• Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Went the other way, moved from Mint 22.3 to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release with solid testing before updates are pushed, any breakage during testing and they don’t push that day’s update, and if something does slip through and break things, just boot into the pre-update snapshot and wait a day to try again with the next patches.

    Up to date packages with low hassle, so as long as I don’t need stable-as-in-never-changes, it’s great.

    Also, nice to have KDE 6 finally and to have KDE not be a forgotten afterthought (Cinnamon is nice but I always feel like I’m limited compared to KDE)

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    I wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.

    In my 8 years of daily driving Arch, I have had 1 ever, and it was only bad bc I didn’t know of BTRFS yet.

    That happened 3 years in, and I went on a new distro-hopping spree in between, trying Fedora, NixOS, and others, and they had actual problems. Not “oh an update broke my system and was fixed in a day.”

    So now I’ve been back on Arch for more years.

    This whole “Arch is always breaking and takes so much maintenance” is a myth. In reality, Arch is the most stable, because it packages everything Vanilla. Everything works the “standard” way. On Debian, things decay, and then some stuff that’s new breaks with some stuff that’s old. On Fedora, there is a Red-Hat tax: configs in weird places, strange scripts, software missing from main repos (COPR sucks btw). On Arch, it’s just “normal” Linux; and that works

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I’ve used my current install for at least that long (going back further with Antergos) and you’re correct about non-rolling options… I definitely would’ve had more pain with system upgrades and PPAs etc in those years.

      That said, I think the Tamagotchi comparison probably makes sense in a way if it “dies” you probably did something “wrong” as on-paper it’s also not difficult to maintain a digital pet either.

      I’m using an outdated system, it’s on three strikes:

      1. Slow, shared internet for me. This adds friction to updates, and when I don’t update as frequently as Arch expects this is the breakage you won’t see.

      2. I hate that updating today vs days-from-now might yield drastically different results. Admittedly the actual problem with my last few updates is that the reason-I-updated issues persisted.

      3. The AUR is the biggest reason to use Arch. But use the AUR very carefully and not for system dependencies! Your graphics card is now legacy, so we put the driver on the AUR* ;)

      Though I don’t think these sort of problems are unfixable**, and other rolling distros probably do fix some of them but may also not have as good of a packaging system as Arch.

      For instance I’m trying Void Linux on an old machine and have already ran into 2 (non-default) applications missing dependencies (which might be an issue with package maintainers, but also Void doesn’t seem to track optional dependencies).

      Tumbleweed/Slowroll would probably be a better fit for me, if not for Patterns.

      * also if you update without switching, blank screen for you

      ** internet+GPU are also material problems as well, but those cannot get fixed today and probably will not be fixed next month either

  • ur_dad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    And if I’m a windows normie that’s sick of windows windowing, I’ll be fine using mint… Right? Y’all are good at making this sound very complex.

    • sudo@programming.dev
      0·
      3 months ago

      Mint is perfect for exactly that purpose. There’s a daunting marketplace of alternatives all with different specialties. Mint’s specialty is being as easy and newbie friendly as possible. Out of the box - it just works - etc.

      • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        It’s easier just recommending the distro rather than Linux in general.

        I know someone who was starting to dislike windows, I sent them the Linux mint site. Had a much more positive interaction compared to when I had just previously said “what about using Linux?”

        I actually think this is a similar way to push the fediverse. Just recommend a good instance instead of trying to sell them on federated technology. The federated technology will show them content and “how does this actually work” could be a conversation for later.