4 ms·

I think this is what happens when you try installing Gentoo or Arch, configure everything your self, and then realize you didn't do it right and now it's a cons

by zxcvcxz 11y ago

I think this is what happens when you try installing Gentoo or Arch, configure everything your self, and then realize you didn't do it right and now it's a constant headache. New users should really stick with the easiest to use distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, which IMO are on par with OS X in terms of usability and simplicity.

gknoy 11y ago
Gentoo, /sigh. That was a great part of my linux learning experience. I bought into the hype a friend told me about "you have so much control!", and effectively shot myself in the foot because compilation time was so slow (and I didn't yet know enough to use it well). The slow manual install process? I can't remember any of it, and would have to read a howto again if I had to do it -- but I think it went a LONG way towards demystifying things: everything was just user-editable config files and sources. There's no magic, and almost everything is something I can change with compiler flags. Of course, I now heart ubuntu and debian, because I tend to agree with the choices of most package maintainers as far as compilation options, and my computer is fast enough that I don't think I'd notice if my office binary were maximally optimized or not. ;) However, I might not have gotten here had I not been exposed to Gentoo and Slackware long ago.
mrks_ 11y ago
I think calling Ubuntu on par with OS X is a stretch. Not that it's that far, but I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite. I agree, though, that sticking to Ubuntu or Fedora for new users is a great idea. They are both excellent operating systems with regard to simplicity.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite. By any chance are you running OS X on Apple hardware? If we took OS X and installed it on an Ubuntu Certified Dell PC we may find that it has the stability issues, so if you are comparing it to OS X running on Apple hardware it's not a very fair comparison, as it's being run under ideal circumstances and Linux is not.
  - thesimpsons1022 11y ago
    that may be "theoretically" the fair comparison. but in practice, most people run osx on apple hardware and linux on any hardware. So to get an actual comparison of the user experience, it is fair to compare them on different hardware.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      So OS X is unusably more expensive.
    - slgeorge 11y ago
      I think it would be much fairer to compare OSX on Apple hardware, to Ubuntu on hardware where it's certified by Canonical. Meaning that the hardware works and you're using the version of Ubuntu it was certified with [1]. An example of this would be the Dell XPS developer laptops, which are certified, and an image is created that by Canonical with the correct drivers in it. In those circumstances you shouldn't have any "stability" issues because it's a like for like set of engineering - basically. In general, in terms of your other comparison with "any" hardware on the Ubuntu side - the two most likely causes of problems are hardware drivers and user fiddling (ie mixing repos and kernels). Lack of engineering support from manufacturers for client hardware is a big issue that's outside the Linux distros control. Nonetheless, if you use common supported hardware and standard installs then you shouldn't be having stability issues. [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      So OS X is unusably more expensive.
      - thesimpsons1022 11y ago
        is there a reason you decided to repost this?
- adrusi 11y ago
  Funny, because my memories of using OSX feature kernel panics, memory leaks and all kinds of broken behaviors. Even running Fedora on a macbook pro was significantly more stable, and Fedora's not known for its stability. Maybe my experience is unusual.
  - hammerandtongs 11y ago
    Not at all unusual. I find OSX to be genuinely dreadful for stability and a 3rd class unix at best in its userspace.
- sp4rki 11y ago
