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I wonder if it is finally time for me to give Arch a try. It's a shame that all my lab's machines run Ubuntu; although I find it solid, this sort of controlling

I wonder if it is finally time for me to give Arch a try. It's a shame that all my lab's machines run Ubuntu; although I find it solid, this sort of controlling behavior by Canonical seems against the spirit of FOSS.

bhhaskin 6y ago
I am honestly thinking the same thing. Still a bit hesitant as I mainly use Linux for work.
- jefft255 6y ago
  Same for me. ROS in particular only supports Ubuntu officially; although I know people can run it on Arch, it’s much more hacky and you have to build every package from source.
  - knowhy 6y ago
    There are packages for ROS in the aur. And there are wrappers for the commands needed to install packages from AUR. To install ros on my system I just need to execute pacaur -S ros-noetic-desktop-full In this case it will indeed compile the package with cmake. But there are also many binary packages on the aur. The user experience is not like Gentoo. I have never had problems finding a package with Arch.
    - jefft255 6y ago
      I wasn't aware of that, thanks!
- 6AA4FD 6y ago
  I would try fedora or centos. They have good stability and documentation. In my admittedly limited experience centos has worked better for me than debian or ubuntu.
  - 1_player 6y ago
    I have returned to Linux after a few years on macOS, and tried Fedora 32: it's interesting, but I did not like: - The hassle you have to do to install "non-free" software. - It's basically RHEL unstable: plenty of opinionated, bleeding-edge software choices that are either unsupported [1] or very much undocumented, unless you can find some help on the actual RHEL guides. - COPR (user packages) is worse than Ubuntu's PPA, both of which are much worse than Arch Linux's AUR. 1: Running Docker on Fedora 32 is non trivial because of how firewalld is configured and because Fedora decided to go all in on nftables. Sure, it's the future, but Docker hasn't got the memo yet. Nor the memo about cgroups2.
DarkCrusader2 6y ago
If the goal is to acquire and update to latest versions of your favorite software, I would definitely recommend you to check out nix package manager.
knowhy 6y ago
You should do that. I did so in 2012 and I have never looked back. Besides that ArchLinux just works better the ArchLinux community understood that a good documentation is way more important than a flashy gui.
bityard 6y ago
You might like Linux Mint or Pop OS, both of which are re-spins of Ubuntu without snaps. Or for that matter, regular old Debian probably has 99% of what you need.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  I'm running ubuntu, maybe it is time to try Pop OS. Hopefully system76 doesn't pull shenanigans like Canonical.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Adding a vote for regular old Debian. My strategy is to run Debian testing, and then 6 months or so after it's promoted to stable, switch back to the new testing branch. This way I get a reasonably stable experience (Debian's view of "testing" is at least as stable as many other distros' view of "stable"), avoid the large churn in testing right after a new stable series is released, and still get to use all the newest stuff. The only thing to watch for is testing isn't covered by the Debian security team, so you need to pay attention to security advisories and make a call to keep or uninstall if a package you use has a security issue, as testing often doesn't get security fixes until a week or so after stable does.
  - slenk 6y ago
    Been using debian for a few years and loved it. Ubuntu calling their own website on every shell login is a serious problem
the_af 6y ago
Aren't you changing more than just snaps by changing the distro? It seems the philosophy of Arch is different to a Debian based linux. Can't you simply opt out of using snaps and keep using .deb with Ubuntu, no matter what Canonical is pushing as their preferred distribution?
lbruder 6y ago
Try Manjaro. It's based on Arch, but with a little more stable software, think Debian Testing instead of Sid. Simpler to install and works like a charm.
dTal 6y ago
I would recommend anyone considering Arch to skip straight to Void. It's "like Arch", but it addresses a number of pain points - specifically, its binary repositories are much larger, and its package manager won't let you break the system with incomplete upgrades like pacman will (on Arch, anything short of a complete system upgrade every time you install any package is not guaranteed not to lead to breakage, whereas xbps tracks shared libraries).
- 1_player 6y ago
  I want to try Void Linux one day, but a distro that throws away systemd because REASONS is completely anachronistic for me. Say what you want, systemd is here to stay. Everybody's free to make a distro without it, but I wouldn't consider it for a full time workstation, at all.
1_player 6y ago
Everybody telling you to try something else than Arch. There's a reason Arch is so famous and a meme: installation is a challenging weekend project if you've never done it, but it's the most stable distribution with the sanest ecosystem (AUR, sane defaults like systemd, fastest package manager, rolling releases, packages are kept as close to upstream as possible). Once you go Arch you probably won't go back and you will just grow the meme further.
- bscphil 6y ago
  Just to add a small anecdote to this: what primarily caused me to switch distros in the past was encountering problems I wasn't able to solve. Over time these problems would build up to the point where using the distro became a series of constant annoyances. Not so with Arch. Sure, some of the reason why this is the case is due to Arch just being a great distro (hence the meme), but I think the biggest difference is just due to the simplicity of the architecture making it possible for you to be your own sysadmin, if that's what you want to do. In about 7 years of using Arch, I haven't encountered a single problem I wasn't able to solve.

