Upgrades are the bane of tech. They are justified by "security" like every law that takes away freedom and privacy is done in the name of "protecting children". It's all BS.
My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
A lot of times it’s made up because security teams don’t have resources to actually risk assess vulnerabilities especially in upstream sources. They’ll just take the CVE at face value which we know is wrong and sometimes not even reachable. But a lot of times there’s legit problems and a lot of times newer code is safer anyways. You just can’t know unless you spend a lot of time and money. It’s best just to patch and toss stuff that is on the network that isn’t supported anymore.
You're allowed not to take computer security seriously, but if you're doing important things with that computer, such as banking, you will eventually learn the hard way...
You can run Firefox LTS on Windows 7, so I wouldn't worry too much about browsing the Internet. Plus, your residential ISP-provided router has a firewall with no inbound connections allowed. How is my Windows 7 computer going to get hacked?
> My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing. I use MS-DOS 5.0, before it got ruined with needless bloat in version 6. Limiting memory to 640K (or 1MB with UMB extenders) means that I'm immune from recent malware attacks. No networking ability reduces my attack surface. I find text-mode user interface to be clean and simple. Lack of multitasking ensures that I remain focused throughout the workday. I will never upgrade.
Agreed, Ubuntu is poorly engineered, they still use some sysv init scripts behind systemd units, which is embarrassing, and I have never managed a successful update.
Fedora is great, I did not have half the problems with it that I had on Ubuntu. Every single update went super smooth.
The one downside with Fedora is that you don't really have LTS and there is no rolling releaste that is intended for daily use, but otherwise it's perfect.
Both Ubuntu and Fedora are fine distros, but as a Slackware user, to me it looks like jumping from the pot into the fire :)
I have tried both and they confused me when compared to Slackware. I like the simplicity of Slackware, maybe that "modified" my brain where other distros seems too complex.
A tangent, but I just realized that there's no OS nowadays that I feel comfortable upgrading at all lol.
- Windows? Make sure to find that script which disables all the preinstalled crap like defender and updates
- MacOS? It's time for apple intelligence boi
- Ubuntu? System encountered a critical error popup on startup
- Android? Your rooted phone is now again detectable by play integrity malware
So my workflow is instead to make some time and do a clean install every 2 years or so. Keeps the clutter out too (re-install only things I actually need).
I've been using Manjaro for almost a decade, of course it's not perfect but at least the rolling release model makes it suited for being upgraded instead of reinstalled.
If you install Manjaro using BtrFS + timeshift + timeshift autosnap it creates snapshots after every system upgrade that can be quickly rollbacked if something goes wrong
I run NixOS on my laptop and server, and do updates about once a week. I don’t use Timeshift but I do use the NixOS snapshots if an update breaks stuff.
But I really haven’t had any issues with an update breaking anything. I don’t really want to go back to the major release model.
NixOS. Takes the fear away due to atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Lot of people can't get pass this language nix though. GuixSd is an alternative to check out. There are other immutable distros too if you're looking for something less radical.
Seconding this; I used solely Ubuntu for 15 years but switched to NixOS a few years ago. Using an immutable system feels like a weight being lifted off my back.
NixOS's automatic snapshots and atomic updates take the fear out of nearly everything in my computer. It's so much less scary for me to muck with boot parameters or kernel modules if I know that I can always reboot and choose a previous generation.
I've told this story here before, but a few months ago I bought a laptop and installed NixOS on there. It worked fine except my USB keyboard would take about 5 seconds to "wake up" if I stopped typing for more than a minute.
If this were any other distro, I probably would have just lived with it, because I would be afraid of breaking Grub to a point where I don't know how to fix it, but with NixOS I figured out how to fix it, and now it's fixed, and it's backed up with git so I always have it if I ever need to do this on another computer.
It's a bit sad that to keep a computer running smoothly you have to jump through these hoops. I end up with applications building up so much crap in my homedir on linux or appdata / winsxs on windows, I wind up feeling like I need to clean things out once every year or two too.
I try to look at a clean reinstall as a good chance to make sure my backups and restore process are working too. Maybe take a chance to experiment with a different distribution or organize things differently, or new bootloader.
Funny how the most stable-over time OS I've ever used is Arch Linux. I had it running on an old netbook for almost 10 years, until they ended support for i386. I also have a laptop running Arch since I bought it on 2018, so it's been seven years. Never a clean reinstall on any of the machines. Just the usual upgrades, which in Arch means running the package manager every once in a while, and following upgrade guidelines in the rare occasion there's a need for something a bit more involved (90% of the time is simply installing reinstalling a package).
