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allywilson ,

Here’s an incomplete list of my daily drivers since…well, I’m old.

  • QNX Neutrino
  • Mandrake 7.2
  • RedHat 7.1
  • Went back to Windoze for quite a while
  • Gentoo
  • Ubuntu (quite a leap there)
  • OS X
  • Linux Mint
  • Debian
  • LMDE
  • Fedora
  • KDE Neon
  • macOS
  • Fedora Asahi

I’m sure I’ve missed the odd one or two (and I regularly jumped back and forth with Debian/Ubuntu/Mint for years and years).

I used to distro hop a lot, so if I only used it for less than a month, I haven’t bothered to list it.

LeFantome ,

Love that list. I am also old. I used SLS, Slackware, and stuff with the .99.x release numbers I switched to Red Hat around 4.1 I think and went to Mandrake from there. And then…

You never used Arch? Not even for Asahi?

allywilson ,

I built Arch (twice I think) but only ever in a VM to have a look around, never made it my daily driver. Used Manjaro for a couple of weeks, but I wouldn’t say it was a daily driver either.

PseudoSpock ,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar
  • Speak & Spell
  • 150 things in 1 from Radio Shack
  • Simon
  • CP/M
  • DOS 2.1 - 6.22 ?? (DoubleDOS)
  • Dos + Desqview X (I spell that right?)
  • Slackware (Linux 0.99pl13) (home)
  • Windows 95 & Linux
  • DEC OSF-1
  • OS/2 Warp (work) / Slackware Linux (home)
  • Windows 98, 98se & Mandrake Linux
  • Domain Aegis (Apollo workstations) (w) & Mandrake and maybe Redhat Linux (h)
  • HP-UX (w) & Mandrake Linux (h)
  • SunOS & Solaris & HP-UX & Aegis & AIX & os/390 (zSeries) & IRIX (w) & Redhat or Mandrake Linux (w & h)
  • PClinuxOS
  • Gentoo
  • Linux mint / Ubuntu
CAPSLOCKFTW ,

Arch Linux

Reasons:

  • Pacman
  • the AUR
  • community driven
  • bleeding edge
  • pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
  • sane defaults
  • minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
  • the wiki
dandroid ,

My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn’t choose arch for my laptop was because I haven’t had good experience with pacman. But I’ll be honest that I haven’t given it much of a chance, so I’d like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?

LeFantome ,

What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.

dandroid ,

Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don’t like the syntax. It isn’t intuitive, and I can’t memorize it because of that. For example, I’m not sure why -S means install. I remember install because that’s the one I have used the most, but I can’t remember what is equivalent to apt update or apt upgrade, and I’m not sure why they can’t just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?

CAPSLOCKFTW ,

I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what’s up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.

Bogasse ,

The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷

experimentmapass ,

@bbsm3678 You should try TROMjaro, and all linux distros should take example from it.

Dranadia ,

Manjaro with KDE. I’ve only been running Linux for a month, and found Arch a bit intimidating, so to me Manjaro was the closest I dare fly to the sun. Really liking it so far.

LeFantome ,

I used to love Manjaro. It seems great when you use it. Word of warning though, it will break on you at some point. When it does, instead of abandoning Arch distros completely, consider giving EndeavourOS a shot.

Dranadia ,

Thanks for the tips, and the heads up. EndeavourOS was on my list when I tried to figure out what to go for, so I’ll definitely try that when Manjaro breaks.

transistor ,
@transistor@lemdro.id avatar

I’m using debian.

wildbus8979 ,

Seconded

mouse ,
@mouse@midwest.social avatar

I live on the more unstable side, I like Debian Unstable/Sid. I also recommend Siduction as it’s based on Debian Unstable.

transistor ,
@transistor@lemdro.id avatar

I’ve been actually trying Debian Testing for past few weeks.

mfn ,
@mfn@mfn.pub avatar

Debian not recommends testing for everyday using. You definetely have to look at the site. Afaik it is basically a bad version of unstable that gets slow updates and it is only for testing purposes.

danielton ,
@danielton@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, this is correct. The way Testing works, it is very possible (indeed, likely) that you could be stuck with a security vulnerability for weeks. You should use either stable or unstable.

transistor ,
@transistor@lemdro.id avatar

Can unstable be used as a daily driver?

danielton ,
@danielton@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, as long as you pay attention to what packages are being added and removed when you perform an update. Once in a great while, there have been instances of buggy packages mass-removing other packages due to a bug.

That said, Debian-based distros like Ubuntu usually base their stable releases on unstable. Unstable doesn’t refer to software stability. Rather, it refers to the idea that the system-level packages could change throughout the development cycle.

