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My opinion on Linus and Luke's Linux challenge

8 minutes ago, 10leej said:
  • You can change the desktop environment on almost every distribution.
  • You can build a DE from scratch slapping tools together (this is how LXDE was made actually)
  • You don't have to use Fedora.

You entirely missed my point, I was responding specifically to the fedora suggestion for Linus and Luke, pointing out that it might not be the best choice if the goal is a "painless as possible" transition from Windows out of the box.

 

Changing DEs and all the associated complications is the exact kind of thing someone coming from Windows does NOT want to have to do. 

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I'm surprised no one mentioned Void Linux, but it would make sense for having a more stable/tested package set due to its single repository layout (community packages are committed directly), while still being bleeding-edge enough to handle modern Linux gaming properly, all while not having the meme status of Arch.

 

KDE Plasma is pretty much the easiest DE choice for someone coming solely from Windows.

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1 hour ago, Foxlet said:

I'm surprised no one mentioned Void Linux, but it would make sense for having a more stable/tested package set due to its single repository layout (community packages are committed directly), while still being bleeding-edge enough to handle modern Linux gaming properly, all while not having the meme status of Arch.

 

KDE Plasma is pretty much the easiest DE choice for someone coming solely from Windows.

I find Manjaro to be quite stable (as in lack of bugs), no experience with Void, but I do agree a rolling release is probably best, since a good gaming experience will be high on their priorities, and they'll want all the latest improvements from Valve, some of which are in the kernel itself. For example the latest FUTEX2 patches are staged for kernel 5.16 which will be available around December/January, while Ubuntu based distros won't see it until April (best case if 5.16 is LTS), or next October (5.15 is LTS).

 

KDE Plasma being the easiest DE for someone coming solely from Windows is a bit debatable, I didn't like the default feel of it, and takes me way too long to configure it, when I first used Linux I liked Gnome 2 the most, later budgie, then pop-shell. KDE may still make the most sense though with the Steam Deck using it, and how much I like it there will determine if I give KDE another go as my desktop daily driver.

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Hoo boy, time to sort through and reply to some stuff.

 

On 10/1/2021 at 10:50 PM, Diffracted said:

I sincerely think one of them should use an arch based distro like (preferably) manjaro.

Putting noobs on Arch is generally not a good idea IMHO. I bet the two could probably figure out all the quirks of rolling release but the amount of tinkering you need to do to get an Arch system rolling just makes it not a good starting point. and don't even get me started on Manjaro's issues.

On 10/2/2021 at 6:59 AM, flindeberg said:

TLDR; SteamOS 3.0 is pacman-based, therefore the obvious distro choice for a gamer is pacman-based. This essentially means Manjaro for most users, and the rest can manage on their own. 

Has Valve officially announced that it's going to be pacman based? I'm guessing so since it'd be weird to roll any other package manager on an Arch based distro, but nonetheless.

On 10/2/2021 at 5:00 AM, Conan Kudo said:

As someone who uses and helps develop Fedora Linux, I was really sad and hurt to hear @LinusTechcompletely laugh off Fedora Linux as if it was ludicrous.

Hard agree.

On 10/1/2021 at 10:59 PM, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

I'm surprised they didn't mention one that is more welcoming to new users... like... Elementary OS or Zorin OS. 

Honestly? Same. Zorin would be like, the perfect pick for them. My irks with it being a paid Linux distro aside, it is still a good distro.

 

Honestly, If I had to suggest any distro to them, I'd say Zorin, Pop, Ubuntu, LM, and then maybe EndeavourOS, in that order.

EndeavourOS is a much better "I-want-Arch-but-am-too-lazy-to-install-and-maintain-Arch" distro in the vein of Manjaro, except it doesn't package itself as a "noob-friendly" distro, and makes it abundantly clear what you're getting yourself into. And the community for it is unmatched. In my short time daily driving it as my first distro (long story) I couldn't find a shred of toxicity.

What's the worst that could happen, rapid brain death?

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5 minutes ago, norgaladir said:

I find Manjaro to be quite stable (as in lack of bugs), no experience with Void, but I do agree a rolling release is probably best, since a good gaming experience will be high on their priorities, and they'll want all the latest improvements from Valve, some of which are in the kernel itself. For example the latest FUTEX2 patches are staged for kernel 5.16 which will be available around December/January, while Ubuntu based distros won't see it until April (best case if 5.16 is LTS), or next October (5.15 is LTS).