My distro path was Ubuntu -> Solus -> Fedora. Never looked back. There's nothing stable in the world of linux distros, but Fedora makes this a lot less painful. Most of the time I just don't have any issues with it. Even my MacBook Pro 2015 runs it almost flawlessly. Love it.
Broken upgrades were one of the biggest reasons I stopped using Ubuntu as well. Granted this was around 10 years ago, but this post suggests things have not improved in that regard.
As an additional data point, I work in an office of 5 who all run ubuntu laptops as developer work stations. None of us had any problems migrating from 22.04.x to 24.04.1 when it became available.
Ubuntu upgrades, even LTS server, are often problematic. I've had several issues over the years: network interfaces renamed, default route lost, 5 minute delays in boot due to various systemd job timeouts (which weren't a problem in previous releases), etc. All this stuff was "fixable" but it certainly wasn't smooth and all required console access to resolve.
Weird, I have machines that have been upgraded from as far back as 14.04 to the current LTS that have had zero issues. IMHO, you only get that kind of problems if you use non-LTS "interim" releases.
This happened mostly during the 20.04 -> 22.04 era. Perhaps it's my configuration? I have some systems with multiple network cards. I will say on VMs with a single network interface, the upgrades have been smooth.
If I were to rebuild my systems, I'd go for Debian.
My latest LTS upgrade ended up completely breaking my RAID partitions. I had to completely reinstall everything. It took me days. This was not a smooth experience.
My typical experience with Linux on the desktop. Install it, get frustrated with lack of compatible games, then something blows up after a week so it won't boot, back to windows.
I enjoy my Mac so much more when I want to to development. Linux just kinda faceplants itself every time i even attempt to use it for anything else than a server.
Looks gorgeous. It's so simple, it's even got "elementary" in the name. Very simple experience for people who want something macOS-like.
However... they never figured out how to get distribution upgrades working. So, they never did it. Whenever a new version comes out, reinstall the OS is the official guidance. The most elementary task in the world, even for technically minded people.
Ironically, that Linux distribution is the ultimate example of form over function, more than any other OS.
I use a Mac as my primary computer but I run a Linux VM on Unraid just for gaming or other odd tasks I want a VM for. The setup and out of the box support for gaming was actually easier than Windows 10, which was what I tried first.
Never have that problem with Archlinux, 'pacman -Syu' to update everything almost never gives problems (it's actually over 5 years ago it gave a real problem for me). You can control yourself when you run it too, no forced updates.
> get frustrated with lack of compatible games
I have no issue playing whichever modern game I want in Linux on Steam (I don't play competitive games with anticheat features though, but things like Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, Age of Mythology, ... all work. Haven't tried Starfield yet but it's 'gold' on protondb)
Steam is a video game app store for PCs. Back when MS added their app store to windows, the people who make steam (Valve) started working on Proton (wine based?) to get windows video games to work on Linux. Originally Valve said Ubuntu was the only Linux distro they officially supported. Then they started their own distro based on Debian. then they switched to their distro to arch.
TLDR Valve, the company that makes Steam, works on getting games to work on Linux, but they have been kind of all over the place.
Your major complaint is the lack of compatible games, but then you say you like your Mac better?
There are WAY more Linux-compatible games than Mac-compatible games, and that's just talking about native builds. With Proton, you basically only won't be able to play games with kernel-level anticheat. Everything else works great.
I'm not doubting that you have had some bad experiences with Linux, but the lack of gaming options is really not a modern issue. Just don't use Wayland (for now) if that is a priority.
There are distros slightly optimized for games (e.g. Garuda is based on Arch) and the support from Valve and Proton is quite good at the moment.
Problems appear only for games launcher that insist on being Windows-only (anything from EA and Ubisoft, Epic games launcher etc...)
I have been Linux desktop user for over 15 years, Gentoo to Arch. Currently being paid to develop on Windows and have more problems with Windows than Linux when it comes to the desktop and OS stability.
Any issue that comes up has been a means to fix with Linux with downgrading a package or editing a config file. Problem with Windows often requires a re-install with the tight integration with registry and buggy drivers that lock up development VMs.
My work laptop has become a space heater controlled by Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry, consumes 1/3 of the CPU, and their Antimalware Service Executable, consumes 4/5 of the CPU for days.
No way will I let Windows bare metal on my personal computers and you have to pay me to use such bad quality software.
PS. Any that says Windows has good backwards capability, that capability is subjective. Still cannot run "Slave Zero" on NT kernel, only Win32.
Another Linux guy here to report that the corporate experience on Macs can suck balls too. Not just Windows.