bhhaskin 6y ago

I am honestly thinking the same thing. Still a bit hesitant as I mainly use Linux for work.

jefft255 6y ago
Same for me. ROS in particular only supports Ubuntu officially; although I know people can run it on Arch, it’s much more hacky and you have to build every package from source.
- knowhy 6y ago
  There are packages for ROS in the aur. And there are wrappers for the commands needed to install packages from AUR. To install ros on my system I just need to execute pacaur -S ros-noetic-desktop-full In this case it will indeed compile the package with cmake. But there are also many binary packages on the aur. The user experience is not like Gentoo. I have never had problems finding a package with Arch.
  - jefft255 6y ago
    I wasn't aware of that, thanks!
6AA4FD 6y ago
I would try fedora or centos. They have good stability and documentation. In my admittedly limited experience centos has worked better for me than debian or ubuntu.
- 1_player 6y ago
  I have returned to Linux after a few years on macOS, and tried Fedora 32: it's interesting, but I did not like: - The hassle you have to do to install "non-free" software. - It's basically RHEL unstable: plenty of opinionated, bleeding-edge software choices that are either unsupported [1] or very much undocumented, unless you can find some help on the actual RHEL guides. - COPR (user packages) is worse than Ubuntu's PPA, both of which are much worse than Arch Linux's AUR. 1: Running Docker on Fedora 32 is non trivial because of how firewalld is configured and because Fedora decided to go all in on nftables. Sure, it's the future, but Docker hasn't got the memo yet. Nor the memo about cgroups2.

DarkCrusader2 6y ago

If the goal is to acquire and update to latest versions of your favorite software, I would definitely recommend you to check out nix package manager.

knowhy 6y ago

You should do that. I did so in 2012 and I have never looked back. Besides that ArchLinux just works better the ArchLinux community understood that a good documentation is way more important than a flashy gui.

bityard 6y ago

You might like Linux Mint or Pop OS, both of which are re-spins of Ubuntu without snaps. Or for that matter, regular old Debian probably has 99% of what you need.

justaguyhere 6y ago
I'm running ubuntu, maybe it is time to try Pop OS. Hopefully system76 doesn't pull shenanigans like Canonical.
kelnos 6y ago
Adding a vote for regular old Debian. My strategy is to run Debian testing, and then 6 months or so after it's promoted to stable, switch back to the new testing branch. This way I get a reasonably stable experience (Debian's view of "testing" is at least as stable as many other distros' view of "stable"), avoid the large churn in testing right after a new stable series is released, and still get to use all the newest stuff. The only thing to watch for is testing isn't covered by the Debian security team, so you need to pay attention to security advisories and make a call to keep or uninstall if a package you use has a security issue, as testing often doesn't get security fixes until a week or so after stable does.
- slenk 6y ago
  Been using debian for a few years and loved it. Ubuntu calling their own website on every shell login is a serious problem

the_af 6y ago

Aren't you changing more than just snaps by changing the distro? It seems the philosophy of Arch is different to a Debian based linux. Can't you simply opt out of using snaps and keep using .deb with Ubuntu, no matter what Canonical is pushing as their preferred distribution?

lbruder 6y ago

Try Manjaro. It's based on Arch, but with a little more stable software, think Debian Testing instead of Sid. Simpler to install and works like a charm.

dTal 6y ago

I would recommend anyone considering Arch to skip straight to Void. It's "like Arch", but it addresses a number of pain points - specifically, its binary repositories are much larger, and its package manager won't let you break the system with incomplete upgrades like pacman will (on Arch, anything short of a complete system upgrade every time you install any package is not guaranteed not to lead to breakage, whereas xbps tracks shared libraries).

1_player 6y ago
I want to try Void Linux one day, but a distro that throws away systemd because REASONS is completely anachronistic for me. Say what you want, systemd is here to stay. Everybody's free to make a distro without it, but I wouldn't consider it for a full time workstation, at all.

1_player 6y ago

Everybody telling you to try something else than Arch. There's a reason Arch is so famous and a meme: installation is a challenging weekend project if you've never done it, but it's the most stable distribution with the sanest ecosystem (AUR, sane defaults like systemd, fastest package manager, rolling releases, packages are kept as close to upstream as possible). Once you go Arch you probably won't go back and you will just grow the meme further.

bscphil 6y ago
Just to add a small anecdote to this: what primarily caused me to switch distros in the past was encountering problems I wasn't able to solve. Over time these problems would build up to the point where using the distro became a series of constant annoyances. Not so with Arch. Sure, some of the reason why this is the case is due to Arch just being a great distro (hence the meme), but I think the biggest difference is just due to the simplicity of the architecture making it possible for you to be your own sysadmin, if that's what you want to do. In about 7 years of using Arch, I haven't encountered a single problem I wasn't able to solve.