I had been using an old version of Mint on my laptop, felt like a change and went for a fresh install of Ubuntu Mate.

Didn't like it so I've been looking for something different. Never tried KDE so I've now installed Kubuntu which seems ok so far.

Not sure I'd get along with a tiling window manager.

What's good? What's not?

(should I really try Arch?)

I'm going to give elementary OS a go. Looks nice, but I wonder if it's functional enough.

Didn't like it.

Ubuntu + Cinnamon now

I've been using Gnome 3 with a top menu and a launcher on Fedora 19 for about three years, see no reason to change*. I started with mate but it went all crashy.

*Er, except it stopped getting updates :'-(

Yes you should.

If you can't be arsed with the setup, which is understandable, give Antergos a go. It's really just an installer + some defaults for Arch, it uses the Arch repos etc..

I wouldn't use anything Ubuntu based these days, the vast majority of their software (i.e. virtually everything outside 'main', which is most desktop software) is unmaintained, which means bugs and security holes. And even the stuff that is maintained is so *old*. Any derivative of Ubuntu obviously compounds this problem.

Distros kinda matter less than they used to since more is done in the core components now. For example hardware support is entirely down to kernel version these days. So I'd rather go with something robust and up-to-date than a ropey derivative cos there's really no point.

Really though, I do think you'd like Arch. Once it clicks, which honestly doesn't take long, it's so much *easier* than any other distro. Easier to maintain, easier to fix, easier to update, much easier to add weird software (it'll be in the AUR).

The manual Arch installation process is *technically* completely unnecessary (as Antergos demostrates). But what it does is gets you to that point where it all clicks *quicker*. It leads you around the important config files and makes it clear what they do so, once you're installed, you *understand* what you have. An Arch installation takes me literally 5 minutes now (cos I install it on everything I can get my hands on).

And virtually any problem you hit will be in the Arch wiki. A big part of learning Arch is learning to check the wiki. In the unlikely event that it's not there, it'll be in the forums. The community is amazing.

Oh and one of the best things about Arch is the package manager, pacman. It's really simple to use and *so* much faster than anything else I've used. Fuck it, I'm doing a recording as I don't think you believe me :Y

Here.

I realise that's, objectively, a pretty fucking boring video. But y'know.

Ok, pretty hefty update some pretty big/complex packages - Chromium, Calibre, Rust, Mesa, Steam and its runtime, Network Manager etc.. Obviously the download portion is limited by my shitty internet but the update portion is so much faster than on even Debian, let alone anything rpm based. And then it's done, system fully up to date. I never get any of the cyclical dependency *bullshit* I *always* get on Debian based systems.

Ok so...

WMs/DEs

I fucking *love* i3. I don't particularly care for tilers in the abstract, I just love i3 in particular. It's liberating; going back to anything else feels fucking *archaic* - clumsy, inefficient and crude. Posts like this echo how I feel so I'll just link that and not babble on. I get that it's not for everyone.

It's *extremely* easy to try though. Just install the i3 package and then choose it in your login manager or add it to .xinitrc if you don't use a login manager. If you don't like it, remove it, no harm done since it's a completely modular and stand-alone package - it doesn't burrow its way into your system like DEs can.

If I weren't using i3 I'd be using Gnome 3.x. I agree with Smithy, there's not much reason to use anything else if you want the full-DE everything-done-for-you approach as Gnome is miles ahead of anything else. It's intelligent and robust. It does have its idiosyncrasies but most of them can be worked around if they bother you. It's a really nice, *coherent* desktop. Looks nice, too, with something like the Arc theme and Numix icons.

KDE's currently very good but you have to spend a lot of time wrestling it into doing what you want, it's clunky as fuck by default.

Xfce's a fucking mess.

i3 4 lyf.



 

Haven't visited Teh in months (years?) and this is a super good post to come back to :D

If I had a spare PC I'd probably give Arch a go again. Work is providing me a shiny new 15" MacBook Pro tho, so maybe I could install Arch on a VM on it! Kinda feel like I want to get back into Linuxy things altho I'm not even sure why.

Hello again Teh!

CAER! 

({)Caer(}) how are you. How's everyone?

I am well! I am married! :O I am trying to have a cup of tea but my cat keeps batting my hand away from the cup :'(

That's what you get for marrying a cat. :C

Hello Andy!

({)

Hello to you too!
(})

So is Arch any good for web development work? Rails, Oracle Instant Client, Capybara, that malarkey.

Yeah, it's perfect for that kind of work because everything is very up to date and also very stock (i.e. unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Suse etc. Arch don't patch or configure upstream packages much, so you get it as the developers intended).

I don't use those specific techs, I use node, mongo, django, python and that kinda stuff but I'd imagine the same holds true.

And then there's the AUR for anything exotic. If it exists and it's not in the main repos, it'll be in the AUR. It's also handy for alternate configurations like, for example, I like to have ffmpeg with nvenc compiled in so I can record games with no performance hit, shadowplay-style, but this is technically illegal so it's not in the main repos, but it is in the AUR. If the exact compilation options you want aren't provided in the AUR you can use the arch Build System to pretty easily make your own package which is like a layer on top of just compiling yourself, the advantage being that the resulting package is managed by the package manager. It's not quite Gentoo in terms of fine-grained configuration but it's a lot less hassle and you can achieve close to the same in a more selective way (as opposed to *having* to fine-grain configure stuff you don't care about).

