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Because it doesn't "just work" in the actual sense: namely, installing is an involved process. That's great for people who are into Linux, but that's not your a

Because it doesn't "just work" in the actual sense: namely, installing is an involved process. That's great for people who are into Linux, but that's not your audience if you're talking about growth. Manjaro may have some hope: it's received a lot of criticism for the odd way the maintainers have set up some aspects of the distro, especially from Arch users. I've seen HN threads full of comments saying things like "why on earth would anyone use Manjaro when you can use Arch?". Those commenters miss the selling point of Manjaro: it's a rolling release for Ubuntu's target audience, and that target audience want one important thing Arch does not offer: - an officially supported, opinionated installer of a fully configured Desktop environment

jorvi 3y ago
I would say OpenSUSE is the best rolling release by far: since they actually test packages instead of rawdogging it and putting bug notices in each package’s release notes.
whalesalad 3y ago
installing it is truthfully the easiest part. the hard part is dealing with breakages due to incompatibilities, particularly when you consider aur.
- Espionage724 3y ago
  lolwut? Unless something major changed, you're dropped to a terminal as soon as you boot the install image, and have to either have advanced knowledge on what to do from there, or have the wiki side-by-side on another device. And unless you're taking incredible notes at the same time, good luck replicating the set-up if you need to reinstall. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and most other mainstream distros at least boot you into a GUI to install.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Replicating the setup when you need to reinstall? What? I once had my computer crash during a kernel update and this left the system unbootable. All you have to do is use the arch iso and arch-chroot into your system to rerun/undo the kernel update or whatever other update broke your system. The thing is, even a "reinstall" is merely about deleting packages and then rerunning pacman and reinstalling your bootloader. Your /home and /etc stay untouched. You can take the list of installed packages and then install those. I mostly needed that when moving from an old laptop to a new one.
    - Espionage724 3y ago
      Cruft is left around from caches and old program data all the time. A clean install handles that, and lets me verify my configs are still good and think about way to change them. Clean installs also let me do full-drive SSD trims. I do OS reinstalls maybe 1-2 times a month unless I'm testing something, and can re-deploy my personalized set-up in less than an hour. I'd rather nuke from orbit and rebuild than duct-tape holes :p If my system became unbootable for some reason, I'd fix it and ideally find out what happened, backup stuff, and reinstall. Best-case, everything is fine (although I'd change distros if it ever broke because of a clearly untested updated). Worst-case, the system becomes unbootable again because of the same issue and I can report it upstream with more confidence.

jorvi 3y ago

I would say OpenSUSE is the best rolling release by far: since they actually test packages instead of rawdogging it and putting bug notices in each package’s release notes.

whalesalad 3y ago

installing it is truthfully the easiest part. the hard part is dealing with breakages due to incompatibilities, particularly when you consider aur.

Espionage724 3y ago
lolwut? Unless something major changed, you're dropped to a terminal as soon as you boot the install image, and have to either have advanced knowledge on what to do from there, or have the wiki side-by-side on another device. And unless you're taking incredible notes at the same time, good luck replicating the set-up if you need to reinstall. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and most other mainstream distros at least boot you into a GUI to install.
- imtringued 3y ago
  Replicating the setup when you need to reinstall? What? I once had my computer crash during a kernel update and this left the system unbootable. All you have to do is use the arch iso and arch-chroot into your system to rerun/undo the kernel update or whatever other update broke your system. The thing is, even a "reinstall" is merely about deleting packages and then rerunning pacman and reinstalling your bootloader. Your /home and /etc stay untouched. You can take the list of installed packages and then install those. I mostly needed that when moving from an old laptop to a new one.
  - Espionage724 3y ago
    Cruft is left around from caches and old program data all the time. A clean install handles that, and lets me verify my configs are still good and think about way to change them. Clean installs also let me do full-drive SSD trims. I do OS reinstalls maybe 1-2 times a month unless I'm testing something, and can re-deploy my personalized set-up in less than an hour. I'd rather nuke from orbit and rebuild than duct-tape holes :p If my system became unbootable for some reason, I'd fix it and ideally find out what happened, backup stuff, and reinstall. Best-case, everything is fine (although I'd change distros if it ever broke because of a clearly untested updated). Worst-case, the system becomes unbootable again because of the same issue and I can report it upstream with more confidence.