“Arch” they just need to read the newsletter before updating.
Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.
alias yay=“yay -Pw; yay”
Today I learned, thanks.
“Gentoo” because fuck you personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch
Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a type of a Linux installation and the name of a book written by Gerard Beekmans, and as of May 2021, mainly maintained by Bruce Dubbs. The book gives readers instructions on how to build a Linux system from source. The book is available freely from the Linux From Scratch site.
LWN.net reviewed LFS in 2004:[19]
Linux From Scratch is a wonderful project. It should become a compulsory reading material for all Linux training courses, and something that every Linux enthusiast should complete at least once. This would also create another interesting side effect: people who tend to be quick in expressing dissatisfaction on the distributions’ mailing lists and forums would probably show a lot more respect for the developers. Installing a ready-made distribution is a trivial task. Building up a set of 4 CDs containing a stable, secure and reliable operating system, plus thousands of applications, is most definitely not.
This just reminds me of my first experience with Linux in the late 90’s. Yes they had installers that got the base system working, but then you had to compile so much.
Which distro should I pick?
@tal@lemmy.today: NoI did this once. I got to a command line installation and I think I either borked installing a usable desktop environment, or I was just sick of it all and decided I wouln’t be getting working hibernation or Wi-Fi this way anyway and the slightly lower resources used wasn’t worth it.
I think I had tried Gentoo before that and must have decided I didn’t like myself for some reason.
“Some DIY is fun, some is stuff we do by mistake because ‘well how hard can it be anyway?’ and it teaches us a lot for the next project. The rest we do purely to spite ourselves, because we should be able to do it, damnit!”
-thing I said to a friend who asked why I was putting so much effort on myself when I could just buy a flat-pack for the same cost and 99% less effort.
@Natanox Seems like NixOS replaced Arch as both a local extremist cult and the most effective newbie repellent.
What’s funny to me here is that, as a long time Arch user, I have been considering switching to NixOS. One of the most terrifying thoughts to me is that after using the same Arch install for 2 years I will spend ages trying to recreate it if I ever have to. Oh, that and Nix letting you test packages seems like a cool feature.
I’ve been on arch around a year now and also considered the jump to NixOS. I was actually dual booting it with arch for awhile and I found pretty quickly that the shit documentation was a huge turn off for me. I ended up nuking the nix partition and reclaiming it for arch.
This is my biggest issue. I am utterly spoiled to the exquisiteness that is Arch’s Wiki…
I mean the Arch wiki mostly works on NixOS too. The problem with NixOS documentation is that there aren’t many examples for the Nix language itself.
What is the Nix language like?
If Haskell and json had a baby
Terrible. Unless you like Haskell, DSLs, and the like.
Arch wiki is the documentation gold standard
The nice thing is that NixOS will keep your setup and all your tweaks if you ever need to reinstall. It’s designed to solve that exact problem.
One way of switching over would be to carry over your homedir and just starting with migrating packages and config as a first step.
I was in the same boat two years ago.
What I did is that I’ve setup a VM with NixOS in it to play with, learn the language and tweak the configuration file.
The great thing about NixOS is that once I was feeling confident enough to switch I installed NixOS on bare metal, loaded the configuration file I prepared in the VM and I instantly had everything installed and running. (Except for the NVidia drivers, fuck nvidia)
Since then I’ve stayed in nixos and I’m not looking back.
This would likely be the plan. This is solid advice really for anyone swapping distros really.
If you have more time like me, you can just “fuck it we ball” and install NixOS and wipe your drive
I swear, I’ve only recommended it to one newbie, and they were an engineer! I had a reason!
Hilarious that this is the new norm, though. NixOS is so not typical at all. Arch is more normal at this point.
NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it’s a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.
Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.
They already built a GUI editor, but a programmer made it so it is actually harder to use than the text file
Lmao which is it?
There’s a list of GUI editors here.
But I don’t know which one exactly they were talking about
Nixos conf editor, it shows less of the config on screen than a text editor
I have an old MacBook for 2012, can barely open terminal, installed Pop!_OS, and I love it!
Am I a terrible person?
Nah, you’re killing it.
Pop!_OS has been my go to for years now. Always been so reliable and easy to use. This was the distro which kept me from going back to Windows
same here. always had issues getting nvidia drivers working on other distros, but pop os got me going out of the box.
I have MacBook pro from 2011 and it runs Plasma fine. It has 16GB of memory, though.
I’ve got an old Dell XPS system from 2010 with a Core i7 970 in it that runs Mint perfectly well.
Not at all. Pop OS was my Windows to Linux distro of choice, of which I stayed on for almost 3 years. It’s a great way to get familiar with Linux.
I only got out because I wanted to be closer to the edge, not because it was bad.
I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge
Are you new around here?
I use Alpine, tbh I dont see why I should learn an entire programming language just for a distro
Alpine just feels like everything on my system is there for a reason (and somehow makes arch feel “bloated”) so I 100% understand wanting a full config file for everything on your system. But DAMN THE DOCS SUCK. Also NixOS locks you into systemd…
I have an old Laptop with a second gen i3 and 4gb of ram. Alpine runs very smoothly with Sway.
I keep seeing this sentiment, what’s wrong with systemd?
nothing.
It’s an ideological thing that says systemd bad because its not Unix enough usually.
Lmao gotcha. I won’t worry about it then. Currently distro shopping. 🙂
NixOS locks you into systemd…
Okay! Nix is out until it fixes that. What a fucking mess systemd is.
