this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I don't particularly like Arch.
I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).
It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.
Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.
I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)
I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.
Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.
Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.
Noooo. You find -Syyu less intuitive than "upgrade"? How dare you.
I agree with all yoyr points. Arch has its place but is not for me.
You aren't even supposed to double the
y
unless you just installed the system or you feel like it's not picking up on updates.TIL.
Absolutely understandable, personally I prefer the AUR since I don't ever need to download and compile the source code anymore, since everything I need got an AUR package.
I also had bad experiences with apt, mostly that their release are too slow/I get stuck on an old release (my raspberry pi's python version is still 3.7, which caused problems since I was using a python 3.8 library). That's probably on me for not knowing how to upgrade my release, but I switched to Arch before learning how to fix this
For the pacman flags, I simply use yay, the AUR wrapper instead,
yay
do a full system upgrade, andyay python
will show me a list of packages that have similar names to install. Still not as clear as apt, but at least there's no weird flag letters to remember for most use casesAh, yes... Good ol' library mismatches. Definitely not a point in Debian's favor.
Well, at least for Stable. In Sid, different ^(Toy)^ story.
I see what you did there, honestly debian major release names and older Linux kernel version names are 2 of my favorites easter eggs in open source 😂
I think the users are off-putting. Can get very blunt in the forums.
What determines the importance of a distribution?