Mastodawn

Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find).

https://lemmy.world/post/6273399

Migrated from Windows to Linux. Decided to share list of answers/statements I was looking for before did it (and could not find). - Lemmy.World

Finally migrated from Windows to Linux. For anyone wondering, what is the state of Linux as your primary OS for home PC\laptop in 2023. I’ve finalised my Archlinux installation yesterday, I dropped of Linux more than 10 years ago and experience in 2023 in comparison is awesome and beyond even wildest dreams back then: - For average user looking for more out of the box experience I would suggest something Arch based (people in comments suggest EndeavourOS, please do your research). Archlinux installation took me quite some time - Almost everything works out of the box, by just installing corresponding package - KDE Plasma environment is fast and beautiful - Pipewire audio server (Jack\Pulseaudio replacement) works great - Wayland window server is not there yet, especially if you have Nvidia with proprietary drivers and want to use VR. Waking up, session restoration and other scenarios have issues. Use X11. - Wine is great! - Music making - Bitwig Studio DAW has linux native version, yabridge allow you to use windows VSTs, which are easily installed via wine - Gaming works out of the box with Steam for majority of titles, some games have native linux version. Performance is great. In worst case windows game might loose 5-15% in performance. Was not case for my titles - Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton - VR is a mixed bag. Not everything is there (Desktop view, sound control and mirroring, camera, motions smooth, lighthouses do not wake up os go to sleep. I use my phone to turn them on/off). But if its not the problem for you, quite some titles work. Tried: native HF Alyx, Lab, windows: Beat Saber and Boneworks. For me it’s a surprise, I did not count on it. Performance is great. So overall my experience is great. Eventually I’m going to get rid of WIndows on other computers and laptops at howe. I can finally wave goodbye to Windows, with lots of ads and bloatware. Alway glad to help with answers regarding installation while my memory and history logs are fresh. ^^

pathief Oct 4, 2023

Does Archlinux take some time to set up but then is as easy to maintain as Manjaro or does the struggle never end?

Always wanted to try out Arch but feel intimidated by all the people telling me not to :P

Oikio Oct 4, 2023

When you set it up - it just works. For me installation took 4-6 of hours (I had to read all the topics), until I had bare bones operating system with desktop env. Just follow wiki installation guide (precisely! I made couple of mistakes, because was not paying attention) and you will be fine.

Rare problems during update I had 10 years ago seems to be even rarer today, just check out feed archlinux.org before update, or after. You can always rollback any package with pacman using local cache. Lots of solutions are easy to find on the internet.

Arch Linux

pchem Oct 4, 2023

In my experience, once you’ve got Arch set up, it less work to maintain than Manjaro. On Arch, you have noticeably more frequent, but smaller, package updates. On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won’t happen on Arch.

MyNameIsRichard Oct 4, 2023

On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won’t happen on Arch.

You can prevent that by using their unstable repositories which mirror the Arch repositories.

pathief Oct 6, 2023

I ended up installing Arch on my 2011 Macbook Pro with archinstall and everything went surprisingly smooth. Only had a small hiccup with the wi-fi drivers, as is tradition. Loving it so far.

Nia [she/her]Oct 4, 2023

Haven’t used it in a while, but in the time I used it I didn’t have many issues maintaining it. General rule is to just check out the news before you update because they’ll warn you if a package is likely to break stuff or requires manual intervention to update.

I remember installing a package that would prompt me for any packages I was about to update that had a new warning/news since the last update and would link me to it, but I haven’t been able to remember what it was called, it was really help

Kualk Oct 4, 2023

Install Manjaro on VM, see how they did it. Then install Arch with the same packages. It is best if you have life example. That’s how I matched my 1st Arch.