At $dayjob the corporate issued Macs are locked down (for good solid compliance reasons so there's no point fighting that) but run a variety of incredibly shitty DLP and virus-checking borderline-malware. The developer experience is horrible.
Worse, because they're locked down so tight you can't install any of those myriad utilities that Mac people tell you about whenever you complain how poor the desktop experience is compared to Linux! - I'm not even able to install uBlock Origin on my browser so any web browsing is eye-opening.
Don't get me started on the MITM SSL certs that the DLP software requires us to have set up for everything - it's pretty amazing how terrible the devX is at times.
Complete opposite experience for me. With Linux I pare down my system to the bare minimum I need, less software running -> less potential problems -> more stability.
I left Ubuntu back in 2019 when I bought a new laptop. The kernel on the latest LTS version was so ancient that there was no way of running my laptop on it.
Ubuntu's biggest problem is that you have to live with problems that were fixed years ago.
So you are blaming a two year old LTS for not supporting your brand new hardware and didn't even try the current release? I had many issues with Ubuntu but laptops being unable to provide even basic functionality without custom drivers isn't something I blame on the OS.
I use Ubuntu as my main steam gaming install because it was recommended by Valve. Does anyone know if it's similarly decent on Fedora? I just want a few games, steam, discord, and a browser.
I use Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg) on my laptop since about a year. It is based on Fedora, with KDE built in and a lot of back end configurations for easy gaming that just works.
It is also an immutable distro.
It has been completely smooth for me, that said for Discord, I would recommend installing Vesktop as a flatpak, it is an alternative electron packaging of discord with Vencord (a plugin framework for the discord client) but more importantly it has support for screen sharing, that the official Linux discord client has but with a lot of issues.
I went with Bazzite and after a hiccup (installed Nvidia-open when I needed just Nvidia) it is working great! Was able to install and play a few games already! Thanks for the recommendation, hoping it will carry on as well as it did today.
Long-time fedora user here. I don't have any problems with it (though I've been using Linux over 20 years so I might just not be seeing some things as problems) but as all things linux-desktop, ymmv. Nvidia drivers (currently on a system with AMD gpu which has been a breath of fresh air) and hardware accelerated codecs (patent related stuff) tend to be the biggest pain points for people afaik.
For gaming: windows 10 pro had the greatest title coverage, but windows 11 is the standard for most modern steam titles.
Ubuntu does have better non-free driver mystery-blob support, and while that is not necessarily a good thing... it makes it compatible with a lot more hardware.
Anecdotally, Fedora was frustrating as F as a desktop due to limited package ecosystem. Thus, it is better for headless servers due to the security model. =3
Steam's recommendations, and their actual "SteamOS", moved to Arch-based around the launch of the Steam Deck.
I've been told Bazzite is a really nice Steam-focused distro: https://bazzite.gg/
Haven't tried it yet, I'm procrastinating moving a gaming desktop to Linux as October gets closer (end of Windows 10 support; end of Windows support for that desktop's CPU/TPM).
My games work great, I actually get better FPS than I do on Windows for many of them. I use the Steam flatpak.
Admittedly I have had some sporadic issues with games not starting or having very bad FPS, but I have no idea who is actually at fault for those issues (and I doubt it's Fedora, maybe an app or a gnome extension or night mode messing with the compositor). Like I said, they're sporadic, so it only happens occasionally. The rest of the time it's smooth sailing.
Generally, I don't think there's much of a difference once you've got Steam installed.
I've had some crashes of Steam itself in the past and I don't know if those were somehow distro-specific.
I don't think I've run into any issues with games themselves on Steam that would have turned out to be distro-specific. Installing and running games on Steam is the same point and click exercise. Steam uses its own set of runtime library binaries for games anyway, so that probably also unifies things for games regardless of the distro.
Discord worked fine when I used it. I wasn't a heavy user though.
Someone said not to use Fedora if you have an Nvidia GPU and I have no experience with that. Also, I don't know about controllers, but I doubt those come with proprietary Linux drivers so I wouldn't assume there'd be much difference between distros.
I run Steam via Flatpak on Fedora and it all seems to work fine. I haven't exactly pushed the machine to its limits, though. Team Fortress 2, Overwatch 2, and various random old or indie games. Stock Proton works fine, and i also use Proton-GE via asdf:
A few years ago, i did have all sorts of problems with graphics performance, but recently it's all worked perfectly. I may also have applied some funky environment variables in my Steam settings; will hopefully remember to check later on.
I have a SteelSeries controller, and at one point used that to play Behold the Kickmen. Worked fine, as far as i remember.
The push for the horrible little thing that is snap via systematic dark patterns (eg. force snap down user's throat via firefox only available thru snap) is the last straw AFAIC.
