• superkret@feddit.org
    199·
    4 days ago

    When you run OpenSUSE, you can feel it was made by Germans.
    The installer is a beautiful example of German engineering.
    The package manager is a perfect example of German over-engineering.
    If you run it with KDE, you have 2 redundant GUI admin tools for every config in the system, and 4 for setting up printers.

  • Fliegenpilzgünni@slrpnk.net
    1703·
    4 days ago

    Sees “Germany”

    Die Kommentarspalte dieser Pfostierung befindet sich ab sofort im Besitz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland meine Kameraden!

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    531·
    4 days ago

    ITT - “I DISAGREE WITH THE FACTUAL ACCURACY OF THE SETUP AND/OR PUNCHLINE OF YOUR JOKE.”

    • Zozano@lemy.lolEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      I’m still a Linux noob all things considered, and I’ve been using NixOS for six months or more.

      It is HARD, but I see the true value of it. I will never need to reinstall Linux because I broke it, that’s simply impossible.

      If I ever need to migrate my system, it’s all backed up to github. With a single

      Bash update.sh

      every single .config file backed up, system upgraded, all packages updated.

      I just love Nix, it’s the perfect OS for me.

      Now I just need to learn how to use flakes…

      Sidebar: I’ve never asked before, but maybe someone can help me out. If I install a flake of an application, am I supposed to add it to the existing flake, or can I modulate flakes?

      I’ve noticed when installing the nixvim flake it generates a new flake and it runs when I issue the

      nix run ~/.dotfiles/nixvim/flake.nix

      command, but I don’t want to have to run that command every time. I feel like making a fish abbreviation isn’t the correct way of doing this.

      • tinkling4938@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        So I’ve only been using nix about a year and only used flakes. I use in two ways.

        First, I have my main nix flake. Most everything is controlled from that. It has several outputs from full blown nixos builds per host or some home manager builds for non-nixos systems.

        Third-party flakes I use as inputs to my own flake then use the override system to inject them into nixpkgs. Then I just install whatever like normal from nixpkgs. I can either override an existing pkg (neovim nightly replaces regular neovim for me), or you can just add as a new package to nixpkgs by using a different attribute name.

        Second way is for projects with their own repo. I’ll add a project flake that has a devshell with direnv so as soon as I enter that directory it sets up a sort of virtual environment just for that project. You can add outputs to it so others can use as a third-party flake.

        My main starting point was https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for this design.

      • visc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        NixOS is for people who have accidentally uninstalled 90% of their system because they didn’t pay attention to what other packages depend on the thing they were uninstalling and were desperately looking for a an undo button.

  • specterspectre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    371·
    4 days ago

    I think I’ve put fedora on at least 4 personal systems and it has never caused an issue. It’s so smooth it’s boring in the best way. Switched to it for daily computing about 4 years ago. I use a minipc as a media server with Arch and turning it on it’s exciting. Just this fucking morning the default configuration decided that my main audio device was a microphone. Lovely. So flexible.

  • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
    3912·
    4 days ago

    I’ll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I’m fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it’s the exact opposite in my experience, I’ve had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can’t think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.

    And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I’ve never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback

    • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      They really should have used the word “static” instead of stable. Stable definitely has connotations of functional stability, and unstable of functional instability.

    • dezmd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      4 days ago

      You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.

      “Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages…”

      The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.

      • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
        41·
        4 days ago

        I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.

        I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.

        The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.

        I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch

        If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ

        • pmc@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          3 days ago

          Did you go buster -> bullseye -> bookworm or just straight to bookworm? It sounds like something got screwed up with the usr merge.

          • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 days ago

            Straight to bookworm. Sounds like that’s not supported but that just further shows why i don’t find it to be a functionally stable, or perhaps reliable is a better wording, system. But that’s also just my opinion

        • leezh@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          3·
          3 days ago

          No opinion on Debian but as a heavy ArchLinux user I should point out you shouldn’t upgrade without reading the news as occasionally manual intervention is required. Upgrades can and will break things if you’re not careful.

          https://archlinux.org/news/openblas-0323-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/

          https://archlinux.org/news/ansible-core-2153-1-update-may-require-manual-intervention/

          https://archlinux.org/news/incoming-changes-in-jdk-jre-21-packages-may-require-manual-intervention/

        • fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de
          31·
          3 days ago

          I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date

          That won’t work, old pacman versions can’t deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.

          • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
            21·
            3 days ago

            I mean, if you want to use your system pacman sure. But you can just download the latest statically built pacman to do the large jump without issues. However i will concede that is more than JUST keyring update

            Edit: another fun way to get around that issue pretty easily. Boot any up to date arch installer, mount the old ass system root to /mnt and just run

            pacman -Sy

            pacman --sysroot /mnt

            Now just normal syu and the live environment pacman will update the old system, arch/pacman has a plethora of easy ways to get around what would otherwise be show stoppers on apt/dpkg :)

        • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn’t get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling “stable” distros.

          • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 day ago

            I honestly don’t see this thorough testing. Not for a lot of apps I use anyway. It’s normal tbf even with 2 year you can’t thoroughly test every package for every bug, so you’re stuck with very old bugs a lot more often than people think. And on top of that some packages are so old that instructions you find on their git pages or wherever are too new and don’t work.

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.

          It’s funny that your phone auto corrected or you typed a capital E out of habit. I imagine you talk about Endeavor OS a lot lol.

          • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
            21·
            3 days ago

            Was using voice to text, it auto capitalizes words at absolute random. However yes i do use EndeavorOS so it comes up from time to time :p

    • dan@upvote.au
      12·
      4 days ago

      FWIW I’ve got a Debian server that hosts most of my sites and primary DNS server, that’s been running since Etch (4.0, 2007ish). I’ve upgraded it over the years, switched from a dedicated server to OpenVZ to KVM, and it’s still running today on Bookworm. No major issues with upgrades.

      • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
        22·
        3 days ago

        It’s definitely not something that will happen 100%. I’ve also had long standing debian systems that seem to not care. However I’ve had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn’t handle multiple major version hops and just eviscerated themselves, I’ve not had that with arch personally. You may need to download the latest statically built pacman depending on how old it is but that and a keyring update usually has you covered

        • dan@upvote.au
          3·
          3 days ago

          However I’ve had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn’t handle multiple major version hops

          Debian only supports upgrading one major version at a time. If you’re upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, you need to first do 10 to 11, then 11 to 12. Upgrading multiple versions at a time is completely untested and unsupported.

    • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
      82·
      3 days ago

      depends on workload. Debian has very old packages and can be insecure but it is a set it and forget it type of thing, it is good when uptime is critical for a server. For desktops, or servers that need better security, but can tolerate a little downtime, rolling releases are good too, if you are enough to update frequently, and you should, since updates usually contain a lot of patched vulrenabilities

    • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
      31·
      3 days ago

      To me the issue is the people calling a system stable because it is reliable, even if it updates unpredictably to changing functionality.

    • friendless@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      41·
      4 days ago

      Good point! But I recently swapped to Debian 12 from Fedora 41. The latter needing constant updates several times a day. And despite this, it was not stable at all.

      • dan@upvote.au
        2·
        4 days ago

        Fedora is good on laptops since it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest driver fixes (which are needed for laptops like the Framework where they’re actively improving things). On the other hand, it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest bugs.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
    373·
    4 days ago

    I mean, I’m on Debian and I’m on the same install instance I’ve had for almost four years now. I’m constantly reading about how some of you people keep hosing your other distros with a normal update…

    • Draghetta@lemmy.world
      131·
      4 days ago

      Real. Though sometimes running a recent version of something is a real challenge, unless it ships in appimage. If it’s a small program you can usually backport the package from unstable or just build it yourself, but if it depends on some rust or js libraries or whathaveyou you have to do so much crap you might as well just be running trixie

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      3·
      3 days ago

      Lol, I ran 5 years on arch without a break.

      Now 6 months of Bazzite without a break.

      I think the age of distros shipping severely broken updated is over. And it was always, ALWAYS grub that broke after an update on mint and opensuse 10 years ago for me.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 days ago

      Are *buntu flavors risky for my workstation? Should I be considering Fedora?

      Why would they be risky? O.o They’re the preferred workstation setup at my place because Ubuntu is spread enough that it can be relied upon to be the distro admins have the most experience with (which is a self-perpetuating thing, I am aware).

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
    16·
    4 days ago

    From my experience of Fedora: would you like to update today? Debian: You’re good bro, no updates today.

    • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      331·
      4 days ago

      I’ve never had any issues with my Arch install being unpredictable. It has always worked exactly as I expected it to, even though I update it every couple of days.

      • luluu@lemmy.world
        353·
        4 days ago

        It has always worked exactly as I expected it to

        Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
        222·
        4 days ago

        I’ve been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I’ve had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they’re usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.

        My experience with Arch is basically: it’s all very predictable until it isn’t and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.

        • Dempf@lemmy.zip
          5·
          4 days ago

          What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.

          It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
            31·
            4 days ago

            What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off

            Yes, and that’s why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I’m confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.

            There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I’ve also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don’t want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.

        • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          33·
          4 days ago

          Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
            62·
            4 days ago

            That’s such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I’ve run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.

            At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn’t matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.

            • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              22·
              4 days ago

              Yeah, and sooner or later, I’ll die of old age, or cancer, or an accident, or get audited on my taxes.

              None of those things have happened yet either. Not only that, but the same is true for every operating system that has ever existed, or will ever exist, including every distro of Linux.

              • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
                32·
                4 days ago

                Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.

                • My wifi, that had been working fine since I installed this computer in 2020, broke in kernel 6.11 and 6.12 because Arch pushed those updates.
                • Early plasma 6.0 releases were rough as balls for months, because Arch pushed those updates.
                • My bluetooth, that had been working since I installed this computer in 2020, started to randomly disconnect sometime last year due to buggy firmware updates because Arch pushed those updates.
                • Hell even plain old intel ethernet on my old system from 2014 suddenly started hanging up under load a year or two ago (never found the cause, did find a workaround).

                None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        4 days ago

        Do you use your computer for things that rely on specific library versions and functionality?

      • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
        12·
        4 days ago

        imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette

        • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          I don’t like waiting that long, because sitting for an hour while it recompiles everything that updated is annoying. I like the daily or so updates that only take a couple minutes.

      • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn’t lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i’d experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments

        • Spectrism@feddit.org
          21·
          3 days ago

          No need to manually install desktop environments, archinstall also does that (Profile --> Desktop).

            • Spectrism@feddit.org
              2·
              3 days ago

              You did, probably just didn’t see it ;) It’s been part of it for years, since around 2020 according to GitHub. But to be fair, calling the option “Profile” might not be very intuitive for some people, so it’s easy to miss.

        • 1985MustangCobra@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.