Linux Appreciation Thread

[Skygazer]

FWIW I have never had any stability issues with Arch or Gentoo that weren't self-induced. That being said, it is kind of easy to self induce stuff especially when you're starting out. I would say in terms of time sink, there's a ton to get it up and running (more so for Gentoo) but the official install guides for both are pretty comprehensive. I've found maintenence to be pretty straightforward and quick once I was up to speed on things (granted, compiling in Gentoo is not quick, but easy to have run in the background). They both have you living in the terminal a lot (at least while installing) which may or not be your thing. They both offer an extreme amount of customization and start you with a very minimal system that you can add extra stuff to as you please. They're both great for learning how things tick behind the scenes. In my opinion both of their package managers are better than apt. If any of that interests you, I would highly recommend checking out Arch. Gentoo I wouldn't really recommend to Linux newcomers unless they already have a handle on bash/zsh/something similar. Some might say the same about Arch, but I actually learned zsh through Arch.

I've never tried Manjaro outside of 5 minutes in a VM. Easy to install but from what I understand it's much more unstable than Arch. And the people who make it don't seem like a very professional outfit (lack of testing, and they've accidentally DDOS'd (or took down in some other manner) the Arch repo at least once iirc). But that's just one person's take.

Debian is cool, I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu personally (I'm big into free software, and I dislike Canonical's approach to things). I would describe Debian as relatively easy to install. I support a couple of Ubuntu users at my work and they seemed to get the hang of it really easily so I wouldn't discount it for anything other than idealogical reasons. If you want a computer just to "do things" without having to think about it as much, these would be the way to go. And let's be honest, most people are going to be in that camp.

[Who]

As someone with an NVidia graphics card, I don't appreciate Debian's habit of putting barriers in the way of obtaining drivers, and that's pushing me towards Ubuntu.

Arch and Gentoo, especially if Manjaro isn't an option, seem like a lot of work for no payoff. Customizability is nice but I've been told that everything can be customized, Arch and Gentoo are just special in that they force you to choose everything yourself to start with as opposed to starting with presets and changing things later. The rolling releases may not be that unstable but as a newbie I'd rather the total stability of something like Debian. My familiarity with bash/zshell is that approximately once a month I find sed useful, so if I'm talking to a normal person I can call myself capable of using using the terminal but if I'm talking to someone who uses Gentoo I know absolutely nothing.

[Skygazer]

I think part of the fun for me is the work haha. If you don't think you'll like it you probably won't!

[Skygazer]

Anyways here are a couple of screenshots I posted on the Gentoo subreddit after a week or two of breaking it in! It still looks pretty much the same now. If you think the theming is bad it's because I did most of it myself :

P

Spoiler: image

[Who]

I think part of the fun for me is the work haha. If you don't think you'll like it you probably won't!

I might, but:
1) I don't really have time for it.
2) The learning process seems kind of brutal/there's no starting point. I've been enjoying customizing Emacs recently, but only because it started off as an ordinary text editor. I tried learning all its fanciness at once a while ago and got nowhere.

I'm probably going to start with Ubuntu. Maybe switch to something else later but for now start with the easiest.

[Skygazer]

yeah the more think on it, using arch/gentoo has definitely been more of a hobby rather than just a means to an end, which is how i imagine most people want to use their computers lol

eventually i want to attempt a linux from scratch install but i probably wouldn't use that as my daily driver, i'll probably just have it as a lil project on one of the old laptops my job let me borrow

[Psyche]

id love to switch to a windows-like linux os at least so i can ditch certain things microsoft forces on windows users but honestly i'd probably rather just have a hacked version of windows that removes that stuff for me

[McEndu]

As someone with an NVidia graphics card, I don't appreciate Debian's habit of putting barriers in the way of obtaining drivers, and that's pushing me towards Ubuntu.

Arch and Gentoo, especially if Manjaro isn't an option, seem like a lot of work for no payoff. Customizability is nice but I've been told that everything can be customized, Arch and Gentoo are just special in that they force you to choose everything yourself to start with as opposed to starting with presets and changing things later. The rolling releases may not be that unstable but as a newbie I'd rather the total stability of something like Debian. My familiarity with bash/zshell is that approximately once a month I find sed useful, so if I'm talking to a normal person I can call myself capable of using using the terminal but if I'm talking to someone who uses Gentoo I know absolutely nothing.

Latest release of Debian bundles firmware, not sure how much it would improve the driver situation

yeah the more think on it, using arch/gentoo has definitely been more of a hobby rather than just a means to an end, which is how i imagine most people want to use their computers lol

eventually i want to attempt a linux from scratch install :eyes: but i probably wouldn't use that as my daily driver, i'll probably just have it as a lil project on one of the old laptops my job let me borrow

I think there are far less regular LFS users than regular Gentoo users, because of how LFS is meant to be set up. I have installed LFS on a VM before and I would never install it again.

(not to mention that there is a trend, started by Gentoo and followed by LFS, of completely dropping eudev for systemd's udev which, while still working even without systemd, is far harder to compile manually alone)