Yeah, Snaps are crap. I can't seem to get 24.04 to stop replacing .deb Firefox with the snap which breaks things like viewing plotly plots because the snap doesn't have access to the right folder. This one thing has me tempted to ditch Ubuntu. At least in earlier versions you could get the snap to stop auto-installing.
I started with Ubuntu, but got turned off my lack of stability, Snaps, old kernels, and obnoxious marketing. I switched to Debian, which fixes most of these issues (but not the old kernels). I like that Debian still uses apt-get and has a huge repository. The smaller repo is what keeps me off Fedora. If you're an Ubuntu refugee looking for a compatible distro, give Debian a try.
I think they mean the repos. I wouldn't be surprised if apt-get is usually an alias for apt, but I don't know, I just type in apt and what I want to do.
On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.
Speaking for myself: both apt and apt-get are different frontends to the same package management system and repository, which is shared by Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and other Debian-based distros. I like the package management system; which frontend one uses (apt, apt-get, aptitude, nala, etc) is of secondary importance, as they differ only in user interface and aesthetics.
`apt` (the program) is a relatively recent addition to the APT (Advanced Package Tool) ecosystem - until not that long ago, `apt-get` was the way to install packages, and `apt` is now a "cleaner" way of interacting with APT.
The sells pitch for apt is "Apt is a newer, more user-friendly version of apt-get." Apt has been around for 10 years at this point, so if they haven't switched they probably aren't going to.
The primary difference between apt and apt-get is apt has better dependency resolution and apt cleans up after itself when you do upgrades (it uninstalls packages that are no longer used).
The apt command also merges functionality from apt-get and apt-cache.
With apt you don't have to use two separate tools to search for packages to install them. That's probably at least a moderate usability improvement for many people since you don't have to figure out whether you need to use apt-get or apt-cache for some particular command.
It's not just the command that one types. DEB packages are more widely available than RPM. The Debian repositories are larger. And for all its flaws, I find dependency resolution is done better on apt than the alternatives.
But it didn't and it isn't. Debian created DEB three years before RPM was created. Starting out, RPM didn't even support dependencies. I got into Linux before RPM so Debian was the obvious choice. I never understood why RPM was created.
I don’t care much about package managers. I left Ubuntu because it put a snap directory in my home folder, put ads in mtod, and made mount output unreadable. It felt like I lost control of my computer.
Well yes: if Canonical cared they could make most of their snaps work almost as good as the Debian packages they dropped, and then it would be the same to the user.
But also no: even if they spent years catching up they would not reach the level of not-sucking that .deb get without extra effort, as a result of decades of policy ossified into the supporting tools. Such as the strong expectation that apt deals with packages that can be (re)built from their declared inputs and share common build-essentials. Whereas snapcraft does not even provide the tools yet to easily rule out building from ephemeral inputs or merely-accidentally working rust versions.
A long time ago there were good reasons for Ubuntu to exist. Debian releases were very slow, sometimes years apart, and focus was on servers. But slowly Debian has incorporated all the things that make Ubuntu better than Debian. It also has a much faster release cycle.
There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.
Been on testing for years without problems. Super reasonable choice for a personal machine if you need recent software versions.
Always use a separate partition for /home, have backups in place and your golden.
stat command gets the detail of when the OS was installed on the machine. uptime doesn't give that. I wanted to say that I have been using the same development machine at work for 4.5 years. "running" was not the right word for it, obviously.
I’m no AWK expert but I know just enough to tell when it’s the right tool for a particular job. Most pipelines consisting of `grep`, `sed` and `cut` commands can be replaced with a single AWK command. In this case:
stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'
For the line containing the `Birth:` regex, print the second field (by default, fields are delimited by spaces). Other lines that don’t match the regex are ignored.
You can also use apt-pinning to set priority for which release to use.
A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.
Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.
I've used ubuntu on and off for a while now, and I've been debating switching over my main computer from windows to ubuntu. Would you recommend Debian instead? Are there any downsides/incompatibilities I should be aware of before doing so? I've used Raspbian a reasonable amount, but mainly for normal raspberry pi things instead of as a desktop system so I've don't really have much hands-on experience with it
Mint is great, served me well for many years. Never had an issue. With Debian I would mess things up if I messed with something I should not be touching. There are faster options but it requires more maintenance. Mint gets out of your way and just works.
That's the thing about mint. You don't have to mess with it because it works. Updating, installing, deleting, changing settings, no problems. That's is my experience with mint. Cannot say the same about any other distro.
I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint.
