recurring trend of unprofessionalism which has tainted Manjaro’s reputation, whether it’s letting their SSL cert expire FOUR separate times (once, maybe twice is understandable, but more speaks to underlying issues in structure), or applying patches to applications without developer’s knowledge and shipping it to users, or the two separate times they DDoSed the AUR servers with a poorly thought out pamac feature, etc…

I give no concrete examples because this all occurred almost two years ago for me at this point. I’m not out to capsize Manjaro or bring about it’s demise, so I don’t write down every package that breaks for use as ammunition in internet debates. I just want a distro that works for me. Manjaro wasn’t that for me so I moved on. You asked why some people don’t like Manjaro and I’m simply explaining why.

The AUR issue happened often enough for me to consider it frequent. It happened most often with niche packages, like the various MSP430 toolchain packages which I often needed, but I explicitly remember it happening at least once on fairly mainline packages like cemu (or was it yuzu?).

The problem is not that Manjaro allows you to pick whichever major release kernel you like, but rather that it doesn’t account for this in the packaging system. You could be running kernel 6.4 (i.e. not officially supported anymore) and update your packages, resulting in a broken system with no warning. By decoupling the kernel version from the package system Manjaro unleashes a whole new failure mode. This would be fine if they accounted for this in their packaging model, but they don’t (because Arch doesn’t and it would be too much work to implement and support it themselves, presumably. It sounds quite tough). This tool, which is designed to make the system more stable as you say, actually can make it less stable!

Manjaro was sold to me as ‘Beginner Arch’, so I don’t know what to tell you on that front. I don’t think this is at all related to why people dislike Manjaro though: Nobody hates Ubuntu because it’s based on Debian, they hate it because of their decisions, like Snaps. Likewise nobody hates Manjaro because it’s Arch based, they hate it because of the decisions they’ve made. Manjaro isn’t the only distro getting hate, but it is probably the lowest hanging fruit due to all of the administative fumbles.

nooneshere ,

On a side note there’s no stable branch of Arch

Telodzrum ,

People love to bag on Manjaro, but I know a fair number of people who use it as their primary OS. Hell, I used it as mine for almost a year and a half; I only moved to Arch because I was super bored one weekend.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

I’m not saying don’t use it, I’ve used it in the past and they get some stuff right. The included programs are generally good choices, their customisations on the DEs differentiate Manjaro from others, the GUI app that lets you trivially install different kernels with the click of a button is great. Unfortunately it ended up causing breakages a couple of times, so I moved on.

I’m saying if I were to pick a word to describe it certainly wouldn’t be “reliable”, due to their whole holding back Arch packages but not AUR ones, leading to dependency conflicts.

I honestly don’t know why they don’t hold back AUR ones as well (or don’t hold back a week, a-la EndeavourOS). That’d solve IMO the biggest issue with the distro

1000069305

Plus the whole repeatedly not updating expired security certificates and telling people to just roll back their clocks to “fix” it.

If it happened only once, I’d chalk it up as an embarrassing albeit understandable mistake. But it’s happened, what, 3 times now? It’s an issue in itself, but it also brings into question what other stuff they’re messing up behind the scenes due to poor processes.

Telodzrum ,

That’s fair.

nooneshere ,

Aur is explicitly stated to be unsupported on Manjaro. I don’t think you can hate on them for this

wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

TheGrandNagus ,

They should probably have big warnings when you actually try to go install something, then, rather than as a note in their wiki that very very few people will read.

corsicanguppy ,

“People I know” has never been a suitable equivalent to actual data, Mr Trump.

Telodzrum ,

The only data in this exchange is the anecdotal data I provided, get your head out of your ass.

nooneshere ,

Lol I agree

possiblylinux127 ,

Small complaint but the article is decent as a whole

TheGrandNagus ,

Agreed

kameecoding ,

Imagine putting Manjaro in the article instead of EndeavorOs

Owljfien ,

Manjaro was one of my first distros when I was still learning, when I installed it, it made Wayland my default but didn’t put in the required nvidia kernel parameters and I couldn’t boot. I didn’t even know what Wayland was to know why I couldn’t boot

aarRJaay ,
@aarRJaay@lemmy.world avatar

Anyone else notice that the first three are Ubuntu?

No_Eponym ,
@No_Eponym@lemmy.ca avatar

Corporate wants you to find the difference…

aarRJaay ,
@aarRJaay@lemmy.world avatar

“They’re the same picture” Pam from The Office

DoucheBagMcSwag ,

Is Garuda Linux really that good for gamers?

PainInTheAES ,

It ships with some gaming stuff, uses zen kernel, has some performance mods (I guess), and a theme as ugly as sin. But you can make any distro do what it does. I’m sure it’s in the same territory as Nobara.

smileyhead ,

It’s Arch Linux with preinstalled stuff right from the install. I won’t recommend it, you still would need a good amount of knowleadge first to drive an Arch based system.

Imagine a Windows modification with some gaming tools preinstalled and scripts for one-click install things that usuallu take five clicks. Great, but only to speed up things you do often.

DoucheBagMcSwag ,

Thanks for the heads up. I lost interest with “good amount of knowledge” (which I have almost none)

Facebones ,

What are good dual boot friendly options? I still game too much to ditch windows and dual booted Ubuntu but meh Ubuntu lol

captainjaneway ,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

Linux Mint is a popular alternative.

But all options can be dual booted as far as I know!

Facebones ,

Some don’t play nice with dual booting. I’m honestly not familiar with the “why” but a couple of distros I looked at (one was one of the gaming forward ones, forget which) are outright like "don’t dual boot this and if you do don’t come crying to us.

I’m guessing they struggle seeing other file system types but I have no idea.

captainjaneway ,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

Oh that is news to me. I always assumed a partition was all it needed.

Facebones ,

I honestly don’t know what the issue is, but if the distro page is like “don’t fuckin do it” I just believe them 😂

conciselyverbose ,

It could just be that windows is obnoxious and likes to do its best to break shit, and they don't want to deal with helping people figure out how to repair it in limited dev time.

474D ,

Mint sets up the entire dual boot and partitioning during the install. You just choose how much space for Mint. Very easy and intuitive.

f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4 ,

I consider Linux Mint Debian Edition to be the starter distro that Ubuntu was, >10 years ago.

Facebones ,

Would you recommend something different for someone who doesn’t need a “starter” but still wants to dual boot? I’m not super unfamiliar, I just haven’t bothered for a long time

Gutek8134 ,
@Gutek8134@lemmy.world avatar

I’m using Pop OS, pretty good IMO

Facebones ,

Flashing pop onto a USB now, let’s give it a go! Any tips on gaming tools? I think I read about some newer compatibility thing but can’t remember what it was called lol.

Gutek8134 ,
@Gutek8134@lemmy.world avatar

I’m using it mainly for development, keeping all the gaming to windows

IrritableOcelot ,

I mean anything but the atomic distros will dual boot just fine. GRUB is GRUB. I have the most experience with Debian-based distros, but they all dual-boot just fine.

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