4 ms·

On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpec

On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpectedly enough...) Fedora services that I've managed to drag along two and, respectively, three major releases. On the other hand, I can't remember ever managing to get a clean upgrade on Ubuntu after 8.04 or so. My latest attempt has been miserable, I spent half a day nursing my Ubuntu station at work back to health. Besides, it's a trend that I expect to see reversed soon enough, given the direction in which Linux desktop is heading nowadays. Edit: empirically, what has greatly simplified my life in this matter is being old-fashioned about partitioning. I keep /home and /opt separate, so upgrading typically consists of saving a list of packages, wiping everything but /home and /opt, doing a fresh install and reinstalling the packages. Depending on what I'm installing (OpenBSD on my laptop, Debian on my desktop) it takes about five minutes of accepting defaults and waiting for progress bars to fill, then another ten minutes until the packages installs (most of those ten minutes is spent on LaTeX, to be honest).

fabianhjr 10y ago
> many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. You might want to try a rolling release distro, something like Antergos (Arch + Tweaks)
- notalaser 10y ago
  I used Gentoo for a very long time (2005-ish to 2009 or so) and tried Arch, too, both back then (after I, uh, toasted a power supply compiling packages for five days straight) and more recently, about a year ago. It's a very good approach, but far too high-maintenance for my taste. During my (latest) short stint with Arch, I became a walking bug tracker. Stick to Adwaita because everything else breaks, don't do that in a KDE app because it crashes, try to reboot my computer only to find out it's stuck in a loop because some process can't notify some other process through D-Bus... There's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on Debian, either, but at least it's the same stuff for about a year or so. Nowadays I get to write Linux software at work so I get all the bleeding-edge stuff there, and dealing with the latest and greatest breakage is part of my everyday job. I have no desire to do it at home, too. Edit: plus, to put it bluntly, it's really no longer fun. When I said goodbye to Windows, back in nineteen-ninety-something, I did it to get away from the mind-boggling complexity and uncustomizable blackbox blurb on my hard drive. Nowadays, it's an order of magnitude more complex; some of it is unwarranted and much of it just isn't reliable. Windows' and OS X's isn't, either, but at least it's nicely tucked away behind an interface that works, so you're not exposed to the crap underneath. I spend a lot more time wrestling with my computer than I'd like to. I can mostly navigate through this whole maze of thisandthatkit and systemd-everything, largely because I'm exposed to it for eight hours a day, whether I want it or not, and have seen it being developed. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I have a feeling I'm going to call it quits one day.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Best i can tell the complexity comes from a misguided idea that if just the DEs simplify and automate common tasks, Linux on the desktop will happen. End result is that the DE people keep pushing ever deeper in the stack, violating long standing layering, that made it easier to reason about why something broke, in the process.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  This type of grass is always greener answer is why the Linux desktop experience is so poor. If someone follows that advice they may fix one issue they have but in return they get a whole new set of problems to discover and troubleshoot or run away from.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    They say that using Linux is constantly solving some problems, only for the solutions to produce more problems for you to tackle. You stop when the next problem you face is not annoying enough to care.
    - notalaser 10y ago
      There was a point, somewhere between 2009ish and 2011ish, when that was really no longer true, except for the distributions that hopped on the PulseAudio boat really early and had audio broken for a few releases. I have no idea what happened after that but it's really screwed up.
      - cptskippy 10y ago
        What happened in 2011ish that made everything go to hell again?
        notalaser 10y ago
        I wish I knew.

fabianhjr 10y ago

> many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. You might want to try a rolling release distro, something like Antergos (Arch + Tweaks)

notalaser 10y ago
I used Gentoo for a very long time (2005-ish to 2009 or so) and tried Arch, too, both back then (after I, uh, toasted a power supply compiling packages for five days straight) and more recently, about a year ago. It's a very good approach, but far too high-maintenance for my taste. During my (latest) short stint with Arch, I became a walking bug tracker. Stick to Adwaita because everything else breaks, don't do that in a KDE app because it crashes, try to reboot my computer only to find out it's stuck in a loop because some process can't notify some other process through D-Bus... There's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on Debian, either, but at least it's the same stuff for about a year or so. Nowadays I get to write Linux software at work so I get all the bleeding-edge stuff there, and dealing with the latest and greatest breakage is part of my everyday job. I have no desire to do it at home, too. Edit: plus, to put it bluntly, it's really no longer fun. When I said goodbye to Windows, back in nineteen-ninety-something, I did it to get away from the mind-boggling complexity and uncustomizable blackbox blurb on my hard drive. Nowadays, it's an order of magnitude more complex; some of it is unwarranted and much of it just isn't reliable. Windows' and OS X's isn't, either, but at least it's nicely tucked away behind an interface that works, so you're not exposed to the crap underneath. I spend a lot more time wrestling with my computer than I'd like to. I can mostly navigate through this whole maze of thisandthatkit and systemd-everything, largely because I'm exposed to it for eight hours a day, whether I want it or not, and have seen it being developed. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I have a feeling I'm going to call it quits one day.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Best i can tell the complexity comes from a misguided idea that if just the DEs simplify and automate common tasks, Linux on the desktop will happen. End result is that the DE people keep pushing ever deeper in the stack, violating long standing layering, that made it easier to reason about why something broke, in the process.
cptskippy 10y ago
This type of grass is always greener answer is why the Linux desktop experience is so poor. If someone follows that advice they may fix one issue they have but in return they get a whole new set of problems to discover and troubleshoot or run away from.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  They say that using Linux is constantly solving some problems, only for the solutions to produce more problems for you to tackle. You stop when the next problem you face is not annoying enough to care.
  - notalaser 10y ago
    There was a point, somewhere between 2009ish and 2011ish, when that was really no longer true, except for the distributions that hopped on the PulseAudio boat really early and had audio broken for a few releases. I have no idea what happened after that but it's really screwed up.
    - cptskippy 10y ago
      What happened in 2011ish that made everything go to hell again?
      - notalaser 10y ago
        I wish I knew.