Another example: I shouldn't be messing with fixing packages after an arch update, but I sometimes have too. It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages.
Again, that is my experience.
> I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint.
That might have been due to a bug in some issue that you would have to fix under Mint as well.
> It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.
Sure, that's fine, I still don't think it makes sense to put down a distro because you were messing with things you shouldn't have been. If you said you had to, then that's different from messing with something you shouldn't have been, since you should have been to fix it.
It seems the real issue was not that you were messing with something you shouldn't have been, bur rather stuff was not working for you as well out of the box.
IIRC it was when an Ubuntu update pushed the Unity DE on me that I abandoned it. And that would have been back in like 2012 or 2013 ish.
The reason I use Linux in the first place is because I know what I'm going to get. There may be a few UI tweaks between Mint MATE versions, but there's rarely breaking changes that completely and fundamentally alter the way that I'm meant to be interacting with my machine. As an end user I want stability in all things. Don't move menus or change keyboard shortcuts (and especially don't change the entire freakin' DE) without making a massive fuss that this "upgrade" might not be for all users with an option to .
In any case, Mint MATE gives me the compromise that I want between a smooth and "pretty" user interface that looks relatively modern without being a heavy resource hog like other DEs that strive for that (cough KDE cough).
As someone who has not used Windows for years now, Ubuntu is fine, but personally I ended up switching to Fedora after a while. But I think people will always have problems with any OS and you'll hear about those more than the people that are running without issue.
I would recommend Linux Mint first. It's definitely one of the best distros out right now and great for people coming from Windows.
There is also a Debian edition of Mint called LMDE. I would recommend Debian second and I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu at all, mostly because of the SNAPs but also because they really gave up trying to provide a good desktop experience when they stopped Unity many years ago now.
Seeing as everyone seems to be recommending that, I'll give it a look haha. I am pretty comfortable with Linuxes (Linuces?), I'm only on windows right now out of habit and program support, but I believe that Linux has a lot better compatibility these days through things like Proton. And if I really do need something Windows-flavoured again, I can just spin up a VM or something haha
Although I love Arch and use it on my main laptop, if you’re like me and you have a closet full of geriatric thinkpads, Debian is great. The one thing Arch / pacman struggles with is long intervals between updates, so if I boot a machine every three months, I’d rather have an OS in a state that was planned to persist for years.
This is so true. I had wondered if it was just me somehow messing my various manjaro/arch machines.
Coming back to a hobby laptop and finding it unable to function because mirrors have been updated or whatever was a really painful thing to find out after a few months away.
NixOS suffers a little from rapid upstream changes like Arch. You can pin nixpkgs and bump when you feel like it (or when a version of something isn’t recent enough), which is great.
However, bumping every three months always renders my configuration broken because of some expression being deprecated. One time it was how pulseaudio got enabled. Last it was how nerdfonts were organised.
I like how nixpkgs gets better. I don’t like thinking “I guess I’m not upgrading packages tonight, I’ll just roll back.”
It just works. It's stable, I don't need to worry about breaking updates and changes anymore. I'm at peace for at least 2 years.
And all the software I care about have their own deb repos or are self updating (Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Cursor, Signal, Slack, etc), so I always have up-to-date versions. There is flatpak as well but I really didn't have any need for it for now.
It's the best combo, stable unchanging base and up-to-date apps.
I moved from debian to ubuntu because stable was too slow and testing was too unstable. Been on ubuntu on my laptop for 15 years, just seems like a hassle to move now, despite the straws (snaps etc)
On any OS, I prefer to install a clean system rather than upgrade. It's always a mess. Windows, MacOS, android, whatever. If you're going to do a major version upgrade, so a clean install.
I rather use a system where I can update and if something breaks, know what broke and how to fix it, you only get that with Linux, if you are interested in learning how
Despite the article I've always found the Ubuntu upgrade process to be pretty painless. I actually did a minor upgrade this afternoon on my personal laptop from 22.04 to 22.04.1 without issue.
But I agree with the article that snaps are infuriating and next time I replace my laptop I'll be surveying the field to choose a replacement for Ubuntu.
I would have agreed with you until I hit Arch and Nix (for different reasons).
Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about once a year was fairly common, and often avoided a lot of pitfalls.
But... I've been running about 8 Arch machines at home over the last 5 years (6 servers, one desktop, one laptop), and mostly don't feel the need to wipe them.
There's a little bit of cruft, but it's usually related to me doing things, and not the OS itself. So the system still feels stable and solid.
---
Personally - I think for Arch, it's a combination of "Not changing upstream" and "upgrading constantly" so that they don't have a lot of custom cruft to start with, and they have to deal with the upgrade process all the time, so it's not some "huge lift" that happens once every 2 years.
