I use Windows btw

  • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    273·
    1 year ago

    This sort of stuff always makes me wonder…WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ALL USING YOUR OS FOR?. All I want my OS to do is hold my files, execute my programs and stay the hell out of my way. What could people possibly be doing with their OS that makes version and distro wars worth more than two seconds of your life? Its like arguing about which calculator or plain text editor is best. I dont care. It adds the numbers, it changes the letters, as long as it isnt doing anything else: who cares.

    • nottheengineer@feddit.deEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      as long as it isnt doing anything else: who cares.

      That’s a big part of the distro discussion. Ubuntu for example forces snaps down your throat if you don’t pay attention, which usually leads to issues down the line.

      Some people are more extreme in that regard and want their system to do absolutely nothing they haven’t explicitly configured. And there’s a distro for everyone.

      • jrs100000@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        How often does that happen to you? Im almost 20 years on Linux full time and it hasnt to me once. I had a wifi driver go out after an update once and Nvida drivers twice. Ive had to roll back a kernal upgrade exactly one time. Those are the only problems and each one took like ten minutes to troubleshoot and fix.

        • sphericth0r@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, if you tend to use your servers for pretty vanilla uses you may not have encountered it much. Once you get into the deep end, it gets deep quick.

        • Celivalg@iusearchlinux.fyi
          1·
          1 year ago

          Same thing as people arguing about their golf clubs, pointless yes, but distracting…

          Most people in the distro wars know it’s pointless and that a tool is a tool, but measuring dicks is as old as humanity and when flipping your dong out wasn’t deemed appropriate anymore, people started arguing about distros

          • mainframegremlin@programming.dev
            3·
            1 year ago

            It’s pretty memed on at this point (arch users, gentoo users, NixOS et. al) but I’d make the point - truly without being pedantic - sometimes you just want stuff the way you want them. Should everybody deal with portage on a daily basis? God no. Is it a viable option for folks to keep their build in check and know exactly what’s going on down to their flags/libs? Absolutely. Same reasons with why some folks jive with the AUR.

            It’s all about finding use case, just like any piece of tech. Yes there’s dick measuring and all else that comes with that, but there’s a good amount of merit to “I like how this distro revolves around x, it makes sense to me so it’s easier for me to maintain”. If those are some of the things that get Linux on the daily driver aspect, I’m all with it.

    • Daqu@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Its like arguing about which calculator or plain text editor is best.

      it’s obviously emacs

    • z00s@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The less important something is, the more people will argue over it.

      See: high school elections, car brands, toilet paper orientation

      • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        That can be nice, but if I actually care about new features in a program Im compiling the RC manually. Otherwise its just more frequent 50GB downloads for some imperceptible incremental change to CUPS and Libre Office.

  • Joosl@feddit.deEnglish
    242·
    1 year ago

    Would be true if canonical didn’t screw up so much lately. Fedora is the go to for many now

  • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Ubuntu ain’t what it used to be. If you want a simple distro nowadays just go straight to the source with Debian. There’s no real benefit to going with Ubuntu anymore, and community distros are just a safer bet. Corporate distros aren’t your friend.

    • GhostsAreShitty@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’m very happy with debian. So many applications ship a .deb, and you don’t have to deal with the Canonical bullshit.

      • cevn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yea it sorta just works and has a lot of community support. Imo the easiest of the distros which is not a bad thing. Turn off snaps and it basically is golden. Never needed backups in like 10 years because I know how to fix everything. The only thing that fucks up at this point is Nvidia but same thing has happened to me on Fedora.

    • veng@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      What about with a laptop where you can’t disable secure boot? Ubuntu works with it ootb, very few other distros do.

      • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I don’t actually think there is literally no scenario where Ubuntu makes sense, especially if someone else is limiting your options. For the record though, I think Fedora has gotten to be a better Ubuntu then Ubuntu, and it works with secure boot out of the box.

    • KingOfPotatoes@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      So does debian not have like 4 years old packages anymore in stable or do I have to live in bleeding edge unstable?

      • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Debian and Ubuntu LTS are both ~2 year cycles, but Debian has traditionally been better than Ubuntu at picking up security fixes

        If you sign up for Ubuntu Pro, they might be as good as Debian, now, but I haven’t checked

        If you want faster than that, something other than Debian makes sense

      • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        There was just a new release, so nothing that old for now, but by the time the next release comes around this one will be getting long in the tooth, no doubt. Debian isn’t for everyone, but if you need the latest version as a native app then you’re not any better off with Ubuntu at this point. Debian is stable and secure and you can use flatpaks, appimages, or even snaps if you’re feeling nasty to get any apps that you really need to be up to date. That’s not what everyone wants, but for those people I’d recommend something like Arch, Fedora, or OpenSUSE, not Ubuntu. Ubuntu has just been neglecting the desktop for a while now, and it shows. They were the best once. Now everyone has passed them.

      • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Oh yeah, Debian is such a poser distro that people only use to sound smart. I brag about how I managed to pull off a full Debian installation all the time. Memes can never, ever under any circumstances end up out of date or anything.

        Edit in response to your edit: Canonical has been neglecting the desktop version of Ubuntu for years now. They’ve pulled in some improvements from other distros, so technically it is better, but the only thing they’ve contributed to themselves are snaps, and even that’s just hand-me-downs from server and IoT. The rest of the desktop Linux world has moved on. The things Ubuntu did better than anyone else ten years ago just aren’t special anymore. You can like what you like, but Ubuntu is no longer the undisputed king of straightforward, user-friendly, and low maintenance.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          BTW keep in mind this is !linuxmemes@lemmy.world and there’s a certain lightness in the robustness of arguments that goes with it. So on a more serious note, you speak of Ubuntu as having no real benefit over Debian. While I love Debian, using the Ubuntu version of Debian, I get 10 years of security support for free (for up to 5 machines). This is objectively a real benefit for anyone that doesn’t plan to upgrade every two years compared to Debian. You’re right in principle about corporate distros not being your friend, however Canonical isn’t an IBM-owned, publicly traded corporation. Yet.

