As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.
So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.
I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.
The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip.
This I find a very weird statement. Perosnally I use arch on a laptop for work and I never ran into the scenario of not having a working laptop always ready.
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I have btrfs snapshots pre and post update that I can roll back to
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I update my packages every friday in the last hour of work, where I can roll back or do the required manual intervention in peace
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When I have an important time period where I judt don’t want to deal with it, I just don’t update anything. At some point I had everything out of date for 7 months due to a big and stressful project. Once it was over, I updated as usual.
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Nothing ever broke since I started doing it like this and following the arch news.
And for that I get way more packages, no missing out on the newest features and it is way easier to install anything not in the repos/AUR by creating my own PKGBUILD so that I have updates - than manually installing it on debian from make and it never updating.
Heavy debian testing / unstable user for over a decade here. I have never had to worry about doing 1/2/3 and I let my package manager do whatever it wants whenever it wants.
I think point number three is likely what Deckwise is getting at. Every distro is stable when you don’t update it. I generally measure the stability of a distro on the ability to blindly update without taking out something mission critical.
I think point 3 is an extreme measure because I make my living with that device. If it ran debian/ubuntu, I would still apply all the above points due to that circumstance.
I also use arch on my gaming pc, where I update blindly (still with btrfs snapshots) and the only time in the 6 years of that archlinux installs lifetime when it didn’t function afterwards was during the grub update.
I used ubuntu for 2 years (and then plain debian for another 2 years) before arch, and for me it broke on every release version upgrade (
do-release-upgrade). So once every half year. (And yes I followed the proper procedure. And yes it may be better now compared to back then.) As I found no way of fixing it, but I wanted the newest release, I reinstalled ubuntu/debian every 6 months, while keeping the home dir.I guess if you are fine with staying on LTS for 5 years, it is indeed very stable, but if you want to have up to date features - arch was way more stable than Ubuntu or Debian in my personal experience.
I think the last three points are exactly what is wrong with Arch for nornal users. I don’t need to follow Windows or macOS news sites to know if I can update Firefox or not, but in Arch you kind of have to dig into this stuff.
On every Debian (derived) machine, I’ve set up automatic updates. Every now and then a bigger update prompts me to click “yes”, and sometimes it asks me to reboot when I have time. The brain space wasted on updates and recovery just becomes usable again without Arch.
BTRFS snapshots are something Debian sorely needs (preferably with a GUI, like Timeshift), and the PKGBUILD based system is very nice indeed. However, they’re not worth the risk in my opinion.
Imagine being able to turn on automatic updates and nothing breaking or requiring rollback. That’s Debian Stable. 🫠
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Now, use these extensions (ignore the one disabled).
My setup:
Just installed Alpine linux with Gnome on my old laptop (i3-3217u with 4Gb RAM). It works really smooth, much faster than Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Aftter tweaking OpenRC run levels my boot time is only 25s (i’m using the cheapest 120Gb SSD)
I am an old hand at Linux. I started with Red Hat’s Halloween release. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad and I slapped Pop!_OS on it and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Rock solid and stable. If you have shit to get done and don’t have time for shenanigans, Debian is hard to beat.
'94! nice!
This the first time I have seen someone say apt is better than pacman.
Definitely didn’t mean better. I actually do prefer pacman because of how versatile it is. Apt is more readable to me when doing simple things, but I do find it somewhat clunky in comparison if I’m doing anything complex.
Wait until you discover aptitude.
Considering that aptitude needs shortcuts it might feel like a throwback to pacman for OP.
There’s also synaptic for checking out dependencies and searching etc. which doesn’t need the user to learn shortcuts.
Where aptitude absolutely rules and saves the day is in fixing complex package conflicts… but often if your system has reached that point you might as well consider reinstall.
You can use shortcuts, or you can use the keyboard menu, or a mouse.
It also works well in case you ever get restricted to a text interface.
Aptitude has a GUI? I’ve been using it purely CLI for years.