Nix has a similar free feel, but it's not so much that upgrades are painless (they aren't), it's more that "wiping" the machine takes a different tone when you basically wipe the machine with every config change, and reverts are simple and easy.
Oh my god yes. Fedora was the first distro (tried cinnamon, mint, manjaro and pop_os and arch) that actually feels like it was supposed to be a release-ready distro.
Their community is also great, I'm still subscribed to the welcome newsletter and never felt like unsubscribing. Its fun reading about people's lives
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadUpgrades are the bane of tech. They are justified by "security" like every law that takes away freedom and privacy is done in the name of "protecting children". It's all BS.
My main machine in on Windows 7. It can't be upgraded anymore. No updates for me! Which is exactly what I want. Pure joy.
People and companies get hacked all the time because people use scare quotes around security and wire up their windows 7 computers to the internet.
So if you don't upgrade you better be happy with what you have for the rest of your life haha.
Exploits are a liberal myth! Jesus didn't need no patches!!
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing. I use MS-DOS 5.0, before it got ruined with needless bloat in version 6. Limiting memory to 640K (or 1MB with UMB extenders) means that I'm immune from recent malware attacks. No networking ability reduces my attack surface. I find text-mode user interface to be clean and simple. Lack of multitasking ensures that I remain focused throughout the workday. I will never upgrade.
Do you post on HN via mail?
Fedora is great, I did not have half the problems with it that I had on Ubuntu. Every single update went super smooth.
The one downside with Fedora is that you don't really have LTS and there is no rolling releaste that is intended for daily use, but otherwise it's perfect.
I have tried both and they confused me when compared to Slackware. I like the simplicity of Slackware, maybe that "modified" my brain where other distros seems too complex.
A tangent, but I just realized that there's no OS nowadays that I feel comfortable upgrading at all lol.
- Windows? Make sure to find that script which disables all the preinstalled crap like defender and updates
- MacOS? It's time for apple intelligence boi
- Ubuntu? System encountered a critical error popup on startup
- Android? Your rooted phone is now again detectable by play integrity malware
So my workflow is instead to make some time and do a clean install every 2 years or so. Keeps the clutter out too (re-install only things I actually need).
I've been using Manjaro for almost a decade, of course it's not perfect but at least the rolling release model makes it suited for being upgraded instead of reinstalled.
If you install Manjaro using BtrFS + timeshift + timeshift autosnap it creates snapshots after every system upgrade that can be quickly rollbacked if something goes wrong
I run NixOS on my laptop and server, and do updates about once a week. I don’t use Timeshift but I do use the NixOS snapshots if an update breaks stuff.
But I really haven’t had any issues with an update breaking anything. I don’t really want to go back to the major release model.
I've told this story here before, but a few months ago I bought a laptop and installed NixOS on there. It worked fine except my USB keyboard would take about 5 seconds to "wake up" if I stopped typing for more than a minute.
If this were any other distro, I probably would have just lived with it, because I would be afraid of breaking Grub to a point where I don't know how to fix it, but with NixOS I figured out how to fix it, and now it's fixed, and it's backed up with git so I always have it if I ever need to do this on another computer.
I try to look at a clean reinstall as a good chance to make sure my backups and restore process are working too. Maybe take a chance to experiment with a different distribution or organize things differently, or new bootloader.
Please tell Microsoft.
Somehow someone at Apple decided they could make more giving the software (but not the source code) away for free.
If I were to rebuild my systems, I'd go for Debian.
I enjoy my Mac so much more when I want to to development. Linux just kinda faceplants itself every time i even attempt to use it for anything else than a server.
Looks gorgeous. It's so simple, it's even got "elementary" in the name. Very simple experience for people who want something macOS-like.
However... they never figured out how to get distribution upgrades working. So, they never did it. Whenever a new version comes out, reinstall the OS is the official guidance. The most elementary task in the world, even for technically minded people.
Ironically, that Linux distribution is the ultimate example of form over function, more than any other OS.
> get frustrated with lack of compatible games
I have no issue playing whichever modern game I want in Linux on Steam (I don't play competitive games with anticheat features though, but things like Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, Age of Mythology, ... all work. Haven't tried Starfield yet but it's 'gold' on protondb)
I don't play any games besides https://play-cs.com/
But AFAIK Linux users use something called Steam to play games? No?
TLDR Valve, the company that makes Steam, works on getting games to work on Linux, but they have been kind of all over the place.
There are WAY more Linux-compatible games than Mac-compatible games, and that's just talking about native builds. With Proton, you basically only won't be able to play games with kernel-level anticheat. Everything else works great.
