Comment by unsungNovelty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unsungNovelty | Hacker News Reader

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I have been using using Linux for 16 years in total and 7+ years as my primary OS.

Ubuntu itself is a performance hog due to snaps. And Ubuntu is NOT beginner friendly. As an ex-IT guy and as a linux enthusiast, It was not when I deployed it to developers and tech people in my company. And it is not beginner friendly when I install it to my friends & family.

I used to use Ubuntu for work until last week. Used it because of the worry for Ubuntu compatibility since most work related tools etc supports Ubuntu if you want to use Linux at work. It used to use 7.5-8GB ram and >40% CPU. So I switched to Linux Mint. It is based off Ubuntu but it is faster & is better for UX. And I have been using Linux Mint since monday. Ram usage wend down to only max 6GB RAM and <25% CPU usage. For the same workload. Since it is Ubuntu compatible, Linux Mint will support all those work related stuff for which they need Ubuntu for. And I have a lot of horror stories with Ubuntu.

I recommend Linux Mint if you want point release distro. It literally takes care of you and works OOTB. The only problem is it doesn't have wayland support yet. If you have the time to invest (which I think you don't since you mentioned tedious), and only if you have time, I recommend Arch Linux.

Another green flag is to prefer community led/oriented Linux flavours over corporate funded for long term UX. Way too many cuts and bleeds to trust a corporate run Linux distro. CentOS and Ubuntu being the latest ones. The only exception so far has been OpenSuse IMO. And I have heard good things about POPOS as well. I haven't used it to comment on it though.

I really see FreeBSD as my north star. But it is not yet there for my work and desktop usecases.

Arch can be made easier if you use Manjaro[0], for example. I used Manjaro for years before switching to Mac, and it was rock stable. I had Timeshift[1] installed and set up to be able to roll back just in case I messed something up. In general though, I never felt like I had to mess around with the terminal and a bunch of commands, only if I really wanted to.

[0] https://manjaro.org/

[1] https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift

I used Manjaro for years before moving to Arch Linux myself. Manjaro broke their 2 weeks testing cycle promise. It used to be stable. Then they started cherry picking systemd and kde directly from upstream instead of the traditional Arch stable repo -> Manjaro unstable -> Manjaro testing -> Manjaro stable cycle for a package. Things started breaking and they were hostile to the community which resulted in a new forum. I have both technical and reasons of morale to ditch Manjaro being an early ~2016 Manjaro user.

I also have a sour taste regarding Manjaro because I was one in the minority of people who supported them when they wanted to kickstart a company with Manjaro. I am also going to ignore the whole issue about the leadership issues and outsting of Jonathon (R.I.P Jonathon!). I walked away from Manjaro because there was no technical reason or joy to use Manjaro and partly for Jonathon. He was the glue for our community. Old Manjaro users know how awesome their community was initially.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I didn't know about any of that. I either got "lucky" and switched to Mac before all these happened, or just didn't pay enough attention to see these changes.

I mean, if you didn't know, you probably came in after all these things happened. A lot of the old community fled to Arch or Endeavour.

It is good right? You had a pleasant time with Manjaro. Fun is good. Excuse me if I have kind of spoiled it for you. :)

Is it possible that some of the perceived performance gains come from comparing an old installation (with lots of tools and packages that are no longer used) with a brand new installation?

I don't think so. Based on my experience. I have enough experience with snap performance issues. When I was using snaps in another distro (Manjaro), removing snaps shaved me a nice 11-12 seconds boot time. Snaps adds boot time. They are slow to start. They also have these performance issues. What I didn't know or somehow missed was Firefox snaps was eating way too much memory than I thought. And the whole package was not appealing or solving my problems.

Linux Mint in my past experience have always stood tall even in old installations. So I don't expect that as a reason. And I don't expect LM to slow down as well. But thanks. I will keep an eye on it and see.

Arch is terrible due to their bare testing package release policy.

Generally accepted recommends:

- Windows converts: Mint

- General: Fedora / PopOS

- Rolling: Suse Tumbleweed

- Config fanatics: Nix

- Minimalistic fanatics: Void / Alpine

> Arch is terrible due to their bare testing package release policy.