 

KDE Plasma being the easiest DE for someone coming solely from Windows is a bit debatable, I didn't like the default feel of it, and takes me way too long to configure it, when I first used Linux I liked Gnome 2 the most, later budgie, then pop-shell. KDE may still make the most sense though with the Steam Deck using it, and how much I like it there will determine if I give KDE another go as my desktop daily driver.

Even with the upcoming 5.15, the new ntfs3 driver will help substantially with accessing their existing game libraries off a secondary partition, so there's always a tangible benefit to being on the newer version of Kernel.

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2 minutes ago, norgaladir said:

I find Manjaro to be quite stable (as in lack of bugs), no experience with Void, but I do agree a rolling release is probably best, since a good gaming experience will be high on their priorities, and they'll want all the latest improvements from Valve, some of which are in the kernel itself. For example the latest FUTEX2 patches are staged for kernel 5.16 which will be available around December/January, while Ubuntu based distros won't see it until April (best case if 5.16 is LTS), or next October (5.15 is LTS).

I'm looking forward to the futex2 stuff landing, but it hasn't been accepted yet.

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1 hour ago, Foxlet said:

I'm surprised no one mentioned Void Linux, but it would make sense for having a more stable/tested package set due to its single repository layout (community packages are committed directly), while still being bleeding-edge enough to handle modern Linux gaming properly, all while not having the meme status of Arch.

 

KDE Plasma is pretty much the easiest DE choice for someone coming solely from Windows.

i wouldn't recommend anything like void to a new user tbh. Void is definitely an advanced distro, for sure.

What's the worst that could happen, rapid brain death?

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@Alexeygridnev1993  Mint has Chromium..... my kids use it to access their school work, firefox for their private browsing

 

Cinnamon/Edge(?) for newer systems

XFCE for older systems

 

been awhile since i tried Ubuntu itself, but kinda gave up on it after log-in manager and wifi issues.

pop-os i have just moved away from as it seemed to be getting slower/ sluggish on top of not finding the file/directories that help forums were giving for fixes.

open suse i found to be very sluggish

fedora was more sluggish than open suse for me

 

so this thread has amused me somewhat, but everyone to their own needs and requirements..

 

if it works for you great, if not try another...

current main system: as of 1st Jan 2023

motherboard : Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

ram : 16Gig Corsair Vengeance 3600mhz

OS :multi-boot

Video Card : RX 550 4 GIG

Monitor: BENQ 21 inch

 

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6 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You entirely missed my point, I was responding specifically to the fedora suggestion for Linus and Luke, pointing out that it might not be the best choice if the goal is a "painless as possible" transition from Windows out of the box.

 

Changing DEs and all the associated complications is the exact kind of thing someone coming from Windows does NOT want to have to do. 

I covered your point earlier.

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14 hours ago, OldTweaker said:

citation needed!

 

A bit more serious, traditionally what drew a lot a people to apt based distros as obviously Debian and a bit later Ubuntu and all of its derivatives over rpm based distros is exactly apt. And I have had no issues with it in the 15 years that I use apt based distros.

I have no personal experience with dnf. From what I've read it seems to be a big improvement and . But to state that it is much better to me seems unfounded. From what I read on the features the two are very much alike these days. They caught up with apt 😉 


Package management is an interest of mine in its own right, over and above my interest in Linux distros themselves, so if you're interested I'm down to have a deeper discussion in a dedicated thread.

But briefly: I'm sure apt was once better than up2date or urpmi or whatever, but these days there's no area in which it's a leader on a technical level.

These are the main apt warts and defects that come to mind off the top of my head, with explicit comparison to dnf when relevant:

  • apt doesn't have a correct dependency solver by default, even as a fallback (for this you need a real SAT solver), but dnf has one (it uses libsolv from zypper). (you can install alternative solvers for aptitude (and maybe apt?) to use a correct solver on apt-based distros, though)
  • apt's CLI interface is a hodgepodge of separate commands, and the modernized subcommand interface is still incomplete
  • apt's ‘modern’ subcommand interface is incomplete and still seems second-class (complains loudly about being unstable) and is missing the best feature from long-standing alternatives to apt (viz., aptitude's pattern matching)
  • apt's new subcommand interface still doesn't include any tools for managing repositories, which is par for the course with modern subcommand interfaces for high level packaging tools (dnf, zypper, nix, idk)
  • apt's only tooling around package signing is deprecated because it's insecure (modifies a global keyring for whatever repo you want to set up, giving too much trust) but there's no good tooling to replace it, so you have to fuck around with GPG manually (wtf?) and it's been like that for month and months. This makes it really incomplete compared to tools like zypper or dnf
  • apt has no notion at all of package vendor, which is a major advancement in repo management for non-source-based distros. zypper was the first to implement this afaik, but dnf now has it also and maybe so do others.
  • apt has no plugin architecture. dnf has a plugin interface in an easy, high-level language (Python), and a ton of its functionality comes in official ‘core’ plugins, which makes it much more hackable than apt. It has a small ecosystem of useful third-party plugins (like half a dozen or so). (Other ‘competitors’ like nix and zypper also have plugin interfaces, too, although they're generally less successful (i.e., see less use) than dnf's.)
  • apt doesn't support yielding machine-readable output for use in scripting and automation, while JSON is pretty much a standard feature of language-specific package managers by now as well as some competitors from other paradigms, like nix. dnf can give output in XML if you need structured, machine-readable output


And those are just shortcomings of apt in particular. All the way down to the bottom, the Debian packaging stack is cruftier and more bespoke than Fedora's or openSUSE's. (I say that as someone who has created packages from scratch for several distros, including Debian-based ones.)

You can get a good sense of the direction of the recent-ish evolution of high-level package management tools for binary package management systems from this talk comparing Zypper and DNF at openSUSE Conference 2019. It should also make pretty clear how apt has been left behind on this evolutionary path.

None of that is to say that apt is unusable. It basically works, and you can pretty much get what you need done done. It's also not to say that you can't have good experiences on apt-based distros; popular apt-based distros like Debian, Ubuntu, and Pop_OS provide great experiences. But as far as gaps between package managers of similar types go, the gap between apt and dnf is not a small one.

PS: FWIW, I'm not really a partisan in this ‘fight’. I'm not a Fedora/dnf user, and I don't have any negative feelings about Debian/apt (which is not true of me with respect to all distros or package managers!). I think Debian is a hugely important project, and the new subcommand interface is a clear sign that the community is interested in modernizing apt. I hope that effort continues to advance. I just think the present situation is pretty clear.

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@Patrick C. I guess citation given 🙂 

Quite an elaborate and interesting explanation and some good points, thanks. The way to add repo's in apt is indeed cumbersome. The term 'much better' I.M.O is too strong as for all intents and purposes it works quite well, but I do see the point that now maybe DNF may be the one that is ahead. 

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6 hours ago, Slipfox said:

Putting noobs on Arch is generally not a good idea IMHO. I bet the two could probably figure out all the quirks of rolling release but the amount of tinkering you need to do to get an Arch system rolling just makes it not a good starting point.


I was a noob, still am tbh, and I had no issues with manjaro. My own experience contradicts your argument. I had a lot more issues with mint and ubuntu. As a beginner having an nvidia card and usb audio manjaro gave me much less issues. I''m planning on testing fedora soon though. I've tried Pop, and while it's fine for what it is, I got really annoyed with a few thing so I stopped using it. In the end, what ever distro you choose as a beginner (except the obvious ones like vanilla arch) you going to have to learn about the same amount of things to get things running and will have issues here and there that you'll have to figure out. Sort of like learning a language. Whether you go with swedish or italian, one potentially being a little harder than the other one, you're still going to have to learn a new language regardless.

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I think that's some great input.  I use Fedora as well, but that's just because I'm experienced with Red Hat, it's what I use for work. 

 

I like that you haven't over complicated the distros since I think that's one of the biggest reasons new users find it difficult to switch to Linux (all of the choices, and a lot of the Linux community has very strong opinions).  

 

The good news is Linux usage has grown a lot for various purposes, and so there's more forum threads etc online so you can resolve issues faster, and there's a lot of the popular distros are really good, so regardless of what you choose in many cases you'll be just fine. 

 

Once you become familiar with Linux, I'm sure the only time you'll find yourself using Windows is when you absolutely must, like if your company forces you to or your mates are adamant on playing a specific game. 