          • ZephrC@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            It may be shocking to you, but I’m actually aware that this isn’t all super serious, and I’m also being light with the robustness of my arguments. Who knew, right? That being said, Debian releases are supported for five years, not two. Ubuntu also releases a new LTS version every two years. I suppose if for some reason you thought it was still a good idea to be on Ubuntu 14.04 that’d technically be a benefit, but the implication of this thread seems to be that we’re talking about desktop distros. That’s certainly what I’ve been talking about. If you’re seriously still running Ubuntu 14.04 on your home computer you’re way more of a niche contrarian edge case than Arch users.

    • mafbar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      This is the final form of the Linux user. Returning to a popular stable distro.

        • TheInsane42@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Snaps?

          Got my new laptop with Ubuntu, s they offered to install it on it instead of windows. (The license costs of windows was as high as doubling the mem to 64 GB, no contest what so ever) It was on the laptop for a few min (sync install to backup location on NAS) before Debian was installed. When looking around, I just couldn’t get to grips with it. (couldn’t be bothered as well to be honest, as OS replacement was already planned, I just wanted to nick the graphical config)

      • loutr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Yeah but at this point you’re fighting against the OS, might as well switch to a distro that already works the way you want.

          • loutr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Sure, that’s why I endured Canonical’s BS for almost a year, but when I started my new job I just installed Arch even though Ubuntu was the “safe” choice.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.deEnglish
        42·
        1 year ago

        Ah yes, vendor lock-in in desktop linux.

        I don’t get why anyone thinks this is acceptable in any way.

      • mafbar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Man, why do people hate apt so much? Maybe because I’m a filthy casual but I never really had any big problems with apt.

        • Sivaru@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Compared to Pacman it’s very slow. I had several problems when I used it. but if it’s good for you, then use it.

          • mafbar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            I mean I prefer Pacman too, but yeah, maybe because I don’t use Ubuntu / Debian that much so I can’t really say.

            • Dnn@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I like pacman too but I will probably never get comfortable with its arguments. It’s worse than tar which has already become a meme. apt is more intuitive to use.

              • nottheengineer@feddit.deEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                After a month of using arch, I’m still considering aliases for pacman.

                At least I can remember “Xtract Ze Vucking File” for tar, but whenever I want to do anything more than -Syu with pacman, I have to look it up.

                • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Right, but if you don’t already know what those arguments mean, then its not exactly super obvious as to what they do.

                  For example, I’ve been told that you’re generally not supposed to do pacman -Syyu because it can result in partial upgrades (unless I’m remembering the wrong set/combination of flags, which would just be case in point…) - I tend to remember flags by associating them with words.

                  For example, the common flags for tar was brought up in one of the sibling comments here, but at least I can remember them by:

                  • x: eXtract
                  • z: Use gzip for the operation (which originally I remembered as “the file has .gz” in its extension before I knew what gzip was)
                  • v: verbose, giving the details about what its doing
                  • f: file, the file name you’re wanting to work with
                  • c: create archive
                  • t: test archive (I use this with the v flag to see what is in an archive before extracting it)

                  But with Pacman, even after using it on and off for a couple of years, I can try to estimate what the flag names are, but have no idea if its right without double checking:

                  • S: Sync with repositories
                  • s: No idea on this one
                  • y: Also no idea on this one
                  • Q: Query (search)
                  • u: Allow upgrades (?)

                  Really I think its the fact that some of the flags can be used in different combinations which have different effects - like passing z to tar doesn’t change the effect of the flag whether you use x or c. Yet apparently -Syyu and -Syu are valid but one does a proper supported upgrade, and one does a partial upgrade which is not supported and is generally not recommended unless you know what you’re doing. I also know of no occasion where passing the same flag to tar multiple times mutates its behavior as well.

                  That makes it feel like an anti-pattern to me, similar to using magic numbers in programming. Maybe there is a valid reason for this decision (such as why the Linux kernel uses magic numbers in syscalls) but the result is still that it feels incredibly foreign to me, despite having 10 odd years of Linux experience under my belt.

  • scytale@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    This is honestly a timeline for me instead. Started out with Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary, Peppermint; then did Kali for a while for work, then moved on to Antergos, Arch. I eventually got tired of my system breaking every few weeks, and now settled with Mint for the time being because I don’t have the time to maintain a bleeding-edge distro and I just need something that works when I turn it on.

  • Hatchet@kbin.social
    7·
    1 year ago

    Eh, I’ve been around the block at this point. Fedora ftw. Simple, easy, GUI installer, “just works”™️, sane package manager, normie default DEs, stable, corporate backing. Maybe not for a purist or enthusiast, but I don’t have time for that stuff anymore anyways. My days of pouring hours into getting my Arch install just right are long past me. That was for when I still had free time.

    • mafbar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I think that TempleOS belongs to the furthest right of the bell curve. Needs hyper brain to run, understand and appreciate.

  • vexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I started out with Elementary, then went the typical “I use Arch BTW” route (and for a time, Gentoo), and right now I’m happy and content with Fedora’s simplicity

  • egeres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    It seems like a lot of linux users are fond of jumping around different distros, do they all automate the setup process with a bash file that installs and configures everything quickly? 🙃