I'm not doubting that you have had some bad experiences with Linux, but the lack of gaming options is really not a modern issue. Just don't use Wayland (for now) if that is a priority.
Any issue that comes up has been a means to fix with Linux with downgrading a package or editing a config file. Problem with Windows often requires a re-install with the tight integration with registry and buggy drivers that lock up development VMs.
My work laptop has become a space heater controlled by Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry, consumes 1/3 of the CPU, and their Antimalware Service Executable, consumes 4/5 of the CPU for days.
No way will I let Windows bare metal on my personal computers and you have to pay me to use such bad quality software.
PS. Any that says Windows has good backwards capability, that capability is subjective. Still cannot run "Slave Zero" on NT kernel, only Win32.
At $dayjob the corporate issued Macs are locked down (for good solid compliance reasons so there's no point fighting that) but run a variety of incredibly shitty DLP and virus-checking borderline-malware. The developer experience is horrible.
Worse, because they're locked down so tight you can't install any of those myriad utilities that Mac people tell you about whenever you complain how poor the desktop experience is compared to Linux! - I'm not even able to install uBlock Origin on my browser so any web browsing is eye-opening.
Don't get me started on the MITM SSL certs that the DLP software requires us to have set up for everything - it's pretty amazing how terrible the devX is at times.
... What on earth. What are you doing to the poor machine?
Ubuntu's biggest problem is that you have to live with problems that were fixed years ago.
I ended with Arch eventually. Rolling distros are much better for consumers.
It is also an immutable distro.
It has been completely smooth for me, that said for Discord, I would recommend installing Vesktop as a flatpak, it is an alternative electron packaging of discord with Vencord (a plugin framework for the discord client) but more importantly it has support for screen sharing, that the official Linux discord client has but with a lot of issues.
Probably it won't make too much difference for you, though...
Ubuntu does have better non-free driver mystery-blob support, and while that is not necessarily a good thing... it makes it compatible with a lot more hardware.
Anecdotally, Fedora was frustrating as F as a desktop due to limited package ecosystem. Thus, it is better for headless servers due to the security model. =3
I've been told Bazzite is a really nice Steam-focused distro: https://bazzite.gg/
Haven't tried it yet, I'm procrastinating moving a gaming desktop to Linux as October gets closer (end of Windows 10 support; end of Windows support for that desktop's CPU/TPM).
Admittedly I have had some sporadic issues with games not starting or having very bad FPS, but I have no idea who is actually at fault for those issues (and I doubt it's Fedora, maybe an app or a gnome extension or night mode messing with the compositor). Like I said, they're sporadic, so it only happens occasionally. The rest of the time it's smooth sailing.
I've had some crashes of Steam itself in the past and I don't know if those were somehow distro-specific.
I don't think I've run into any issues with games themselves on Steam that would have turned out to be distro-specific. Installing and running games on Steam is the same point and click exercise. Steam uses its own set of runtime library binaries for games anyway, so that probably also unifies things for games regardless of the distro.
Discord worked fine when I used it. I wasn't a heavy user though.
Someone said not to use Fedora if you have an Nvidia GPU and I have no experience with that. Also, I don't know about controllers, but I doubt those come with proprietary Linux drivers so I wouldn't assume there'd be much difference between distros.
https://github.com/augustobmoura/asdf-protonge
I have a laptop with hybrid graphics, the discrete chip being NVIDIA. I followed these instructions:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/set-nvidia-a...
A few years ago, i did have all sorts of problems with graphics performance, but recently it's all worked perfectly. I may also have applied some funky environment variables in my Steam settings; will hopefully remember to check later on.
I have a SteelSeries controller, and at one point used that to play Behold the Kickmen. Worked fine, as far as i remember.
DXVK_HUD=compiler gamemoderun %command%
The push for the horrible little thing that is snap via systematic dark patterns (eg. force snap down user's throat via firefox only available thru snap) is the last straw AFAIC.
https://github.com/ln-komandur/linux-utils/blob/master/Purge...
They are evil... but a necessary evil... =3
Also, this is a common task:
sudo snap remove firefox
sudo snap remove thunderbird
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa
Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa2
Package: thunderbird*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
sudo apt update
sudo apt install firefox thunderbird
I use Bodhi Linux but, besides the Desktop, this is bascially Ubuntu.
On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.
[0] https://developer.linuxmint.com/rel_xia_whatsnew.php
The primary difference between apt and apt-get is apt has better dependency resolution and apt cleans up after itself when you do upgrades (it uninstalls packages that are no longer used).