Because whenever I use apt or a similar standard package manager there is always some issue. For example, I start up an Ubuntu VPS and try to run nginx just to find out that Ubuntu 24 only has 1.24
And to get a newer version you need to do a bunch of steps:
How are these sources.list incantations any different from editing a configuration.nix file?
At least they aren’t trying to get Steam to work on Kali.
That’s surprisingly easy.
I use arch btw
Does anyone really recommend Ubuntu these days? I think Mint has reigned supreme for years, at least for beginners.
I recommended Mint to my partner and she wasn’t too enthusiastic about it after trying, I have Ubuntu on one of my laptops where she has a guest account and she actually prefers it even after hours of use so her new laptop is getting 24.04. I did do the diligence of explaining that Ubuntu is to Canonical as Firefox is to Mozilla, and why some Linux heads aren’t a fan.
Since bookworm, I find little need to push them past Debian. It’s clean and runs all the things.
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How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
- The last time they tried it was ages ago, or they followed some old instructions.
- They’re trying to play a game that has serious anticheat aspirations and doesn’t run well on linux
- They want to play roblox.
It’s funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.
Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it’s really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We’re existing in a super diverse ecosystem.
It’s just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it’s the best pick for the person who’s asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.
Throw Mint Cinnamon or the latest version on the computer, solved. Ubuntu can… be speshy sometimes on my older spare laptop, but it is not really their fault, more my computer is a bit cooked. Some puppy linux distros are cool, but also a tiny bit complicated for beginners.
That was the reason I decided to install Mint Cinnamon.
It’s been impossible to install for a week now. And I’m not even 100% IT illiterate. After ~3 days of struggling, I decided to do the walk of shame and post on the Mint forum, admitting my failure. It’s been unsolved for about a week now. >100 fails and errors, crashes, freezes.
I can’t even imagine where I would (not) be had I chosen Kali or Arch.
Tbh you might have failing RAM or something. Have you run Memtest?
Yes, I have done a few things already, including memtest. I’ll copy from the forum:
The things I have tried:
- Updating my BIOS.
- The ISO I downloaded has been md5 checked, all fine. I have also tried 2 other ISO files from 2 other mirrors - same.
- Three (3) USB drives to install Mint, ranging from 8 GB to 24GB.
- Installing with or without multimedia codecs.
- Turning on secure boot before install (I was desperate, found a forum post with a similar error message, later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Turning off secure boot before install (I found a different forum post where the exact opposite was recommended - later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Installing in compatibility mode.
- Offering a sacrifice to Xebeth’Qlu, tormentor of souls.
- Running gparted before install, deleting the previously half-installed partition, formatting it myself to ext4, then running the installer.
- Splitting the aforementioned partition into a 16GB swap partition (I have 16GB RAM) and leaving the rest of it as ext4 (mounted at “/”).
- Running chkdsk -f on the SSD containing the MBR+Win10, then rebooting the PC twice, according to one of the error messages in my post below (then trying to install again).
Might sound like a dumb Q but have you tried testing any of the live environments or are you jumping straight to the install, and if you have played in the env. for a bit, have you tried installing any other distro? (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc)
If by live environment you mean the one running from the USB (before I start the actual install) then yes, the install itself starts from a live Mint, running from the USB already. Sorry, I’m not sure if that’s what you meant.
Yup thats exactly what I meant. If you play with it on the USB for a while, do you notice any problems at all or is it only after install?
I have played around before trying to install a few times, but I’m not sure if that exhausts the question: I brought up two terminal windows to ssh into my Raspberry Pi and to manage logs on the other, while I had a browser up to look up netcat usage examples. It didn’t freeze or crash during regular activity, if we’re looking for that.
I am daily driving nixos. It is for those users who have already used atleast couple of beginner distros. Get familiar with packages terminal and other. It is just arch but stable even at the unstable branch. It has saved from breakdowns during important work. But nixos needs time to mature it’s flakes and home manager.
No don’t use Nix they’re evil. Use Lix or Auxolotl or Tvix or Tangram or Brioche or Guix
Why is Nix evil? This is the first I heard
NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.
(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)
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There was some politically charged drama… I think. There was some drama, anyway. I’m not clear on the details.
It was probably a Twitter-tier disagreement that was blown way out of proportion by a small group of people. If others have details, please don’t enlighten me, I value my ignorance.
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nixos_Woke_Invasion. The user wiki is quite helpful now. Or if you want the direct source of the article, https://srid.ca/nixos-woke
That title gives it all away. Every time something is blamed on “the woke” or “wokeness”, it’s sure to be rich in opinions, sparse in facts, and entirely based on hurt feelings.
Or arch instead of NixOS 😂
When my win 10 gaming box EOLs this fall, I’m probably going to jump it straight to arch, since it looks like the most straightforward way to build a Steam OS like system.
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Was going to be skeptical about an obscure distro, but I see they are currently #2 on Distrowatch. Can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before.
Appreciate the recommendation, I’ll def look into it!
good luck.
My gaming PC has been running EndeavourOS for about a year now. First ever time running any spin of arch and it’s been a stellar expirience. You can pry this desktop from my cold dead hands, I love it.
If you get bored later on try CachyOS. An update borked my eOS install and somehow screwed up my snapshots. So rather than deal with it, I tried out Cachy (Arch base) and just never went back. It has some quirks, but I haven’t had any issues for the past 6 months. And it’s fast.
I know that there is arch based distros that are more user friendly but I was talking about clean arch and not about arch based distros.
Oh yeah sorry I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was contradicting you, I just love my EndeavourOS install so much I couldn’t help but chirp up! I would not recommend any arch to a new user, including EndeavourOS.
It’s fine. I just said it because I thought there was a misunderstanding.
@fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com I think they found you
