Hacker News Reader

Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the NIH syndrome, but I like using what's probably the most popular distro and especially the software variety in the community PPAs.

So what's the best way to get a more vanilla Linux desktop experience without losing the convenience of the Ubuntu PPA ecosystem? Use a Ubuntu remix? Can you use PPAs with Debian? Or do you not even need them with the cutting-edge Debian variant (whatever it's called again)?

edit: NIH, not NIMBY, thanks kudu for the correction.

View on HN

Arch Linux might be what you're looking for, if you're willing to take the plunge. You get a bare bones machine when you install it, and you make your own desktop experience. You can install GNOME or KDE, or something more lightweight like openbox, or a tiling wm like i3 or xmonad.

What you want, though, is something like PPAs. You're looking for the Arch User Repository [1]. You can install some helper like Yaourt [2] and run something like `yaourt -S leagueoflegends` to get user-contributed packages.

The other thing that really does it for me with Arch is the excellent wiki, which documents nearly everything you'd ever want to do with Arch Linux.

[1] http://aur.archlinux.org/

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

Arch, in my experience, tends to not work well if you don't care for it. It rots; the longer you don't keep up to date on everything, the worse the experience of using it gets.

I would rather install a new version every year or two, have the regular updates run when I use the computer, and have everything I need as quickly as possible without too much effort. Ubuntu with PPAs provides this experience. Arch provides the latter, but fails at the former.

You're absolutely right. Arch does not like being neglected. That being said, I had no trouble falling into the habit of running pacman -Syu and glancing at the archlinux.org home page every day or two.

Also, it might be possible to set up a cronjob or a systemd service that sees if there are any posts on archlinux.org that you should read, and if not, does an automatic update regularly.

If you like a DE use the remix they are pretty vanilla (ubuntu gnome, lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu) you can make them more vanilla if you forgo installing a desktop cd and just install the DE without the *-desktop package from a minimal or alternative cd install.

Otherwise give up on ppas (they may or may not work on debian) and look at maybe open build service or something.

Mint i think is compatabile with ppas but mint is very not vanilla

I switched to Arch Linux after the Amazon fiasco and can only say I wish I did sooner. It's marvelous, and if you think Ubuntu's PPAs are good, you need to see the AUR. I think I've done the `./configure && make && sudo make install` thing literally once on this system, and it wasn't because the tool wasn't in the AUR, but because I needed special compile flags with vim.

Just to add to this, even for the special-compile-flags case, you shouldn't need to go the manual-make road; you can easily customize packages with the ABS (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS) and use them like AUR package (I used a customized gtk3 for a while using this method, and it worked wonderfully).

I use Ubuntu without any desktop, using the dwm window manager. My "file manager" is the bash shell. None of their interface experiments affect me, but I get the advantages of the drivers and PPAs. I haven't yet seen anything in any desktop environment that interests me; and running this way leads to low memory overhead and a very snappy response on older hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

I don't understand how it applies in this context?

I think the OP meant NIH (Not Invented Here), rather than NIMBY.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com