Short answer: It's basically perfect for web dev, yeah.

Arch is great if you don't mind upgrading the entire OS every time you want to install a small utility because otherwise the repositories are out of date and don't have some dependency or other. :C

Or even if you don't want to install anything because it's all working perfectly well, you still have to upgrade every five seconds to stop the package repo format breaking because it was changed in a backwards incompatible fashion.

Oh and if you don't like the idea of both man pages and the wiki suddenly being unreadable because some upgrade fucked about with fonts files it had no business touching and corrupted things for a subset of users small enough to make it a bloody pain figuring out what actually happened.

But aside from all that, it's great. :T

The first thing is a *good* thing (for a desktop). We have the internet, there's no reason not to keep your system up to date and lots of good reasons to do so. Allowing partial upgrades, as Debian and the rest do, creates loads of work for maintainers and you still get mismatches.

The second thing has happened like twice so fuck you.

The third thing sounds like a Pete thing.

 

"there's no reason not to keep your system up to date and lots of good reasons to do so"

One good reason to not do so is that it's a tedious chore that in 99.9% of cases does not improve the user experience in any meaningful way, and can lead to catastrophic breakage, a risk I am no longer willing to run.

I update my mission-critical systems once a month (sometimes not  :-$ ).

Still happily running Fedora 19 and Win xp home, Ubuntu 12.04, OS X 10.4 and Win 7* at work...



*got win 10 on one pc and glad of it.

>One good reason to not do so is that it's a tedious chore that in 99.9% of cases does not improve the user experience in any meaningful way, and can lead to catastrophic breakage, a risk I am no longer willing to run.

That's very much the case on distros not designed for it (Ubuntu, stock Debian, Fedora etc.). But it works perfectly well on those designed for it (Debian testing/unstable, Suse Tumbleweed, Arch, Gentoo) and in my experience results in a less buggy system.

Fedora and Ubuntu in particular are designed to be static until you format and upgrade to the next version. Which is like a pre-internet way of doing things.

Updated software, when *everything* is updated so you don't have to have your maintainers kludge between the version mismatches, has fewer bugs. New bugs are always introduced and regressions happen but far more are fixed with each update than introduced. You get a less buggy and more secure system.

If you want stability then that's a different matter. Stability meaning unchanging. That's a personal choice (on desktop) but unless you're on a distro that puts a *lot* of effort into making that work (Debian stable and Red Hat/Centos are basically the only ones), you're going to have a buggier system.

> The third thing sounds like a Pete thing.

I hadn't until then changed fonts in Arch, so I was surprised it wasn't a more widely encountered issue.

Here's someone else encountering a similar issue on 7th September - I can't remember when I had the issue but it was definitely longer ago than that - long enough that it either happened again or was left unfixed for a month or two. (Actually I think I vaguely remember seeing something like because a configuration change could solve it, the problem wasn't going to be fixed, but I can't be 100% certain my memory isn't conflating it with some other issue.)

I am writing this after seeing someone else post the *exact* same problem, though he got no good answer and I can't find his post anymore (thought it was in the last few days). Ever since a full system update (pacman -Syu) a while ago, many fonts in Firefox, Chrome, and other programs are totally unreadable. They show up as gibberish, like wingdings font. With such a disastrous problem I would have expected Google to provide quick answers, but no such luck.

> The second thing has happened like twice so fuck you.

Gee, I must have missed it the first time round. :P

> there's no reason not to keep your system up to date and lots of good reasons to do so.

What's the benefit from upgrading from Firefox 48.0.1 to 48.0.2 ?

> Updated software, when *everything* is updated so you don't have to have your maintainers kludge between the version mismatches, has fewer bugs.

You're ignoring the fact that lots of software developers regularly add new bugsfeatures and make unnecessary changes for the sake of it.

I don't care if there are less bugs if it means something has stopped working how I need it to work - my issue is less with the nature of Arch and more with the current attitude of developers, but that's a whole nother rant I don't have time for.

Yeah, if you want things to stay the same then Arch is definitely not for you and that's fine. It's designed as a cutting-edge distro. Debian Stable or Free BSD are for you (hug)

What I want is for cutting edge to mean sharper and better blades, instead of "oh, my longsword is now a katana, well I guess that's kinda cool, but that doesn't mean I don't need a whetstone and, oh wait, now it's a scimitar? Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?" etc.

Still, at least I don't have to put up with Windows 10.

My web server has been pestering me about updating Ubuntu for about 2 years so hm. Also I'm pretty sure it's been running continuously for that time. I'm scared to restart it.

I dunno, I've been using a slowass old MacBook Pro for the past 5 years at work and it's been fine apart from after I installed Xcode and then some open-source things wouldn't compile properly without a massive amount of dicking around with gcc. Fucking C compilation :@ I made a nice font browsing app though, that was nice. Even sold a couple of copies for 79p before my annual licence thing expired.

anyway er,

really I guess the only way this is relevant to me is if I were to get a laptop for dev work or something, but still, I am dangerously curious about Linux again :C having to run Node things on Windows 10 just reminded me how shit the Windows command prompt is, and how used to Bash I've become. At least I can install vim on Windows, although mostly I just play Guild Wars 2 on this computer.

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