These days there’s archinstall script on standard Arch install image. It supports LUKS 2 disc encryption and BTRFS root. If you save your configuration and load it, then retry attempts take no time.

prunerye Oct 5, 2023

Beware that, on Arch, “once you’ve got it set up” can be a loaded statement. Once your OS is running and all your programs reinstalled, there will still be a dozen little configuration files somewhere that you don’t know about and that will annoy you until you spend the time to problem solve. If you let those problems linger, it can lead to a “struggle never end[s]” situation. Part of the beauty of Manjaro is sensible defaults. But if you want to try out Arch, you should. It’s not hard; it’s just annoying for a while.

shym3q Oct 4, 2023

don’t recommend manjaro. instead - vanilla arch or endeavour os

Oikio Oct 4, 2023

I hope people will take my post with a grain of salt and do their own research anyway.

darcy Oct 4, 2023

i love endevouros. great for beginners. simple transition from DEs, too, for noobs

Oolee Oct 4, 2023

Noob question here. Why so many ppl is against Manjaro? As someone who just tried many distros , Manjaro was the one that just worked for me untill I was bored to try something else.

𝓢𝓮𝓮𝓙𝓪𝔂𝓔𝓶𝓶 Oct 4, 2023

I also would like to know.

Kongar Oct 4, 2023

See my other reply - delays for testing lead to versioning problems with the aur.

MyNameIsRichard Oct 4, 2023

I think it’s mostly do with the carelessness of the devs. They’ve let their certificates expire multiple times (and suggested their users put their clocks back as a workaround) and DDOSed the AUR a couple of times by accident. To be fair, I haven’t heard of any foul ups in a long time so maybe they’re being more careful now.

Kongar Oct 4, 2023

I used manjaro for a while, and it just worked out of the box. The problem is with the AUR. Manjaro is always a little bit behind the aur, and this leads to breakages because a package needs a dependency version that isn’t available. It’s like doing partial upgrades which arch is clear about: don’t do it. The other thing is that this delay is for testing, but there’s been questions raised if manjaro really does the testing justice.

If you stay away from the aur and use flatpaks, manjaro won’t have issues generally speaking. But now there’s an alternative in endeavor-it’s got a nice installer and dumps you into an arch+ environment. Me personally I didn’t find arch difficult to install, so I just went that route.

Suspicious Oct 4, 2023

TLDR: poor project management & bad security and stability even though it specifically promotes itself as stable. Here’s a video I think explains it pretty well m.youtube.com/watch?v=5KNK3e9ScPo&pp=ygURbWFu…

I Can No Longer Recommend Manjaro Linux

YouTube

CloverSi Oct 4, 2023

The biggest reason is instability - packages in its main repo are held back two weeks, while the same isn’t true of anything from the AUR, meaning potential dependency version mismatch if you use the AUR a lot. More details here

GitHub - arindas/manjarno: Reasons for which I don't use Manjaro anymore

Reasons for which I don't use Manjaro anymore. Contribute to arindas/manjarno development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

JackbyDev Oct 4, 2023

Do they literally just delay everything by a week or make weekly “releases”? Both don’t make anything more stable. I’m confused what their goal is. The weekly “releases” would at least seem like a good idea but you’re just as well risking being stuck with a bug for a week.

CloverSi Oct 4, 2023

I think everything’s delayed, rather than weekly releases, but I’m not 100% sure. Either way, in theory this gives them more time to catch any major bugs and hold those packages, though in practice I don’t believe that happens much at all considering how short the delay is.

JackbyDev Oct 4, 2023

Yeah, I’d imagine that Arch devs are quicker to fix things because they’d affect everyone than Manjaro devs would be to notice and stop something. I imagine there are more Arch devs. I don’t know though.

d_k_bo Oct 4, 2023

manjarno.pages.dev (kinda ironic that the original manjarno site is dead)

Manjarno

Why you shouldn't use Manjaro

exu Oct 4, 2023

Also dont-ship.it for Linux mobile where Manjaro shipped broken WIP pull requests

Do not ship work in progress

Rikudou_Sage Oct 4, 2023

Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton

And Heroic Games Launcher.

Zaphod Oct 4, 2023

And Bottles

Diplomjodler Oct 4, 2023

I wouldn’t recommend Arch to Linux beginners, though. It’ll take quite a bit of tinkering to get to work and you have to develop a pretty detailed understanding of the whole thing. Which is absolutely fine, of course, if this is what you want to do. But if you just want something that works with minimal hassle, try Mint.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Yes, I find this obsession with Arch on Lemmy very weird. It’s certainly not a distro for beginners. Ubuntu (let the hate flow), Mint, Fedora, and many others would be better choices.