  Well I've had more stability issues in OSX (two personal laptops, a work laptop, and a work iMac), than my goto personal setup... Debian Unstable. Personally Debian Sid is my top choice, Arch being close second, and SlackWare being third for sentimental value. Ubuntu always breaks on me after a while. Mint destroyed two separate and different installations with its full disk encryption. Gentoo is too much work. Fedora... I just cant bring myself to use something called yum. The Mandrakes, Mandrivas, PureOS's, et. al. and the derivative distros just feel like crutches to me. In my opinion nothing come close to the simplicity and straightforwardness of Debian.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    >Fedora... I just cant bring myself to use something called yum. They use dnf now.
    - sp4rki 11y ago
      Damn. That is even worse. To me DNF means either Duke Nukem Forever or Did Not Finish. I'd rather not chuckle every time I mean to update a package... :)
- Peaker 11y ago
  I find Mint (Ubuntu minus Unity) to be much more usable than OS X. OS X has some really bad behaviors by default. One example is the Alt-Tab key which is split into two different keys which make no sense in my workflow. The concept of "App" is an implementation detail but OS X brings it to the forefront.
adrusi 11y ago
Maybe I was never the typical "new user" because I moved to linux from OS X after I realized that the way I was using my mac, doing everything in just the terminal and web browser, was going against the grain in apple-world, but was the "right way" in Linux. I started by using Fedora, which worked well for me, but there were occaisional annoyances, like having to install a lot of software to /opt and /usr/local instead of making custom packages because rpms are a pain to make, and some major, and difficult to compile and configure software (specifically mono), being too out of date to satisfy dependencies for something I wanted to use (KnightOS development tools written in a recent version of C#). When I wanted to edit the configuration of some software, it was much more difficult than it needed to be because it was already running a custom configuration highly tailored to Fedora. Rather than just finding support online and doing what it said, I had to invest quite a bit of time into figuring out how the software worked, and how it integrated into the fedora system, before having a high enough level of understanding to figure out the changes that needed to be made myself. After just 6 months of using fedora I migrated to Arch. The installation process was slightly cumbersome. I had never configured wifi using anything other than a graphical wizard, and even though netctl is really easy to use, it took some getting used to. Partitioning my drive without gparted or OS X disk utility was daunting. But none of these were too big of challenges, because the beginners guide, and the rest of the Arch Wiki, were so thorough and easy to follow. I installed GNOME and never ran into any issues. Nothing ever broke, except when I installed incompatible video drivers, but that was my fault and easily fixable by booting from the installation disk. Unlike in fedora, almost any software I could ask for was in the official repositories, configured minimally. If it wasn't, then it was on AUR. And for the software that no one but I use, creating my own package was so incredibly trivial that it was almost easier than manually compiling from source. A couple months later I added a second arch installation to my machine with full disk encryption (keeping around the old one because I had no where to back up to at the time). And then a couple months I replaced both installations with a cleaner (gummiboot instead of isolinux, luks on lvm rather than lvm on luks), bigger (occupying my whole drive rather than just half) arch linux installation. Just a couple days ago I reconfigured my system to run debian and arch in dual boot with a shared home partition, both with in an lvm configuration over luks. While the debian installer was powerful relative to fedora's and ubuntu's, I found that I had to drop down into its very underpowered busybox shell several times to acheive the configuration I was going for. In comparison the Arch installer is just a full live arch installation with arch-chroot and pacstrap bundled in to be able to manage packages on a foreign system. tl;dr I think that if you encourage new users to focus on the fundamentals of using linux, the "easy to use" distros will quickly become harder to use than the more "advanced" distros.

