I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Most of them.
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Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it’s surprisingly bad at that.
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Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
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Opensuse world - I’ve only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn’t really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn’t click and I’ve left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
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Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I’ve never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.
I’ve got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel
~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with
I highly enjoy using EndeavourOS. But then again, I wouldn’t classify it as a spinoff, it’s pretty much vanilla Arch, but purple.
Now Manjaro on the other hand… Tried it and understood why so many people don’t like it within the first week.
Mind to elaborate a little bit more about the Manjaro problem? I am driving it since a couple of years without any issue but I keep hearing this… now I am afraid :)
I hope it works for you forever. I am not going to get in an argument with the other Manjaro users here that will come to argue with you.
Just keep in mind that most of the people warning you away from Manjaro have a story that basically sums up as “I used to love Manjaro until, one day, it totally broke on me. Now I won’t touch it.” Sadly, this includes me. Will you join us one day? I hope not.
Keep using it if it works for you.
Manjaro detractors are usually:
- People who do stuff they shouldn’t, like using non-recommended kernel or driver versions or replace critical system components from AUR, then blame it on the distro when stuff breaks.
- People who don’t understand how AUR works and think that Manjaro holding back binary packages for a couple of weeks has any effect on AUR (which is built from source…)
- People who can’t get over the times when they didn’t renew their certs or when they accidentally DDoS’ed the AUR. It doesn’t matter if the distro is good or not. Those instances of carelessness should be held against it forever.
- People who can’t stand the fact it’s a commercial distro.
- People who can’t stand the thought of any Arch-based distro that dares to do anything different from Arch (other than make the install easier, that one seems to be acceptable for some reason; but there are more extreme people who dislike that too).
I am trying to think of how to respond to this without being a jerk.
Let me skip to the end. Until very recently, I thought of Manjaro users as innocents that just did not understand the risk. Like islanders living next to a volcano that had never erupted in their lifetime.
I still view most Manjaro users that way. Manjaro defenders though I now think of as dog owners whose animals have bitten multiple times. When told, the owner insists that “my dog would never do that” or “if it did, you must have done something wrong”. I am done arguing with those people. All I can do is warn others that this dog has bitten several of us and you may not want to enter that yard. If you do, who knows, the dog may be friendly. Or not. Again, all I can tell you is that many of us have scars. Use that information as you will.
Most “Manjaro detractors” I have encountered have years of experience with both Manjaro and other Arch distros. Their tales come from experience. When they share their cautionary tales, there are often Manjaro defenders whose best defence is just to deny that what the “detractors” are saying ( about their own experience ) is real.
My core question for the defenders would be, if it is our fault, why do we only encounter the problems on Manjaro?
Let’s go through the bullets above one by one:
- I never did that on Manjaro. I probably do it more on EOS. Why only problems on Manjaro?
- why does my lack of knowledge of how the AUR works only break things on Manjaro?
- this bullet is the best. It admits that Manjaro has repeatedly broken things but we should not hold it against it. Literally this is saying that “Manjaro breaks things” is wrong because, while it does, we should just get over it. Hilarious.
- how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
- how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
I got in a lengthy back and forth with a Manjaro fan the other day where I repeatedly related the ways that Manjaro used to break on me and how that does not happen for me on vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. They just kept coming back telling me that it could not have happened and, if I thought it could, that I did not understand how the AUR works. It was insane. Basically, this guy could not follow what I was saying to him. His response to his inability to understand the scenario that I was describing was to insult my intelligence and expertise.
Look loser. I don’t care if you believe me that your dog bites. I will continue to warn people and they can decide if they want to risk it or not.
Isn’t it funny how none of the people who claim that Manjaro “just broke” on them can recall what the problem was? They can’t point at a bug report. It’s nothing they did, naturally (they’re “experienced” users, after all). It just broke.
Meanwhile, it never broke for me or others, in years of use, with dozens of AUR packages installed. So yeah. I think I’ll stick to concrete evidence like a rational person, thanks.
What’s the relation between opensuse and microsoft?
In 2014 some wrote that there is none https://forums.opensuse.org/t/what-relationship-between-opensuse-and-microsoft/104583/5
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Honestly everything besides Debian and Arch after distro hopping for years.
Anything that isn’t Arch.
- Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
- Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
- openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
- Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
- Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
- Debian’s packages are too old.
- Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
- The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won’t consider trying:
- Gentoo is too much work.
- Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
- I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
Removed by mod
All of them, so I’m still on Windows
Yes officer, this heretic right here.
NIXOS is definitely not for me. The documentation sucks and there are less cumbersome ways to restore a system.
Honestly, if you’re not using nix to deploy systems or need it to create reproducible environments across systems, then NixOS is a bit overkill.
I want to use NixOS for servers and embedded systems as well, so I run it on my laptop. But the user experience gives Gentoo a run for it’s money for being the most finnicky bastard in the distro world. They would both contend if there was a Razzy award for usability.
Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability
then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷♀️
As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.
I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don’t wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.
I daily drive Fedora, but I’ve used Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, and more. Once you get used to how Linux works, distro doesn’t really matter that much aside from edge case distros that operate totally differently like Nix. I chose Fedora because I like the dnf package manager.
The only distro I don’t like is Ubuntu. I had to setup a Linux VM at work so I figured Ubuntu would be a good choice for that. Firefox is painfully slow to open because of Snap, so I uninstall it and run “apt install firefox” which Ubuntu overrides and installs the Snap again.
Fuck. That. Deleted the VM and installed Debian instead.
Arch: Arch
Ubuntu (and downstreams): Canonical
Enjoying Fedora. Find Debian (and downstreams) pretty solid as well.