If it is what you like, fair enough but I feel that it is encouraged around here as a default for both beginners and advanced users, which is bizarre. It’s too complex for beginners and not optimisable enough for very advanced users. I don’t hate it but I hate to see it become the standard.

Synthead Oct 4, 2023

not optimisable enough for very advanced users

In what way?

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Compared to gentoo for instance, packages are not compiled depending on the HW they are installed on. So, not enough resource optimisation and customisation for some users

Of course, any distro is customisable if you spend the time to do it voluntarily, but by default it’s not the way it works

Synthead Oct 4, 2023

I suppose, although you are getting very little performance improvements compiling from sources. Like very, very little. Considering that you will be waiting for emerge a lot, there’s a good handful of folks that consider it a net positive.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Absolutely, it used to be important, now it’s more of a hobby for me…

Yet, for some people who love to have everything under control, Arch is a step below the fully optimisable distros. That’s why I think it’s maybe not for the ultimate Linux extremists among us :) Although there is definitely some respect to give to people who completely mod Mint or Ubuntu, they’re among the bravest

JackbyDev Oct 4, 2023

Have you tried Funtoo?

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Not yet, thanks for bringing it!

JackbyDev Oct 4, 2023

I don’t know enough about Gentoo to understand what it is saying but it sounds like it is totally the same but makes dealing with the compiler options a lot easier? Do you think it’s a good first pick over Gentoo? For “advanced Linux” I mean not a first timer lol.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

I find it a bit weird to try to make gentoo more ‘user-friendly’. It kind of defeats the point… I have to try tho before being able to answer

daddyjones Oct 4, 2023

I moved from Gentoo to Arch years ago and was unable to notice any performance difference. There may have been one, but it wasn’t perceptible to me.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

For very specific uses, it can be useful. Some scientific SW, niche applications. Most of the time, it’s a flex now (I use gentoo BTW, what about that?)

exu Oct 4, 2023

If you absolutely need to compile everything for your system, you can do that with ABS

Making sure you're not a bot!

raubarno Oct 4, 2023

I used to use Arch Linux. It’s really good, honestly, especially if you want to know how the OS components work from inside or make something custom. For anything else, I would recommend Debian and its non-snap-based derivatives (Linux Mint Debian Edition or Tuxedo OS).

the16bitgamer Oct 4, 2023

From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.

I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.

However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Arch is several months ahead of other distros

Source for that? It’s one of those weird, wild affirmations that go around regarding Arch. Ahead in terms of what? Integrating the most up-to-date kernel or something?

Is it because of the rolling release model? But it’s not the only one to have rolling releases.

the16bitgamer Oct 4, 2023

This comes from personal testing of games. There was a DX11 bug intel igpus where UE4 games crash instantly on boot. I was able to work around this by forcing dx12 in arch, but when I moved to fedora it wasn’t working, that was until about 2 months later after an update. Since I don’t know exactly how far behind fedora is in terms of graphics drivers I said it in ambiguous terms.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

Yeah, I’m not sure supporting MS proprietary 3D rendering APIs is the goal of any Linux distro? It’s like saying: look my distro is ahead because excel runs on it. I might be missing the point here. If you can have the same reasoning with Vulkan, that would make sense tho

the16bitgamer Oct 4, 2023

Have you not heard of the Steam Deck and Proton? Running MS APIs through a compatibility layer is the main goal for Linux gaming for the past few years, as it allows legacy games that had no hope in getting a Linux native port (or a terrible Linux port) to run in Linux, through the Proton Compatibility layer.

