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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of XFCE for your DE/WM. It allows you to set loads of keyboard shortcuts for various WM activities like launching programs, switching workspaces, moving/resizing windows. As far as non-WM activities, look elsewhere in this thread for program recommendations.

The only Linux distro I can stand is Arch Linux. It will require you to become a sysadmin (comfortable with a shell, editing a few config files here and there, and following instructions from the wiki), but you sound comfortable with that. Arch will never break beyond recovery for you. It's a very simple distro that doesn't try to "do everything" on your behalf. Other distros like Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora all seem to have a significant chance of self-destructing when I update them. Arch just keeps working. I've been using it exclusively for over 7 years.

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My experience with Arch and updates is exactly opposite. Specifically, if I boot up a computer with Arch on it that has been sitting in a corner for a month or so, updating is almost guaranteed to break everything. I think this is just because of frequency of Arch updates. If you update every day, then it's probably no big deal. But then I find the same is true for other distros (go too long without updating software, updates break things). Personally I use Debian more than anything else, and that's mostly because I'm most comfortable and familiar with it.

Personally I use OSX (still Mavericks, for now) for development, but almost all of the code that I write gets executed in Linux VMs (often through Vagrant). For me, this eliminates most of the headaches that come from developing using open source technologies in a non-free environment. I'm sure it creates some headaches of its own, but I find it works well for me.

Arch is arguably worse than most about this, because their rolling repositories dump versions after a couple of updates are available. So if you wait too long to update, it can't even figure out how to get started, because it no longer has the slightest idea what the packages you have installed even mean.

Don't get me wrong, I like Arch a lot, and I've been using it as my main Linux distribution for the past five years at least. But if don't do a full "pacman -Su" at least once a week, it's absolutely going to shit the bed at some point.

I guess I'm kind of surprised that people are OK with updating infrequently. Don't your distros distribute security updates? How long do you wait before applying them?

I just want to use my computer. I don't want to just constantly administer it instead.

I usually don't want new features. I'd often rather have what's already there fully working. The lack of finished software available (e.g. TeX) is astounding.

In my case I might have had arch on a machine that just sat in a corner for a month. Boot it up -> update -> brick.

I usually do updates about once a week. If I need to install a new package, I'll usually refresh everything then as well. But occasionally it's longer than that. I just forget for a week or so, go on holiday, etc.

Most of the time, I come back, do an "Syu", and it's fine. Occasionally though, things go pear-shaped. Once or twice I've needed to manually fetch packages from one of the archive sites and manually copy it into pacman's cache directory to get things up and going again.

I've been trying to keep a problem log for arch updates for the past few months [0] but I haven't tried not updating for a while.

Now I'm curious, so I guess I'm trying it for a month [1].

[0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html [1] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/Not-Updating/

Manjaro is a nice spin off of Arch - with a graphical installer and package manager. I reckon probably have the skills to install Arch these days, but not the time or inclination to wade through pages of documentation.

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