 

The modularity, adaptability and openness of the platform is really enticing to modern developers and is definitely where modern applications are headed, so it's only matter of time before it ends up becoming a key part of the desktop space. 

 

Finally, if anyone is thinking about becoming a developer or working in IT in any capacity, learning Linux is practically a must.  Modern applications basically depend upon it, knowing how to use and extend the platform is a great plus.  Why not learn it on your home PC! 

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5 hours ago, Patrick C. said:

You can get a good sense of the direction of the recent-ish evolution of high-level package management tools for binary package management systems from this talk comparing Zypper and DNF at openSUSE Conference 2019. It should also make pretty clear how apt has been left behind on this evolutionary path.

It's also interesting to note that openSUSE is on the path to replacing Zypper with DNF and ships DNF as an alternative today.

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6 hours ago, Conan Kudo said:

That's pretty cool! It's good to see some convergence in the adoption of tools like that where possible.

Another Fedora tool I sometimes like to use on non-Fedora distros,where it works beautifully, is dracut, Fedora's initrd image generator. It's included in Debian and derivatives, and that came in handy for me once on Ubuntu when I wanted to mount a special volume before a custom systemd service would run, and I discovered that Debian's initramfs-tools didn't support reading some (I think systemd-related?) mount options from /etc/fstab. So I ripped out initramfs-tools, plugged in dracut, and everything Just Worked™.

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9 hours ago, Diffracted said:


I was a noob, still am tbh, and I had no issues with manjaro. My own experience contradicts your argument.

Manjaro/EndeavourOS/Arco aren't what i'm talking about here. Those are easy to get running since all the actual work is done for you. I'm talking about mainline vanilla arch, which is a bit of a pain to get going the first time around. And this isn't me hating on Arch *or* any Arch-based non-mainline distros, I love Arch, I started out on EndeavourOS and moved to mainline where I am to this day. And Manjaro has it's own issues that aren't necessarily just that it's rolling release. So no, your experience doesn't "contradict" my point.

And besides, the best outcome that we can get out of this challenge is people letting go of the preconceived notions that Linux requires you to have advanced knowledge in computers and programming and that Linux is unstable and doesn't "Just Work". Quite literally, the best outcome is people letting go of the notion that Linux is entirely like Arch. Because that's what most people think of when they think "Linux". So having the distro that gets shown off to the world be Arch, alongside all of it's quirks, would be kind of against the point, don't you think?

What's the worst that could happen, rapid brain death?

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10 hours ago, OldTweaker said:

@Patrick C. I guess citation given 🙂 

Quite an elaborate and interesting explanation and some good points, thanks. The way to add repo's in apt is indeed cumbersome. The term 'much better' I.M.O is too strong as for all intents and purposes it works quite well, but I do see the point that now maybe DNF may be the one that is ahead. 

Thanks for taking the time to read through all that, especially since bits of it were hastily and sloppily written, despite its length.

If you're curious about some of the upstream issues with Debian packaging and how Linux distro packaging as a whole could stand to improve, somewhat disgruntled ex-Debian developer Michael Stapelberg's exit letter and subsequent work on package management research are super interesting, imo.

Since I've said some unflattering things about Debian tooling I feel obligated to say something true and kind about Debian: at the same time as apt lags behind some similar tools like dnf, Debian is leading the way on upstreaming patches for reproducible builds, which (1) is a ton of work and (2) benefits everyone. It's in the interest of all Linux users for the Debian project to thrive and grow, including developers and users of ‘competing’ Linux distros. We should be glad that one of the oldest surviving community-powered Linux distros continues to push the ecosystem forward for all of us, sometimes in one area, sometimes in another.

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1 hour ago, Slipfox said:

Manjaro/EndeavourOS/Arco aren't what i'm talking about here. Those are easy to get running since all the actual work is done for you. I'm talking about mainline vanilla arch [...]

Your opinion about manjaro, the people behind it and their decisions aside. I was talking abut manjaro specifically in that comment, and that comment was what you argued against when you said arch was a bad idea. You can't argue against something I haven't said or insert a straw man to make it fit. =P You said it yourself, manjaro is easy to get running, so aside from your opinion about them and the potentially negative aspects of their decisions I don't really see your point since the user experience is what is being tested here in the end. Also you're not forced to update on the regular on a rolling release distro, so if the user (in this case pretty tech savvy linux beginners) know those risks, I think it'll be fine, don't you? Besides, programs like timeshift exist for a reason. It has worked the best for me compared to other popular distros, that's just my experience with my hardware. More experienced and knowledgeable peoples view on the matter is very important and I'm still very much a n00b, but that's why I felt my point of view was still legitimate and relevant in this case.