The apps I was using were running with DXVK, but due to a bug with intel iGPU driver which affects both Windows and Linux users, it didn’t work. A Intel Mesa update patched the bug, and my game worked better. When I moved back I was on an older driver and had to wait for it to be added in.

drolex Oct 5, 2023

Aaaaaah it’s gaming! Oh dear, I feel old. OK, so Arch gets the compiler drivers for gaming related HW before other distros? I guess, given the community of nerds (no offense), that would make sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

Still wouldn’t be ahead of the compilable distros. I urge you to switch to LFS, the real beginners distros. ;)

the16bitgamer Oct 5, 2023

I wouldn’t worry too much about not knowing this. The steam deck is still relatively new and proton/dxvk is improving at such a blinding pace compared to the rest of Linux that my head is still spinning.

From my limited understanding, because of Arch’s rolling releases and Valve basing the steam deck on Arch. DXVK the compatibility layer for DX games to vulkan is managed by the distro. How this works is magic is still magic to me. I also think graphic drivers gets pushed on arch early too, since it’s a rolling release.

However I am in complete agreement, Arch isn’t beginner friendly, I personally like Manjaro and find it friendlier, but that’s like having a pet cat, and it’s a Bob cat. Sure it’s not a Lion, but it’s not a Kitty.

dallen Oct 4, 2023

I find Mint to be the most obvious choice for beginners who don’t use Lemmy.

niisyth Oct 4, 2023

Anecdotally, Mint broke file permissions and then the mounting points for my home server setup. And I find Cinnamon to be quite ugly imho.

I tried Fedora and Debian and much prefer those two vs Mint. Also, KDE is incredibly beautiful on the Steam Deck.

RachelRodent Oct 4, 2023

I installed Mint in my Windows user moms computer she loves it.(on windows it was unusably slow) It is a drop in replacement for beginners who want to use linux almost exactly the same way they have used windows. Fedora is good(and my fave) and not too unintuitive for beginners aswell but if someone wants to switch to linux but “keep using windows” It is the answer, not to mention all the extra software preinstalled to make stuff work out of the box.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

You’re doing god’s work, well done

RachelRodent Oct 5, 2023

An the thing is, I don’t use linux myself 😁. Lemme explain, I tried Nobara on my gaming desktop and loved it but was not grting the performance I was hoping for so I reinstalled the nvidia drivers. I fucked up and couldn’t get to the graphical UI anymore. For some ungodly reason not even live USB without the simplified graphics mode I formatted my drive thru the simplified live usb mode to nsft and installed Windows on it. Tod this day Linux aliterally can’t be installed on my Computer. Same bug. Plus Wayland isn’t quiite ready for nvidia cards yet, meaning I will do Linux on my next PC that will also have an AMD GPU.

FalseDiamond Oct 4, 2023

It’s because it’s bleeding edge, extremely well documented and extremely popular. Bleeding edge is exciting and you’re gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.

Do mind though it doesn’t mean it’s easy, like at all, and I fundamentally agree, there’s a million better choices for first timers.

drolex Oct 4, 2023

you’re gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.

Absolutely not. I’ve never used a distro that required me to check the forums or wiki of another distro.

it’s bleeding edge

What now? I feel I have fallen asleep and just woke up at a marketing meeting at my job.

flashgnash Oct 4, 2023

I’ve ended up on the arch wiki a few times on non-arch distros, it covers many generic Linux tools very well

dai Oct 8, 2023

Being on NIX I’m very jealous of the volumes of documentation for Arch. Found my way to the Arch wiki a few times.

Flaky Oct 4, 2023

I had to help a friend install the VMware kernel modules, since VMware is weird and VirtualBox sucks for virtualising Windows. I had to guide him through it step by step, making sure his commands were exact.

He’s only started using the terminal properly. Hell no, I’m not going to recommend Arch to him.

florge Oct 4, 2023

I think it depends on what the said beginner is after. If they just want something that works then sure archlinux isn’t the best option, but if they want learn more about linux then there’s nothing wrong with installing arch. When I was new to linux, I found the beginners install guide on the archwiki to be very helpful and learnt a fair bit about how things work. I think you then have a good overview of how your system works and therefore have a better idea of what needs fixing when things break.

MigratingApe Oct 4, 2023

Debian unstable FTW!

NightoftheLemmy Oct 4, 2023

Mint all the way

NightoftheLemmy Oct 4, 2023

Mint all the way