Stable? Good? Bad? Annoying? Is it beginner friendly? Should I try KDE or Gnome?
I’ve only used Mint and SteamOS and from what I understand KDE should be similar to SteamOS Desktop mode because that is KDE based, right?
I don’t plan to distro hop any time soon, but I’m just curious if I ever get a new laptop I might try it to take advantage of it supposedly being descent at performance optimisation
Yeah, it’s good. I like it for laptops with niri + noctalia shell, which is now an option on initial install. That might not be your cup of tea if you’re used to KDE, but I love the touchpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts. Retains some of the intuitive navigation I love about GNOME but is much more power-user oriented.
As far as arch-based distros go it’s more beginner-friendly than most, but probably not as friendly as Mint/SteamOS. Things like, do I use pacman, AUR, flatpak? Depends on the package. Also it’s just the single rolling release, which updates very frequently. If you’re used to updating packages manually, expect to be sidetracked by system updates.
I’m about to embarrass myself, I’ve been using mint for like 2 years now I should know this by now but…
Updating packages manually is the Sudo apt update command, right?
And that updates any of the OS updates too and not just third party packages? 😅
Well yeah. Say you want to install a particular package but haven’t updated for awhile, maybe now your package definitions are outdated so you need to update them before pacman will correctly point you to the package you want. But now since you updated the definitions, your system wants you to update about 200 other packages. And one of them is an updated kernel, so it wants you to reboot to apply it. Essentially, staying on the cutting edge has associated maintenance you might not be used to.
Right! I guess I understand a little. I wonder if there is somewhere I can learn more about this kind of thing without having to bother people with questions all the time
Wait, what is sudo apt upgrade and how is that different from sudo apt update!? What is a kernel, can I eat it?!
apt updatemake a todo list of what needs to be updatedapt upgradeexecute that todo listdon’t worry about bothering people, linux dorks love answering questions. Why do you think every linux thread han 1000 replies
Apt keeps lists of packages available. This is pretty smart, as it means stuff like
apt installdoesn’t need to go out onto the internet and ask what packages are available every time you want to do something. But these lists need to be kept up-to-date, so:apt updatewhich will fetch these lists and store them locally.apt upgradewill then use the lists, and a list of installed packages I presume, to figure out if there is anything that can be upgraded, and then fetch and install any new/upgraded packages.ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
And this is true on all “traditional” Linux distributions. On arch the commands you run are different but the underlying principle is the same. The equivalent of
apt updateispacman -Sy, andapt upgradeispacman -Su. And these two can be combined topacman -Syu,[1] in fact arch recommends always doing a system upgrade when doing a list update.Also I use KDE, it just works.
1: Or
-Suythe order is not importantⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
If you’ve seen this classic copypasta it is actually an accurate explaination.
aptis used by debian based distros.Arch based distros generally use
pacmanfor distro packages.“Third party” is a bit too vague a term for linux. The distro distributes packages that are made by other parties (“upstream”) some of which are part of the operating system (the OS is modular and made up of packages from many sources) and some of which are applications either preinstalled or that you have installed using the distro’s package manager. The distro’s job is to make all of these packages easy to get and work together nice.
You can also install packages that are not distributed by your distro. On debian systems like mint this in usually done by adding another source repository (ppa) to
apt. Also using flatpacks, appimages or building yourself.On arch generally people use the AUR (Arch user repository). This requires a separate package manager like
yay. Because packages on the aur can be uploaded by anyone you have to be careful about malware.Arch has frequent updates, cachy less so but still much more frequent than mint. The system can break if you don’t update often enough (by break I mean it won’t be able to update or install new packages and require a fresh os reinstall to fix).