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5 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

Your opinion about manjaro, the people behind it and their decisions aside. I was talking abut manjaro specifically in that comment, and that comment was what you argued against when you said arch was a bad idea.

I still maintain that Arch is not a good first distro subset for new users because of the rolling release factor and how terminal-centric it is compared to something like Ubuntu.

 

7 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

You said it yourself, manjaro is easy to get running, so aside from your opinion about them and the potentially negative aspects of their decisions I don't really see your point since the user experience is what is being tested here in the end.

Easy to get running =/= easy to use and maintain in the long run. That's my issue with something like Manjaro as a new user distro, Arch is just not built to be friendly to people who don't understand the shell. I'm going to be borrowing a few points from the doc i linked a few times over this conversation, so bear with me. The rolling release model is not built to be easy to maintain for someone who has no idea what they're doing, it's built to be easy for power linux users to maintain, and rolling release is going to be inherently more unstable than something like debian, ubuntu, or Pop.

With something like rolling release, you're going to have to deal with dependencies *a lot*, Packages are going to want to use the latest versions of their dependencies on Arch or other rolling release model systems all the time. This means that the suggestion of:

15 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

(...)you're not forced to update on the regular on a rolling release distro,

doesn't really work, since (especially on the aur) you're going to need to update regularly, at least once a week imo. This applies somewhat less on Manjaro since they hold back packages for like a week for "testing", which isn't necessarily a good thing, since it sort of defeats the purpose of rolling release.

Secondly as for why Manjaro isn't good for new users, it doesn't teach proper usage of the AUR. As you are surely aware, the AUR is the most powerful toolkit an arch user has for programs, essentially acting as a public third party repo of arch programs. Manjaro ships with the Pamac AUR helper iirc, and GUI AUR helpers are, while an easy to use tool, are an awful way to learn the workings of the AUR. You need to read PKGBUILDs before building programs off the AUR, lest your OS install become borked.

This all circles around to the point I'm trying to make:

31 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

so if the user (in this case pretty tech savvy linux beginners) know those risks, I think it'll be fine, don't you?

The user will not know the risks if they use Manjaro, since Manjaro creates shortcuts and workarounds for problems that should be solved by just learning how to maintain a system by experience. Hiding all of the problems and things you need to do to maintain an Arch install behind GUIs and "just not updating your system regularly" will harm a user's usage habits in the long run. This can and will harm the UX of the distro, since having to deal with quirks and issues related to Arch without having prior knowledge of the intricacies of Arch will quickly frustrate a user to writing off Arch entirely and distrohopping.

And I'm not saying that any Arch based distro is out of the question. If need be, EndeavourOS is an amazing Arch based distro that, unlike something like Manjaro, does not attempt to hide the intricacies of Arch behind GUI frontends and workarounds/shortcuts. It really does just skip the first few steps of starting an Arch system, and then leaves you to do the actual maintaining. And Arch is still a good distro, I just don't think it should be any users first, second, or even third distro.

What's the worst that could happen, rapid brain death?

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On 10/5/2021 at 5:47 PM, flindeberg said:

I would have a look at Manjaro due to nvidia-all (https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all) so you easily can keep your drivers up to date (with pacman, the Arch package-manager), and downgrade with ease if needed. You essentially need to clone the repo, run "makepkg -si", select the version you want and DKMS (https://github.com/dell/dkms, DKMS helps you with managing messy kernel modules, i.e., a step towards "just work".), and you are ready to go.

 

There is an auto-installer for nvidia for Fedora (https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/t0xic0der/nvidia-auto-installer-for-fedora/) but I have heard mixed things about it. 

 

The strength of pacman / makepkg and the AUR is that the line of closed and open source becomes a bit blurred, which is good for the user in most cases, even if the more principled Linux-users might consider it a "bad thing".

I think "just want it to work" is not that far off, but the big "use-wayland-as-default-on-nvidia-without-issues" is a bit away, and once that hurdle is clear the "just work" part becomes way easier.