I don’t know how I ever managed to launch it, but I think aptitude has a TUI. I mostly use it to resolve conflicts introduced by me adding external repositories and ignoring warnings, but I know there’s a way to turn it into a visual package manager that reminded me very much of the old DOS ers applications.
If you start missing the classic taskbar and startmenu it is easily available in GNOME too:
Startmenu: ArcMenu
Taskbar: Dash to Panel
App Indicator: AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem SupportYknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.
I’m also a gnome shell convert. Down with the taskbar!
If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.
If you’re feeling a little bit adventurous give Testing a chance, it works really well for workstation. I’ve been using it for nearly two decades and rarely have issues. Just about updates for a couple of weeks after the rollover and you’re good!
I may look into some of that stuff down the road but tbh I won’t be doing anything too intense with it. Web browsing, music, video streaming, word processing and maybe some light C/C++ development. If my needs were more specialized I might consider changing over to testing or unstable.
I agree about plain english in the package manager.
Years ago I wrote a script (now unmaintained) called “human Bash” where I wrapped a bunch of my commonly used commands in english words.
Some examples (parameters in cursive):
- "please install minecraft "
- “please update”
- "search package by command ifconfig "
- "search file by name /home/user/Downloads *.pdf "
- "search file by content p_color "
and so on.
But since then I moved on to gui tools entirely.
Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.
please was basically a more complicated alias for sudo :D it originated as a meme on twitter I believe
If you want to take a step in between: I am running Debian Testing on my notebook. Testing is the staging ground for the next major Debian Version, right now 13.
Still very much stable, but inherently more up to date packages. Not a real rolling release, but the closest you can get to a rolling Debian. Plenty of updates, but no problems in the past year I used it.
You also could give Fedora a try
I second this, but atomic/silverblue.
Atomic and Silverblue are not for the faint of heart
I enjoy a challenge. I did briefly look at Fedora but picked Debian because of the history mainly (plus I at least had cursory experience with apt).
dnf can be thought of as the fact version of apt. It has better checks to make sure you don’t break anything and it keeps a history so you can roll back changes
I can recommend debian testing. I’m using it on laptop and desktop for several years, always running “apt update && apt full-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove” and it never broke. It’s not officially a “rolling release” but practically it is.
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Same! Debian with gnome on my desktop and work laptop. Raspbian on my Pi4. Headless Debian in the cloud…
I can see why. Really liking how everything feels so far. I might also use this laptop to try a flavour of BSD at some point
This is interesting because I’ve been thinking about switching from Debian to Arch. I’m already running Nix inside of my Debian installation to get more recent apps (I don’t like how snap interacts with the rest of the system, so I avoid it if I can).
Is there anything else on a more base OS level (like apt v pacman) that you’ve noticed is different, if you’re willing to share?
Welp, I’ve only been at it a few days, plus I’m kind of treating this system as plug and play. Meaning, on my desktop I’m happy to get my fingers into all types of config files and such, while on this laptop I intend to leave as many things default as possible. Bottom line is I haven’t looked too deep under the hood, so I can’t give too much insight on how the inner workings compare. I fully recommend giving Arch a try though. Just take things slowly and read the ArchWiki carefully.
This is the sort of thing that I enjoy seeing on a Saturday morning. Congrats!
I agree. I did a lot of distro hopping when new to Linux to try all the desktops and have the latest apps etc. But after years of that I just wanted something stable that will be reliable and I don’t have to maintain.
I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 as soon as it was released and it’s fantastic. Stable Debian base with Cinnamon on top. I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve always been confused by pacman/arch in general and always preferred apt which I find straightforward.
As one who worked in IT for years, I’m tired of micro managing systems and unnecessary complications. Linux Mint Debian Edition/Debian + apt just keeps it simple.
Timeshift is a must. Creates a system restore point in the event that an upgrade goes wrong and it really works well. I highly recommend that to all Linux users.
I also like Warpinator which is Linux Mint’s version of airdrop. Works between my android and my pc perfectly.
And there is tons of help online for Debian, unlike other distros.
