Time for a new flavour of linux

[canseco]

Oh, I wasn't aware that Manjaro had stable repos as well. That seems to be the main difference to arch in terms of packaging. I'm not convinced it'll save you your dependency troubles entirely, since the packages and how they depend on each other is a clone of arch I think, but if they don't update as often at least you won't have to tackle that quite as often.

I was under the impression that Manjaro is just Arch with an installer. Seems it's more that that, at least these days.

That's Antergos, Manjaro has stable (default), testing and unstable repos.
There's not dependency troubles on stable since they are reported and fixed before on the other two.

And about Linux distros, most are dead because they were personal ones or changed name overtime, but when it comes to the desktop, only a few are worth it.

But there a lot of specialized distros that make sense, like Raspbian, SteamOS, KXStudio, Super Zaxxon, etc.

Btw, Manjaro is number one on distrowatch, not that is matters much, but funny,

 

[spud42]

have you seen or tried this? https://www.trueos.org/

 

[levi]

have you seen or tried this? https://www.trueos.org/

That's apparently a rebranding of PC-BSD, which is fair enough. Not a big fan of its DE being based on Qt though.

 

[Grench]

So far it looks like Manjaro is the distro for me: Arch without the system breaking updates. I'd never even heard of it until mentioned here, so thanks for that.
I managed to get my system more or less stable. I plan on buying a new hard drive this weekend and trying some installs early next week.

Be sure to report back on how it goes?

 

[Askarus]

I have Arch on my main Laptop and installed Manjaro on my old one for fun.

Arch broke my Laptop several times. Mostly because of the Nvidia driver.
The last 2 Semester I did not run an update for months simply because it was too risky for me. I did need my Computer for daily work. An Arch Update was simply too risky for me.

When it breaks again and repairing would require major trouble I'll switch to Manjaro as well.

However I have one mayor concern with Manjaro.
It's an other bloatware Linux distribution.
The minimal Installer did not work for me so I used the full package.
Xfce looked strange and over animated. It hat Steam installed. My custom mouse cursor will transform to that finger cursor in some programs.
Popups when there are package updates.

It's so nice to have a plain Arch with nothing but what I installed.

But as Arch is so unstable I'd not recommend it and most likely I won't install it again.

I still wonder how there are people telling me they have never had an issue with Arch.

 

[EvilDragon]

Running ArchLinux on all my computers and haven't had any breaks after an update for a few years now.
No idea what exactly you're issue is - I'm running testing and it works fine.

Sure, sometimes with package updates you need to manually remove old versions before a new package can be installed, but that's it

I've had more problems with Ubuntu distribution updates (with older versions though, I haven't used it for a while) than I had with ArchLinux.

Sent from my Moto Z using Tapatalk

 

[fahrstuhl]

I find Arch relatively stable and easy to use once it's set up. I started recommending Antergos (basically a graphical Arch installer with a nice pacman GUI frontend) as people's first Linux distro because once you have a desktop environment running, it's pretty easy to use.

Arch broke my Laptop several times. Mostly because of the Nvidia driver.

Installing nvidia-dkms instead of nvidia solved this for me. My Arch has been stable for a few years by now and even survived being moved to completely new devices without reinstalling.

I still wonder how there are people telling me they have never had an issue with Arch.

I've never had an issue with Arch that I couldn't solve Which I can't say about many other distros.

Running ArchLinux on all my computers and haven't had any breaks after an update for a few years now.

I'm not that brave though, all my servers run Debian.

Sure, sometimes with package updates you need to manually remove old versions before a new package can be installed, but that's it

Yeah, it's a really good idea to subscribe to the Arch Linux news for stuff like this.

 

[levi]

Arch broke my Laptop several times. Mostly because of the Nvidia driver.

This might well be the common factor. I'm intel graphics on all my machines here and never had a problem I wasn't prewarned about on my rss feeds. NVidia binary blob installer I assume, rather than nouveaux or anything?

 

[Askarus]

This might well be the common factor. I'm intel graphics on all my machines here and never had a problem I wasn't prewarned about on my rss feeds. NVidia binary blob installer I assume, rather than nouveaux or anything?

Yes, binary.
I would use the open source driver the next time.
But as long as it works I will not dare to touch it and try to switch drivers.
I did this once on my old Laptop and it was a very bad idea.