 

(AMD / Radeon cards pretty much just work with the lastest Mesa-stack, and Nvidia cards kinda do as well, but the open source nouveau nvidia driver cannot clock Nvidia cards, so even though the nouveau driver works well enough on a performance per MHz-basis you need to use the proprietary Nvidia driver to make the graphics card go out of what is essentially power save mode.)

Thanks for the information! 

 

In the end I went for Fedora been running Fedora 34 from 5th Oct and working well. 

 

The nvautoinstall worked okay (after making sure secure boot was off), the only gripe I had was that even for F34 they used the F33 repo for cuda (raised issue on his github to should get resolved) I fixed this manually so all good. 

 

Other than that loving it, having all the Linux tools (Ansible, Git, etc) without having to use WSL is great and the fact I can install applications with a one line command, no more multiple menus just to install is just amazing. 

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@Slipfox "The user will not know the risks if they use Manjaro". Isn't that also true for not just arch but linux as a whole? No matter what distro you use you will inevitably be forced to learn a few things to avoid borking your system. So if you tell someone about those risk, to not be lured into a false sense of security when using manjaro for instance, then surely that must mean that person then are aware of them and can approach it in a more informed manner? I think I'm too tired to wrap my head around much atm. Anyway. You make good points and I can see how you've arrived at that conclusion, not from understanding the ins and outs of exactly everything you mentioned but I think you explained it well. In the end all I really wished for was for them to have different experiences of linux. I feel it would be a bit boring if they both were using the same distro and or de.

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1 minute ago, Diffracted said:

Isn't that also true for not just arch but linux as a whole? No matter what distro you use you will inevitably be forced to learn a few things to avoid borking your system.

Well, sure, you will have to learn *some* things to avoid system borking, but it's too a much lesser extent on, say, Ubuntu, than Arch or it's derivatives.

2 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

So if you tell someone about those risk, to not be lured into a false sense of security when using manjaro for instance, then surely that must mean that person then are aware of them and can approach it in a more informed manner?

Perhaps. but at that point you'd be much better off learning Arch on something like EndeavourOS.

4 minutes ago, Diffracted said:

In the end all I really wished for was for them to have different experiences of linux. I feel it would be a bit boring if they both were using the same distro and or de.

Oh of course. If they're both using like, Ubuntu, or Pop!OS, that would just be pretty boring. But I'd rather them both use like, LM or something and both have a good experience with the desktop then both use Manjaro and have to deal with Arch's nonsense without prior knowledge, thus giving them a bad taste of Linux and then possibly inferring that bad taste onto the audience.

What's the worst that could happen, rapid brain death?

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3 hours ago, Slipfox said:

The rolling release model is not built to be easy to maintain for someone who has no idea what they're doing, it's built to be easy for power linux users to maintain, and rolling release is going to be inherently more unstable than something like debian, ubuntu, or Pop.

This is something Arch users like to say to handwave away the fact that Arch Linux is a finicky distro to maintain.

openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian Sid are rolling releases which are pretty much rock solid compared to Arch. NixOS Unstable is a rolling release which is categorically immune to the kinds of dependency management problems that leave Arch users with broken systems if they don't upgrade frequently enough, and it never requires users to read and follow instructions for manual fixups. Most rolling release distros don't have Arch-like problems.

 

3 hours ago, Slipfox said:

With something like rolling release, you're going to have to deal with dependencies *a lot*, Packages are going to want to use the latest versions of their dependencies on Arch or other rolling release model systems all the time.

This, too, projects aspects of Arch Linux onto other distros. ‘Having to deal with dependencies’ here almost certainly means ‘when you try to build from the AUR, packages are going to complain about not having new enough versions of their dependencies’. But the entire AUR phenomenon is an Arch problem (and yes, it is essentially a problem):

1. Arch's actual package repositories are very small, so there are a ton of things Arch users want to use but which aren't available in the distribution

2. Arch is a niche distro with its own packaging format, so most third-party vendors don't package anything for it

3. Repackaged proprietary software isn't suitable for inclusion in the distribution itself

And so for a huge portion of the software that people actually want to use, Arch users rely on a glorified pastebin full of source packages, with no build infrastructure or distribution model. The pastebin masquerading as a repository is also unsupported by Arch's own package management tools, and so Arch users resort to a host of barely- and often un-maintained ‘wrapper scripts’ that pull down package recipes and prepare environments for ingestion by the actual Arch package management tools. Shamefully and astonishingly, this isn't a temporary workaround for missing functionality in pacman, but a permanent state of affairs!

