The more time I spend with Linux the more I realize that Distro doesn’t matter, GUI doesn’t matter, experience doesn’t matter.
Distro doesn’t matter because you will inevitably come across something that you need that doesn’t work on your distribution.
GUI doesn’t matter because no matter what you do you will %100 have to use the terminal and if you can do it once you can do it again.
Experience doesn’t matter because if you’re inexperienced you have to go outside your Comfort zone, if you’re experienced you got there because you like going outside your comfort zone and you will constantly stay in that state.
WTF are you guys doing with your PCs??? I’ve been running Mint for over a year now and the only time I’ve used the terminal was to open a port for Chromecast. I browse, I game, I watch shows, etc. maybe I’m just really lucky, idk, it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.
I personally use it to run a headless docker on fedora 40 server with containers holding jellyfin, filebrowser, pia, qBittorrent a desktop in noVNC a pfsense server, and probably some stuff I forgot.
Why is that not a standard use case?
But in all seriousness I guess I get your point.
Meh, don’t worry about it. If you are happy with how it’s going for you - enjoy the ride! Not everyone needs to be bothered by the terminal. But it IS there if you need it or want to use it.
Besides, if Arch users wanted to be be real gurus they’d be running EMACS and not Arch.
Not exactly advanced, but I missed the super+P shortcut when switching from desk and monitor to sofa and TV. Made a couple of one line shell scripts that call Xrandr then bound them to keyboard shortcuts.
Arch is the distro that did hold the longest against my torture yet, maybe because everything is from the same repo 🤔😂
That huge chunk of learning required for arch when you’ve never used Linux before is really hard to imagine when you have years of experience working Linux under your belt. That does not mean it doesn’t exist for new users though.
That shit’s complex and long. Much as I appreciate the sentiment of “the distro doesn’t matter” I really can’t agree.
I realised the same thing.
When I was switching from Windows to Linux on my PCs (both at home and at work), I originally wanted to use Debian because I’m most familiar with it and have been running it on servers for 20+ years.
I have to use Fedora at work though - it’s a lightly-modified version of Fedora that runs some automatic configuration on first boot and first log in for things like ensuring disk encryption is enabled (including adding randomly-generated secondary keys for IT support), 802.1x certificates for Ethernet and VPN auth, Chef, endpoint security, etc.
Anyways, I started using it and love it. I’m running it at home now too. I realised the difference between distros is much narrower than it used to be.
Yes and no for me
Distro doesn’t matter because they only differ in package manager and initial configuration, you can always compile things if you really need it.
GUI doesn’t matter because you’ll end up with all KDE and gnome dependencies installed anyway because your applications need it.
Experience probably matters, but if it doesn’t, it may be because there is just so much there to know.
I wish gentoo was more explored, I felt the same way and then it finally scratched the itch of things working (perhaps even too many options). I actually ended up using gentoo because it was less of a headache to just get things to work in a way that does not feel hacky
I moved to Arch about 20 years ago because I wanted Gentoo but I didn’t want to wait hours for compilation. I remember it fondly though. emerge was kind of a killer feature.
Though I gotta say, I’m a bit more curious now that we have better processors. And I’m curious what I’ve missed over the years.
I tried out Gentoo for a while, and just using binaries for the web browser and office suite made the compile times a complete non-issue. The problem I had that made me give it up was that when there is software you want that isn’t in the official repos there are a thousand different ways of getting it, and all of them suck. Overlays are supposed to be the solution for that, but man that experience was just awful.
I tried all kinds of things, but in the end all the options basically boiled down to risking breakage, maintaining my own packages, or not using emerge at all, which just feels like it’s defeating the whole purpose of being on Gentoo in the first place.
Experience doesn’t matter because if you’re inexperienced you have to go outside your Comfort zone, if you’re experienced you got there because you like going outside your comfort zone and you will constantly stay in that state.
I was experimenting a lot during my early Linux months but then I found what works for me and settled with it. I don’t leave my comfort zone much anymore.
NixOS:
a whistle is blown, people start running out the trenches rifle in hand. Shouting while bombs pounder around, you stay still, disoriented. The general grabs your jacket and starts screaming. You cannot figure a single word of what he says, he just puts a monad into your hands.
Gentoo: you compile your mother from source, and then give birth to yourself.
You end up saying something similar to yourself after you read and fail to understand a LKML archive because it’s the only available documentation on this specific flag that you may or may not need and if you don’t need it why not turn it off. Repeat this many times for much learning (eventually).
It was a great experience but next time I’m building everything not strictly necessary as a module.
“It was a great learning experience” is how I describe working under the worst bosses in my life. Specifically, to people that I can’t be honest with and say how i truly felt.
One of them was just a straight up malignant asshole. The other was chronically absent. She may have had some good reasons for it, but when I had to stop bailing her out because it was getting to 20-30 hours extra entirely without a schedule… and she started lying (and spoofing texts to prove it was my fault…)
Well, suffice it to say “great learning experience” is the polite way of saying “absolute fucking hell”
And I fucking soared
(Btw)
The thing about arch, is that if you have a basic understanding of the terminal and computers, the arch wiki can get from that level to a real expert.
So if you ask me, anyone with a basic understanding of the terminal, and a goal to improve, should go with arch.
Can you define a basic understanding of the terminal?
Your basic and my basic could be wildly different.
Having completed “Hacknet”, the hit 2015 hacker simulator video game.
(Only half joking)
I played 2 hours of that game. I wondered how close it was to reality. Do those programs that you call in game have real life counterparts?
This was my experience just setting it up as dualboot and not doing super much with it. Sure I failed installing it a few times but I came out with more understanding of file systems, and in the end the wiki told me everything I needed to know.
I installed Slackware from 24 floppies I downloaded from a Volkerdings personal server, because I didn’t have a CD ROM. I installed using documentation printed on a dot matrix printer that was versions out of date… It took a day to compile a kernel. I’ve had to manually patch drivers (3c509 baaabyyy).
I dreamed about a future where I never had to do that again. Arch pisses me off.
