this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (9 children)

It's awful for most new users, though. They don't even know what the options are, how can they choose anything?

Not every new user is the same but if they are absolute newbies they should start with a user friendly distro, which Arch definitely isn't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I fully agree that it's bad for users who aren't that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I love Manjaro :'(

It's like arch except it doesn't break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it's the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don't know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.

But I understand that you just can't advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn't ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run "pacman -Syu --noconfirm" willynilly.

I still wouldn't recommend it as the first distro as it doesn't hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don't know what I did wrong tho.

Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.

What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.

In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that's the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.

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