If the software that Arch users actually want and rely on as end users were integrated into the distro in the same normal, bare minimum way as for other distros, downstream rolling release distros wouldn't present this kind of ‘having to deal with dependencies’ problem at all.

And it gets worse, too! Even other distros under the same paradigm actually have tooling for pulling packages from bleeding edge releases into whatever you're running. OpenSUSE's Open Build Service, for example, makes it easy to ‘fork’ a package from the rolling release and build it against an older release, including tracking future updates to that package, building it automatically, and hosting it in a repo for you. Pulling in additional dependencies that package may need is also little work. Administering a rolling release lagging behind openSUSE Tumbleweed would make ‘dealing with dependencies’ an entirely different kind of problem from the case with Arch downstreams, and it would also make it easy to solve each build once and for everyone, by actually storing built artifacts in a repository other users can take advantage of when you're done.

When comparing Arch to distros with package management in the functional paradigm like NixOS and Guix, the difference between Arch Linux quirks and ‘rolling release problems’ becomes even clearer. Any NixOS user can install literally any package from the latest rolling release of the distro at any time, no matter what version they're on, and there are no dependency conflicts to manage, ever.

There's nothing special about rolling releases. What is special is that Arch without the AUR is a desert, and the AUR at any given time is tightly coupled to the contemporaneous state of the vanilla Arch repos, which causes problems for downstream distros that don't match its release cadence. And that's 0% a rolling release problem and 100% an Arch problem.

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On 10/1/2021 at 9:17 PM, mail929 said:

If this happens to catch your attention hi @LinusTech and @Slick. I've been using Linux since high school (10 years now) and have experience with almost all the distros on your poll. First off I'd like to give some input on the challenge. I think it's awesome that you're doing this and bringing more attention to Linux and the improvements the community has made in the last decade or so. That being said if you choose the wrong distro you could make all of Linux look really bad. Every distro is different and targeted to a different audience. To explain I will give a brief explanation of each distro on the poll, but I trust @GabenJr will be a good filter for you.

 

Most of these distros have several different versions with different UIs or "desktop environments". For each of them I would recommend the "normal/standard" version.

 

Ubuntu

This is my number one recommendation for both of you it gives the best combination of ease of use, stability, and freshness. Ubuntu is the only distro on the poll created by an actual dedicated corporation with hundreds of employees, plus community contributors. I run Ubuntu on most my machines at work, on my spare machines, and Ubuntu Server on my homelab.

 

I have to disagree and agree.  

AGREED UBUNTU is what Linus should go with.  It is the most popular for a reason.  It is the closest you'll find to "it just works" without the possibility that exist with POP OS that it "just works"... on certain hardware.  (Unless Linus goes all in and just buys a Thelio system). 

 

Key and crucial is for his daily driver, as a new user he should go not for the most cutting edge release but for the latest LTS release.  This means if he decides to build a new PC for it, some of the newest things might not work.  For example.  I was never able to get TB 3 to work on my old motherboard with Ubuntu LTS.  Yet TB4 works like a charm with Ubuntu 21.04.*

 

Disagree.  Linus is a Windows user and should consider the variant of Ubuntu known as KUBUNTU.  Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop and is very Windows like in all the good ways while clearly being its own thing.  The standard Gnome desktop of Ubuntu is very much MacOS like.  Kubuntu has just as much support as Ubuntu and is an official release not just a community project.   It has all the tools he needs in a fully integrated desktop look and feel. 

 

For a browser MS Edge for Linux does everything like it was on Windows.  

 

* A key point to make is that if Luke or Linus change distros that is not a fail on this challenge.  Linux users "distro hop" all of the time.  So @GabenJr  you might want to advise them to set up their /Home on a separate drive from their OS drive.  This way if they decide they hate whatever distro they start with, all is not lost.   Lots of Linux users do that.  Also let them RTFM like the rest of us did.  That's part of the joy of using Linux. 

 

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43 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The standard Gnome desktop of Ubuntu is very much MacOS like. 

I keep seeing g this in a thread and it makes me wonder if these people have actually used Mac OS

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