Security updates come to unstable through normal package updates, which testing doesn’t get until everything makes it through a probationary period with no “serious” bugs filed and no dependency issues. And if any package that the package needing the security patch depends on also has a serious bug filed, the process could take even longer.

transistor ,
@transistor@lemdro.id avatar

Packages from debian unstable trickle down to testing in 8-10 days usually if all the other criteria are met. But I have also heard that important security updates go straight from unstable to stable and then come to testing at a later time. When is that later date I have no idea.

greyfrog ,

Used Arch for over 5 years. I don’t know if having a child changed me but I realised I’d lost a lot of time I had that I spent just fiddling with configs to get stufftpo my liking so went from Arch xmonad to PopOs and Gnome.

It has been stable and doesn’t have the snap bullshit that comes with Ubuntu.

wviana ,

You wouldn’t need too much config for arch and gnome.

Frederic , (edited )

I’m old too :-/

  • CP/M
  • DOS
  • Windows3, 95, 98
  • BeOS
  • some Debian and Mandrake
  • Windows XP
  • Ubuntu (a long time)
  • Mint/Cinnamon (I hated it, it was quick, maybe a year)
  • MX/Xfce (since ~2016)

I may try Arch on a old laptop just to play with it.----

theshatterstone54 ,

I hated it, it was quick, maybe a year.

I think we have a very different definition of quick, my friend. I’ve been on Linux for about a year and a half, most of which on Arch and recently on NixOS.

LeFantome ,

CP/M. Ya got me there. I guess I can say EOS though ( Coleco ADAM ) and Tandy DOS 2.1.

If you don’t want to jump straight into Arch, give EndeavourOS a go. It is only 20 packages on top of the 90,000 you get in Arch ( so, it is Arch ) but it is a breeze to install and is sensibly configured out of the box. Once installed, it is Arch ( don’t let the elitists tell you it isn’t ). It uses the real Arch repos and runs the real Arch kernels. Of course, if you have the time, vanilla Arch may be even more fun.

Leer10 ,

Fedora Silverblue. I want a Linux system that just works.

eleanor ,

I’ve been switching between Arch and Debian for the past 5ish years. I don’t really notice much of a difference, other than Arch has updates much more often than Debian Testing usually does. I like how meta-packages in Arch are more minimal than the ones in Debian, but that’s a very minor thing.

LeFantome ,

Arch updates much more often and to vastly newer versions. Not saying which is better but those two distros differ quite a lot in this respect.

dream_weasel ,

Arch.

People think it’s really challenging and brittle, but everything seems to always work no matter how often I update (or don’t) and the wiki is top notch.

I actually chose arch initially because when you go to forums to troubleshoot problems there is always an ubuntu answer and an arch answer, and the arch answer is almost always shorter.

LeFantome ,

Bang on

happyhippo ,

TW

MyNameIsRichard ,
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed without hesitation.

dandroid ,

Tried it for the first time last week. I was hesitant because I’m forced into SLES for work, and I fucking hate it. But thats because all of the default configs for all packages are overly secure. Like, installing apache required a ton of extra steps to allow HTTP traffic. But I needed to test both HTTP and HTTPS for the feature I was working on, so I needed HTTP.

But overall I have been very happy with Tumbleweed. I like that the packages are more up to date than Ubuntu LTS (what I was using previously), and I haven’t had as many driver issues either. Oh, and snapshots are amazing. It already saved me once when I accidentally deleted the wrong config file, I just cp’d it from my last snapshot.

jollyrogue ,

This is the best answer. It’s the most comparable to Fedora with it’s semi-rolling releases.

Fubarberry ,
@Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz avatar

EndeavourOS is good, I was frequently using arch wiki on other distros so it’s handy to have it actually apply accurately to my distro. AUR is super handy as well.

I could use regular Arch, but I appreciate the simplified installation.

mortrek ,

Also easy to install with auto btrfs snapshots so that updates can never really break anything.

Fubarberry ,
@Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz avatar

I use btrfs actually as well, but mainly just for compression/deduplication. I’ve been meaning to get snapshots set up but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

mortrek ,

You really should. It can save your butt, and it’s only a few shell commands.

Owljfien ,

Arch on my main pc, and Ubuntu on my server, only reason it’s Ubuntu is I needed 6.2 kernel for my Intel arc encoding card and debian based for the arrs

NormalC ,

POP!_OS is amazing. It started out as a way for System76 to create an Ubuntu operating system image that had all the latest packages that they would need for their hardware but then grew into something much bigger. They have a plan for Wayland with cosmic-epoch and they ship the latest kernel (6.4.6 as of writing) and latest Mesa. It’s solely responsible for killing my distro hopping (as well as having GNU Guix and Flatpak).

Watch this snippet on where POP!_OS came from (invidious link)

Piped link

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