Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAmazingRace | Hacker News Reader

I really like EndeavourOS, compared to something like Manjaro. It's essentially 99% vanilla Arch with a few QoL improvements and a distinct theme. That's it.

Manjaro, on the other hand, breaks too many things and goes off the beaten path more than I care for. Pamac is kind of junk too, as I prefer yay.

View on HN

I think Linux-ers need to start promoting non-debian family OSes.

For some reason Debian-family marketing of 'stable' really caught on, despite things like Fedora and SUSE being often more stable.

I hope in the future we can keep people away from Debian-family for daily desktops. Its such a terrible experience and it kept me going back to windows. Now that I'm off Debian-family distros, it genuinely feels like I'm using an OS that is higher quality than Windows. Its something of an amazing feeling and kind of gross I used something like Windows/Ubuntu for so long.

Debian itself doesn't feel too "gross" to me. Ubuntu definitely does. I had things break way more often when I used Ubuntu than vanilla Arch, ironically. And the problems ran deeper and were harder to fix when they did pop up than Arch. Might've been something unique about the way I was using it. Not sure.

What's wrong with Debian? If you mean Ubuntu-family then I might get that, given the amount of pointless churn it's seen lately. But Debian itself is fine IME, and quite preferable to any Arch-derivative for production use.

I'd start by removing this false dichotomy between Arch and Debian. I think doing this unfairly promotes Debian in a light that is unwarranted. Debian is not easier or more stable(for desktop), that is just the marketing niche they fell under. Not to mention, there are many more families than Arch and Debian. To me, nothing holds a candle to Fedora.

Debian is fine for servers, but due to it using outdated Kernels and software, it makes being a daily user difficult.

Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)

> Debian is not easier or more stable(for desktop), that is just the marketing niche they fell under.

What? Debian is absolutely easier than Arch - it defaults to shipping a GUI and installation has been handled by a wizard for ~forever, while Arch long preferred "here's a live CD and a wiki page about how to manually construct a system" - and anything with actual releases is more stable than Arch's rolling approach ("stable" being in the sense of "if it worked yesterday it'll work tomorrow").

> Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)

Yes, new hardware is likely to need new drivers. Of course, once you hack in the bleeding edge packages it's hardly a stable/LTS OS anymore regardless.

The false dichotomy is that you keep referencing Arch.

No one is disagreeing "Debian is absolutely easier than Arch"

Fedora, Endavour, OpenSUSE, may be easier than Debian. (Fedora is)

You fell for the exact false dichotomy by placing Arch vs Debian. There isnt 2, there is a circle of options, and Debian is not part of the consumer/daily driver circle.

Life’s been great for me since I’ve moved primarily over to Fedora from Ubuntu as of I think version 36. Fedora always had this (unwarranted) reputation for not being stable, but it’s been by far the best Linux laptop experience I’ve had outside of Ubuntu in the early days (10.04 LTS was the GOAT for me back then) Haven’t tried openSUSE yet tough, pretty happy with Silverblue.

The problem is the word stable is confused with “doesn’t break” rather than the actual meaning of “software versions don’t change, fixes may/may not be backported.” Debian isn’t any more or less “stable (in the doesn’t break sort of way) than most any other distro, but it is in fact more stable (as in software doesn’t change) than Arch or Fedora.

As a community we need another term to define a stable (unchanging) distro.

Just noticed this comment two weeks later. I will say that I absolutely love Fedora on my Intel NUC. Works great with the hardware, it supports Secure Boot, and dnf is a very tight package manager.

What terrible experience did you have? I've been daily driving Debian/Ubuntu on multiple machines for years, and I can't complain.

I've always thought it was weird that distros like Manjaro and EndeavourOS get lumped together as "arch derivatives" when the former doesn't even pull from the Arch repos.

I'm exactly the same. I use Arch on my work PC and home PC, because I have my setup heavily personalized. But when I want to spin up a VM or install something Arch-adjacent without worrying about a bunch of manual configuration, Endeavour is my new goto since I discovered it last year. Manjaro feels like too much of its own thing now. Plus the many debacles it's had.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com