With apt you don't have to use two separate tools to search for packages to install them. That's probably at least a moderate usability improvement for many people since you don't have to figure out whether you need to use apt-get or apt-cache for some particular command.
I'm more and more disappointed that packages are snaps and not directly installed via apt, myself.
Does that really make a difference? From a user perspective it's only replacing apt-get install by dnf install or pacman -S or apk add
This is up to the repository. If Debian choose RPM it would be as large as it already is
I thought redhat distros later introduced yum as the "apt" equivalent?
Everyone says this about their favorite package manager.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman_Rosetta
The people moving OSes in response to Snap presumably have strong opinions on package managers :)
But also no: even if they spent years catching up they would not reach the level of not-sucking that .deb get without extra effort, as a result of decades of policy ossified into the supporting tools. Such as the strong expectation that apt deals with packages that can be (re)built from their declared inputs and share common build-essentials. Whereas snapcraft does not even provide the tools yet to easily rule out building from ephemeral inputs or merely-accidentally working rust versions.
There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.
Many Ubuntu 3rd party repos have no Debian equivalent. But there are more Debian repos than before.
This way, you can also have a rolling distro.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.
Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.
https://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html
That might have been due to a bug in some issue that you would have to fix under Mint as well.
> It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.
Sure, that's fine, I still don't think it makes sense to put down a distro because you were messing with things you shouldn't have been. If you said you had to, then that's different from messing with something you shouldn't have been, since you should have been to fix it.
It seems the real issue was not that you were messing with something you shouldn't have been, bur rather stuff was not working for you as well out of the box.
IIRC it was when an Ubuntu update pushed the Unity DE on me that I abandoned it. And that would have been back in like 2012 or 2013 ish.
The reason I use Linux in the first place is because I know what I'm going to get. There may be a few UI tweaks between Mint MATE versions, but there's rarely breaking changes that completely and fundamentally alter the way that I'm meant to be interacting with my machine. As an end user I want stability in all things. Don't move menus or change keyboard shortcuts (and especially don't change the entire freakin' DE) without making a massive fuss that this "upgrade" might not be for all users with an option to .
In any case, Mint MATE gives me the compromise that I want between a smooth and "pretty" user interface that looks relatively modern without being a heavy resource hog like other DEs that strive for that (cough KDE cough).
There is also a Debian edition of Mint called LMDE. I would recommend Debian second and I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu at all, mostly because of the SNAPs but also because they really gave up trying to provide a good desktop experience when they stopped Unity many years ago now.
if the issue with the current stable version of debian are certain packages - like the kernel -, try debian backports
* https://backports.debian.org/
they have a list of available packages at
* https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/
ps. yes, using testing is another possibility, but for serious systems i personally prefer the "stable" release :))
just my 0.02€
Coming back to a hobby laptop and finding it unable to function because mirrors have been updated or whatever was a really painful thing to find out after a few months away.
However, bumping every three months always renders my configuration broken because of some expression being deprecated. One time it was how pulseaudio got enabled. Last it was how nerdfonts were organised.
I like how nixpkgs gets better. I don’t like thinking “I guess I’m not upgrading packages tonight, I’ll just roll back.”
It just works. It's stable, I don't need to worry about breaking updates and changes anymore. I'm at peace for at least 2 years.
And all the software I care about have their own deb repos or are self updating (Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Cursor, Signal, Slack, etc), so I always have up-to-date versions. There is flatpak as well but I really didn't have any need for it for now.
It's the best combo, stable unchanging base and up-to-date apps.
Huh. I didn't notice that in my personal experience. And with Fedora I at least get recent versions of software.
But I agree with the article that snaps are infuriating and next time I replace my laptop I'll be surveying the field to choose a replacement for Ubuntu.
Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about once a year was fairly common, and often avoided a lot of pitfalls.
But... I've been running about 8 Arch machines at home over the last 5 years (6 servers, one desktop, one laptop), and mostly don't feel the need to wipe them.
There's a little bit of cruft, but it's usually related to me doing things, and not the OS itself. So the system still feels stable and solid.
---
Personally - I think for Arch, it's a combination of "Not changing upstream" and "upgrading constantly" so that they don't have a lot of custom cruft to start with, and they have to deal with the upgrade process all the time, so it's not some "huge lift" that happens once every 2 years.
Nix has a similar free feel, but it's not so much that upgrades are painless (they aren't), it's more that "wiping" the machine takes a different tone when you basically wipe the machine with every config change, and reverts are simple and easy.
Both are pretty nice, though.
Their community is also great, I'm still subscribed to the welcome newsletter and never felt like unsubscribing. Its fun reading about people's lives