It is NOT. This is biggest mystery I have about people's perception about Arch Linux. Arch provides latest upstream stable packages unlike point releases. NOT developer branches of packages BUT STABLE versions of package as soon as it is available. Point releases like ubuntu gives you old versions of software. And backport security patches against that version from latest stable packages which again leads to possible bugs etc etc. Apart from Linux, you will never see anyone calling a latest stable version of a software as "bleeding edge". You don't say iOS 17 as bleeding edge. It is the latest stable version of the iOS. Windows 11 is not bleeding edge, it is the latest stable version of windows OS.

I have a 5+ year installation Arch installation from which I am writing this comment. It is fast easier to use and predictable. Point releases always give you a easy jumpstart and it is often a pain to maintain in the longer run. Arch definitely requires initial time investment (It is after all a DIY distro, not a managed distro), but it is easier to maintain. I use Arch because I am lazy. I don't want unpredicatable changes.

I don't think I am going to complain getting firefox 119 (which is the latest STABLE version at the time of writing) within a week or two. Especially in these times where we should be using latest packages for security and stability.

Also repost for Linux distros (like stable/unstable/testing) is testing a package against the distro. It is NOT checking the stability of the software itself. It is checking the stability of a software/packages against a particular distro.

Not who you're replying to but I'm sorry, he's right.

The GRUB incident last summer was the last straw for me. I found myself with an unbootable system. The r/arch sub was radio silent. r/EndevourOs posted a sticky about the grub issue. On researching it more, they were using a build of grub off master (not even a release!). When I asked an arch dev if he thought it was appropriate to do that given he'd just left thousands of people without a bootable system, he dismissed me with something to the effect of 'If you can't repair your bootloader maybe you should use an easier distribution'

You know what? I agreed with him. I formatted my laptop and installed PopOs and it's been really nice running a system where the devs actually seem to care about stability.

Oh no. I am sorry that happened to you. My experience have been pleasant from the community. But I understand that might not be everyone's experience.

Might I suggest setting up timeshift or other things like BTRFS which have rolling back features? I never have to use it in my 5+ years old arch install, but I have used it once while using Manjaro (Arch derivative). If your system breaks, I just use Linux Mint live boot and revert it back to last working state from Linux Mint which bundles timeshift. And you just wait for a fix before you update again.

I suggest this because my experience has been that point releases creates problems in the long term and hence is not without issue. So this might be helpful.

PS: I have heard nice things about PopOS. Hope things are fun over there. :)

> It is NOT.

It is.

Arch has an explicit policy that if there are breaking issues with a package, they will push it regardless and it is your task to read about these yourself in the package update/release messages.

No sane person is going to do that for the many many packages that their system is comprised of.

SUSE holds fresh packages for a little bit and puts them through a more rigorous testing process, before pushing them onto Tumbeleweed. This leads to much much less breakage.

Maybe you aren't aware, but Tumbleweed is also a rolling distro. This is why I specifically mention it as a replacement for Arch.

Hi,

This is an interesting point you make. I agree that this is a policy and I am not a fan as well. The solution is keeping an eye on the forums and news. But yeah, it can sound problematic. But like I mentioned just above in my comments, zero issues with just sudo pacman -Syu for the last 5 years. I have only done manual intervention twice, both times as per https://archlinux.org/news/. One was something I can't recall and recently JRE, JDK. It didn't break.

Tumbleweed updates are big batches because of the way they update. Which I am not a fant of as well. Not to mention, I am a big fan of Arch community. More over, albeit only hearing good things about OpenSUSE (AUR is based on OpenSUSE tech IIRC), I would like to use only community led/oriented distros. They are always better for the end users. Especially Arch, whatever technical problems exists, they are always improving things. Look at the archinstall. Now I can have a new arch install in like <5 mins.

Why not a stable distro with KDE for Windows convert? KDE is the closest thing that looks like Windows.

Linux Mint also looks pretty close to Windows, and they seem to explicitly try to accommodate Windows-experienced folks, with a lot of preinstalled tools and a similar UX.

I run NixOS with KDE on both my desktop and laptop, and whilst it is closer to Windows than Gnome is, its not as close as Mint, or rather, Cinnamon. KDE looks close to Windows with the default UI, but the UX differences are more noticeable.

Another good distro for Windows users would be Zorin, with their Windows layout.

What makes me stay on KDE is the file manager (Dolphin), it's even better than the Windows one.

I would be on Gnome otherwise, but its file manager is for people that don't actually manage files. It's quasi useless (at least for my needs).

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