I started my Linux journey in the 90's with Red Hat Halloween. I'm sick and tired of troubleshooting and Debian based distros have been fully painless. Those of you learning your craft should absolutely try to manage things like Arch, just leave my old and tired ass be and I'll sit here with my old kernel and cheer you on.
Yup - if your goal is to use Linux to learn how Linux works and how it's all put together then Arch is awesome. If you've got stuff to do and Linux is a tool to reach another goal, not so much. I like my tools to be stable, reliable and predictable.
Whenever you get bored:
~$ sudo docker run -it --rm archlinux bash
[root@5452124778b3 /]# pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core downloading...
extra downloading...
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
this coming from someone who used podman for years for hours for development every day.
podman is cancer, it's way better to use docker rootless.
podman will break if you sneeze at it, and the only recourse you will find in github is to podman system reset which stinks of bad programming.
docker rootless never breaks, podman may die if you cancel a download because the devs were either inexperienced or bad and instead of protecting the state with atomic filesystem operations they leave dirty files in working directories which make it fail in random and unexpected ways.
Wait...is that all it takes to install arch in a docker container? Does this include a GUI or is it for terminal Haxxorz only?
Terminal only. Though in theory you should be able to expose a port to access an X or Wayland session remotely to use a GUI, but I haven't tried this.
Stable in the distro context refers to how often packages change. Sid (which is the one that's broken in that) is not that. The other 2 are stable in that sense, but older software can sometimes be shaky on newer hardware.
I really like Debian, but for some reason my not-new-laptop didn't liked it. Issues with suspend, the WiFi and the NVME drive made me to nuke it last Wednesday and in its place I installed Fedora, which seems to play better with the hardware. At least I don't have problems with it in my desktop.
If you're running Debian stable, your hardware was probably too new for the kernel. Unless they changed their development paradigm when I last ran it, stable is always 2-3 years behind mainline Linux software aside from security patches. It's one of the key reasons why it's so stable.
See the on the official wiki.
I mean, my laptop is a Dell from 2018-2019 with a 8th gen Core i5, so I don't think is too "new" 🤷🏻♂️.
That's surprising. Dell should have good Linux driver support, seeing as they offer Ubuntu pre-installed in some markets.
Saying that, we have work issued Dell Precision mobile workstations and there are constantly hardware and driver issues under Windows, where you'd expect things to work just fine...
- the internal microphone not working (handy for meetings!)
- the 3.5mm combo jack not working (ah, great, no backup for when the internal microphone stops working)
- the battery handshake failing, causing the machine to not charge, stay stuck in a low performance mode, and constantly pop up Windows notifications saying the battery is not genuine
- the presence sensor locking the laptop while you're literally working it
Now I use a USB headset, disabled the presence sensor, and reboot the laptop repeatedly until the battery is detected as genuine
A testing/sid hybrid is awesome on my hardware. These guides are pretty useful for keeping things sane:
Specifically, OpenBasedSecureDistro, with a desktop environment, for gaming
Please send help, thanks
I would advise against any rolling distro if you use Nvidia drivers and CUDA. When I was using Tumbleweed it kept breaking with kernel updates. This was common in the forums. I had to pin my kernel to an older version to fix it. It was not ideal.
I've come full circle back to Debian stable. I'm sure at some point I'll need a newer package and be frustrated again. When the time comes, perhaps I'll try distrobox if I can't easily backport it.
I have been running Manjaro(I know not arch) and have been happy with it. But I will definitely give tumbleweed a look. I like knowing I have the latest versions of things.
well tested rolling, you literally have the arch update wall of terminal every week but it is a bit more stable with great tools like snapper should anything go a bit wrong
I love opensuse and I've switched back to it from arch on two of my three computers, but the one thing I miss is the speed of pacman. I'll be working on something with an arch user and need to install something new and by the time zypper has refreshed the repos, pacman will have completely finished the whole installation