 

[WizardStan]

Sure, sometimes with package updates you need to manually remove old versions before a new package can be installed, but that's it

Yeah, that's happened a few times. This time the "old version" that needed to be removed was ffmpeg which is depended upon by a lot of things: remove ffmpeg, you need to remove so many things.
Have you done an update in the last few days? It was updated on Tuesday, you might have the same problems I did.

I've never had an issue with Arch that I couldn't solve

It's not that I *can't* solve it, it's the straw that broke the camel's back. Every time there's an update I need to fix a few things. This time it broke so many things I spent hours fixing it and it's still in a partial mess. Steam doesn't work, some USB devices don't load: I'm sure I could fix the rest of them as well but it's literally faster and easier to just install something new.

 

[HelenF]

On a previous computer I tried to use the proprietary NVidia drivers on Fedora, and it tended to break things. Later on I just used Noveau and did without 3D. My current computer just has Intel graphics, on purpose.

 

[EvilDragon]

Yeah, that's happened a few times. This time the "old version" that needed to be removed was ffmpeg which is depended upon by a lot of things: remove ffmpeg, you need to remove so many things.
Have you done an update in the last few days? It was updated on Tuesday, you might have the same problems I did.

Easy solution:

pacman -Rdd ffmpeg
pacman -Syu
pacman -S ffmpeg

This removes ffmpeg (without dependencies), updates the system and then reinstalls ffmpeg (with all missing depencies).

 

[JDTAY]

pacman: Updates your Arch Linux properly and eats ghosts. Is there anything he can't do?

 

[levi]

Also USB devices breaking after an update sounds like you need to do a reboot. Any time the kernel updates on disc, the one running in RAM loses all of its unloaded drivers because they move to the new kernel version number on disc. Now I think I heard something about inplace kernel updates are coming soon, but for the time being I can't even mount a CD iso file after a kernel update, I found the other day.

 

[trix]

I've been using Gentoo on all of my computers (except Pandora and Rpi2) for over 10 years and highly recommend it.

It's a lot like Arch except that by default it compiles everything it can from source, automatically. The Portage package manager is utter brilliance and my favorite feature of Gentoo by far. It's similar (on purpose) to the BSD Ports system but, of course, for Linux instead.

Packages on Gentoo are bleeding edge (if that's what you want) and due to compiling everything from source, are easy to modify and usually extremely stable. I don't recommend using the unstable repo globally, but rather on a per-package basis. The only time upgrading is ever a pain is when it's been years since I've updated the system (some old computers I have are very rarely used). Even then, however, it's never too much trouble to get them updated. The worst is when GCC and/or GLibC are updated, but when that happens there's usually a news post with instructions to enable a smooth upgrade. No RSS needed, those messages are put on your screen the moment you update the package manager and are retrievable from the regular console mail reader.

Anyone who likes Arch but wants to try something else should definitely give Gentoo a spin.

 

[WizardStan]

This removes ffmpeg (without dependencies), updates the system and then reinstalls ffmpeg (with all missing depencies).

Yes, that's literally what I did, force the update.
My system is now incredibly unstable. I don't know why. I shouldn't have to figure out why.

 

[ible]

i tried but didn't like pacman because -S seems like it should search, not install something... i dunno, maybe i'm languagist....

 

[levi]

S is for Sync. It will do a search if you do a -Ss though. It seems to me the initial capital letter to the pacman option doesn't actually do anything, just tells it in which context to interpret any letters that follow.

 

[ible]

why would "Sync" install a package? seems like that should update an already-installed package. i guess i appreciate apt's readability...

apt search ffmpeg
apt install ffmpeg
apt update
apt upgrade

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s09.html

 

[cuantar]

I've been using Gentoo on all of my computers (except Pandora and Rpi2) for over 10 years and highly recommend it.

I second this recommendation. I now use Funtoo for new installs, and have migrated my most-used Gentoo systems to it also. (I have even used Funtoo on my pandora since 2012; I built a VM to compile everything with qemu so I didn't have to do it on the pandora.)

Man. I wish my pandora display still worked (the LCD cable connector on the motherboard broke). I used it daily up to a few months ago. Was quite happy with the Gentoo-based system.