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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m sure EndeavourOS is perfectly fine for the people who work on it and their core user base. That’s not my issue. It’s still happily running on my laptop. I just keep on seeing people say “Don’t use Manjaro, use EndevourOS! It’s much better.” But your average computer user would lose their shit at having to deal with those ^ issues. “You just had to enable it at installation if you wanted printing. You didn’t see the checkbox?! Oh mah gaaa” …Seriously? It’s not a checkbox to turn it back on if you miss it and should be opt-out to begin with. Are you going to tell me CUPs is a significant memory/storage drain and a gaping vulnerability in a residential network? If one’s not familiar with Linux, CUPS, pacman and Systemd it’s a huge headache for most people to get this working.

    I just think that EndeavourOS shouldn’t be presented as a Manjaro alternative for your average person, when it’s an opinionated Arch-based distro with spotty defaults aimed at somewhat experienced Linux users that want nitty-gritty control over their system. (Users which, again, might as well be using vanilla Arch if that’s fun or important to them) And it has some weird update/mirror manager that prevented me from just using pacman to update my system at one point and I had to figure out whatever it was they wanted me to use. Never had this kind of crap happen to me in Manjaro. Nor was printing disabled by default. Nor were network shares hard to get working.


  • And in my case, I kinda don’t like Endeavour OS. I installed it on my laptop to try it out a couple months ago. It looked to me like a convenient no nonsense installer for Arch with some nice defaults, then you stumble on their custom update/mirror manager nonsense. Then you want to use a printer and realize they left CUPS disabled, as if to give you an “excuse” to use systemctl. Then if you want to use Samba, you need to go out of your way to find a default config file. I’ve had to jump through more hoops and dealt with more quirky nonsense than with Manjaro stable on that distro.

    It’s like it doesn’t know who this is meant for. People who want their hand held through a GUI for something basic as updating their system, or people who love writing their own config file for everything.

    Might as well install Arch, really.

    -Other happy Manjaro user



  • Yeah, I’ve been on Plasma 6 with my Manjaro Unstable desktop. Not a terrible experience and I’ve yet to encounter an AUR package giving me problems, aside from outdated ones. Honestly, I’ve given Endeavour OS a try on my laptop and will be switching it back to Manjaro when I find the time. It’s a fine distro, but it feels like it tries to give you an excuse to “bust out the terminal” once in a while… Which isn’t my thing anymore.








  • I don’t remember anyone mentioning Snap being closed source, but it receives many complaints for interfering with the functioning of common programs, on top of slowing down the execution of programs installed through it and is now being forced on users. I haven’t touched any *buntu distro in years, but it always seemed half-baked from the comments I keep on reading about it.

    Also yes, Flatpak is what I believe you could call a universal package manager. Package it once and it should run on any Linux distro since it takes most things out of the equation, save for the kernel and drivers. And yes, it mostly is used to distribute desktop applications. It’s ideal for safely running random applications or older programs that wouldn’t run through a modern runtime.


  • It’s not some miracle packaging system and while Flatpak-installed programs tend to start just as fast as native ones, I consider it inferior for most cases. Its two big advantages are that Flatpaks have a runtime they specify and depend on. It gets downloaded and installed automatically if missing when you install a Flatpak. So you’re much less likely to run into issues where a program won’t run on your system because of an incompatibility with a missing, or newer version of some library. Each Flatpak also gets installed in its own fake environment and is essentially a sandbox when you run the program. You can use a program named Flatseal to give each Flatpak access to specific directories or functionalities, or restrict it further. But the one big negative is that this runtime uses a lot of disk space. ~800MB per runtime.

    It tends to work really well and I’ve been told that years ago a guy would use this packaging system to bundle pirated windows games with a preconfigured version of wine, which made them run out of the box, with zero tinkering. On top of essentially being sandboxed and unable to access your real home folder, internet, camera or microphone. Just to illustrate its versatility. It also kind of already won the war when Steam Decks started using Flatpak as their main packaging system.


  • Nope, no thank you… I’m not touching anything other than native, AUR or Flatpak packages. AppImage has only been an inelegant and overall inferior alternative in my experience. The Windows experience, with Linux portability issues. “Find an installer online from some website, have it do whatever the hell it wants, polluting my home folder with random crap and hope it’s not a virus” with essentially zero advantages over Flatpak or even Snap.


  • Yeah… For years I already suggested anything good but Ubuntu to those interested in trying Linux, but now I’m going to directly tell them not to touch it. Sure, you’ve got lots of online discussions from the past 20-ish years of people teaching each other how to install PPAs for up-to-date versions of programs or drivers and that’s sweet. But how about a distro where that stuff is just available out of the box and one that doesn’t force you to use snaps as if they didn’t cause issues left and right?


  • I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called “discord-screen-audio” which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!


  • sleepyTonia@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlwhy did you switch?
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    1 year ago

    I decided I preferred dealing with issues caused by the limited resources of a well-meaning community (And often largely corporate contributions, I know) rather than issues caused by some giant company’s malice and greed. Goes without saying I don’t use Chrome either or any Chromium-based web browser. It’s not just Linux. There’s no surprise “Now you gotta pay a subscription to get the next updates!” catch when I get up in the morning and I never have to figure out how to disable anti-features.

    Basically every non-game program on my home computer I don’t strictly need for work is open-source, often worked on by volunteers or crowd-funded and that just kinda feels good, y’know? I decided to completely switch to Linux around 12-14 years ago and I sometimes laugh when I hear of the deliberate nonsense Windows users have to deal with at every major update. Or when installing basic software.

    To install any program I want, it’s just a matter of opening a terminal, or GUI package manager like Pamac and typing its name or often a related keyword. It gets installed along with anything it requires. No need to cautiously find the proper website (Anyone remember when SourceForge messed with Gimp’s installer to put ads in it?), download an installer and launch that. All my programs get updated for me through that very same GUI, along with my desktop environment, drivers and the kernel. Don’t gotta think about it or wait for some popup in each and every program to tell me “Click here to update! 😌”. And my computer doesn’t randomly reboot or slow down on me.

    And Edit:
    Last thing, but the Windows basic desktop utilities, like the file browser, text editor and such are all so much worse than the most common Linux alternatives that it’s kind of sad. I don’t know how people function without tabs and split-view when moving files. And I haven’t even touched on how ridiculously customizable Linux desktops are. Nothing compares out there.