by zxcvcxz 11y ago

gknoy 11y ago

Gentoo, /sigh. That was a great part of my linux learning experience. I bought into the hype a friend told me about "you have so much control!", and effectively shot myself in the foot because compilation time was so slow (and I didn't yet know enough to use it well). The slow manual install process? I can't remember any of it, and would have to read a howto again if I had to do it -- but I think it went a LONG way towards demystifying things: everything was just user-editable config files and sources. There's no magic, and almost everything is something I can change with compiler flags. Of course, I now heart ubuntu and debian, because I tend to agree with the choices of most package maintainers as far as compilation options, and my computer is fast enough that I don't think I'd notice if my office binary were maximally optimized or not. ;) However, I might not have gotten here had I not been exposed to Gentoo and Slackware long ago.

mrks_ 11y ago

I think calling Ubuntu on par with OS X is a stretch. Not that it's that far, but I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite. I agree, though, that sticking to Ubuntu or Fedora for new users is a great idea. They are both excellent operating systems with regard to simplicity.

zxcvcxz 11y ago
>I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with Mavericks or even Yosemite. By any chance are you running OS X on Apple hardware? If we took OS X and installed it on an Ubuntu Certified Dell PC we may find that it has the stability issues, so if you are comparing it to OS X running on Apple hardware it's not a very fair comparison, as it's being run under ideal circumstances and Linux is not.
- thesimpsons1022 11y ago
  that may be "theoretically" the fair comparison. but in practice, most people run osx on apple hardware and linux on any hardware. So to get an actual comparison of the user experience, it is fair to compare them on different hardware.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    So OS X is unusably more expensive.
  - slgeorge 11y ago
    I think it would be much fairer to compare OSX on Apple hardware, to Ubuntu on hardware where it's certified by Canonical. Meaning that the hardware works and you're using the version of Ubuntu it was certified with [1]. An example of this would be the Dell XPS developer laptops, which are certified, and an image is created that by Canonical with the correct drivers in it. In those circumstances you shouldn't have any "stability" issues because it's a like for like set of engineering - basically. In general, in terms of your other comparison with "any" hardware on the Ubuntu side - the two most likely causes of problems are hardware drivers and user fiddling (ie mixing repos and kernels). Lack of engineering support from manufacturers for client hardware is a big issue that's outside the Linux distros control. Nonetheless, if you use common supported hardware and standard installs then you shouldn't be having stability issues. [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    So OS X is unusably more expensive.
    - thesimpsons1022 11y ago
      is there a reason you decided to repost this?
adrusi 11y ago
Funny, because my memories of using OSX feature kernel panics, memory leaks and all kinds of broken behaviors. Even running Fedora on a macbook pro was significantly more stable, and Fedora's not known for its stability. Maybe my experience is unusual.
- hammerandtongs 11y ago
  Not at all unusual. I find OSX to be genuinely dreadful for stability and a 3rd class unix at best in its userspace.
sp4rki 11y ago
Well I've had more stability issues in OSX (two personal laptops, a work laptop, and a work iMac), than my goto personal setup... Debian Unstable. Personally Debian Sid is my top choice, Arch being close second, and SlackWare being third for sentimental value. Ubuntu always breaks on me after a while. Mint destroyed two separate and different installations with its full disk encryption. Gentoo is too much work. Fedora... I just cant bring myself to use something called yum. The Mandrakes, Mandrivas, PureOS's, et. al. and the derivative distros just feel like crutches to me. In my opinion nothing come close to the simplicity and straightforwardness of Debian.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >Fedora... I just cant bring myself to use something called yum. They use dnf now.
  - sp4rki 11y ago
    Damn. That is even worse. To me DNF means either Duke Nukem Forever or Did Not Finish. I'd rather not chuckle every time I mean to update a package... :)
Peaker 11y ago
I find Mint (Ubuntu minus Unity) to be much more usable than OS X. OS X has some really bad behaviors by default. One example is the Alt-Tab key which is split into two different keys which make no sense in my workflow. The concept of "App" is an implementation detail but OS X brings it to the forefront.

adrusi 11y ago

Maybe I was never the typical "new user" because I moved to linux from OS X after I realized that the way I was using my mac, doing everything in just the terminal and web browser, was going against the grain in apple-world, but was the "right way" in Linux. I started by using Fedora, which worked well for me, but there were occaisional annoyances, like having to install a lot of software to /opt and /usr/local instead of making custom packages because rpms are a pain to make, and some major, and difficult to compile and configure software (specifically mono), being too out of date to satisfy dependencies for something I wanted to use (KnightOS development tools written in a recent version of C#). When I wanted to edit the configuration of some software, it was much more difficult than it needed to be because it was already running a custom configuration highly tailored to Fedora. Rather than just finding support online and doing what it said, I had to invest quite a bit of time into figuring out how the software worked, and how it integrated into the fedora system, before having a high enough level of understanding to figure out the changes that needed to be made myself. After just 6 months of using fedora I migrated to Arch. The installation process was slightly cumbersome. I had never configured wifi using anything other than a graphical wizard, and even though netctl is really easy to use, it took some getting used to. Partitioning my drive without gparted or OS X disk utility was daunting. But none of these were too big of challenges, because the beginners guide, and the rest of the Arch Wiki, were so thorough and easy to follow. I installed GNOME and never ran into any issues. Nothing ever broke, except when I installed incompatible video drivers, but that was my fault and easily fixable by booting from the installation disk. Unlike in fedora, almost any software I could ask for was in the official repositories, configured minimally. If it wasn't, then it was on AUR. And for the software that no one but I use, creating my own package was so incredibly trivial that it was almost easier than manually compiling from source. A couple months later I added a second arch installation to my machine with full disk encryption (keeping around the old one because I had no where to back up to at the time). And then a couple months I replaced both installations with a cleaner (gummiboot instead of isolinux, luks on lvm rather than lvm on luks), bigger (occupying my whole drive rather than just half) arch linux installation. Just a couple days ago I reconfigured my system to run debian and arch in dual boot with a shared home partition, both with in an lvm configuration over luks. While the debian installer was powerful relative to fedora's and ubuntu's, I found that I had to drop down into its very underpowered busybox shell several times to acheive the configuration I was going for. In comparison the Arch installer is just a full live arch installation with arch-chroot and pacstrap bundled in to be able to manage packages on a foreign system. tl;dr I think that if you encourage new users to focus on the fundamentals of using linux, the "easy to use" distros will quickly become harder to use than the more "advanced" distros.