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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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106

What is your preferred daily driver distribution? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by bbsm3678@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Considering switching away from Fedora and to another distribution. Does anyone have any suggestions for distributions I should consider?

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[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn't choose arch for my laptop was because I haven't had good experience with pacman. But I'll be honest that I haven't given it much of a chance, so I'd like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don't like the syntax. It isn't intuitive, and I can't memorize it because of that. For example, I'm not sure why -S means install. I remember install because that's the one I have used the most, but I can't remember what is equivalent to apt update or apt upgrade, and I'm not sure why they can't just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?

[–] CAPSLOCKFTW@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what's up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.