As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.

So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.

I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    7·
    7 months ago

    To me, the best OS will always be the one that gets out of my way as good as possible. That includes stability, maintenance, compatibility, usability and sensible defaults. I don’t want to deal with the OS when I’m trying to get stuff done or I’m looking for entertainment.

    And yeah, Debian is pretty good at most of those things.

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      7 months ago

      I struggle daily between wanting exactly what you describe, while also wanting to have my grubby little fingerprints on every square millimeter of my system. I think I’ve found the middleground now with a portable, “lazy” Debian system, which will mostly handle lighter use, and my dedicated Arch desktop where I go full nerd mode, experimenting and fiddling to my hearts content.

    • Nik282000@lemmy.ca
      1·
      7 months ago

      As much Gnome can be a pain to customize, out of the box I still like it for its get-out-of-the-wayness. Tap the super key, type a few chars of the name of software you want to run, hit enter and its back to being a taskbar. Very similar to tab completion in the terminal for me.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 months ago

    I agree about plain english in the package manager.

    Years ago I wrote a script (now unmaintained) called “human Bash” where I wrapped a bunch of my commonly used commands in english words.

    Some examples (parameters in cursive):

    • "please install minecraft "
    • “please update”
    • "search package by command ifconfig "
    • "search file by name /home/user/Downloads *.pdf "
    • "search file by content p_color "

    and so on.

    But since then I moved on to gui tools entirely.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        1·
        7 months ago

        please was basically a more complicated alias for sudo :D it originated as a meme on twitter I believe

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 months ago

    I am an old hand at Linux. I started with Red Hat’s Halloween release. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad and I slapped Pop!_OS on it and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Rock solid and stable. If you have shit to get done and don’t have time for shenanigans, Debian is hard to beat.

  • auth@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 months ago

    I tried Debian a few times and never liked it… I like the Arch experience better.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    These kind of posts confuse me. What you’re describing is not the distribution, but a vanilla GNOME experience. That can be achieved on basically any distribution with a healthy package repository. Not to mention that troubleshooting rarely involves the package manager, unless you are aware of a package that specifically breaks something. The recent pixman regression would be an example of this

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      1·
      7 months ago

      On Arch, full Gnome is packaged in a billion optional packages, and requires some manual configuration to work right just in case you wanted to run Gnome on an outdated Linux version with System-V and no PulseAudio. The defaults are for compatibility with the wacky setups Arch users like, and not so much the “it just works” approach.

      On Debian, you just get all the packages an end user would reasonably expect. That’ll take up a few hundred extra megabytes and add a bunch of shortcuts you’ll probably neve use to your app selector, but it’ll work well out of the box.

      You can get the Debian experience on Arch and the Arch experience on Debian, but both ways you’ll need to do a lot of messing around.

      Of course, Debian is not specifically any better than alternatives like Fedora or Ubuntu in this regard, but there is a clear distinction between Arch and Debian in my experience.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    1·
    7 months ago

    Check out MX. It has some nice tools and defaults to make Debian better as a desktop distro.

    Debian + Nix (home-manager) gives you a stable system and bleeding edge userland packages. It’s a perfect combo.

    • genie@lemmy.world
      02·
      7 months ago

      I tried Debian + Nix once upon a time too. Honestly flatpaks and containers did everything I needed and more, and every dev team I’ve been on already has familiarity with the container workflow.

      I’m a huge fan of Debian and Nix, don’t get me wrong, but it was shy of perfect for my use case. Glad it works for you though! I’ve been using Fedora + Nix home-manager with flakes for almost two years and I don’t think I’ll ever go back

      • Shareni@programming.dev
        11·
        7 months ago

        Flatpak is imperative. Nix gives me less headaches than docker. I haven’t tried distrobox.

        Why Fedora? That’s what I initially started with, but it was less stable than arch on my t480, nix unstable has newer packages, and I couldn’t get nix to work with selinux.

        • genie@lemmy.world
          21·
          7 months ago

          Haha I’ve had a journey to get here, all because I have a 12th gen Framework.

          Initially I got Debian Sid working but ran into power management issues with the module system. I switched over to arch and loved that for a while but frankly I was too careless and kept breaking my system. The way I use Arch it wasn’t a stable daily driver. Then I switched over to NixOS and loved it, but I bricked 3 of 4 ports with a firmware update (again me being careless). Graciously, Framework helped me fix the issue.

          After all of that I decided to go with a distro that is officially supported by Framework. Between Ubuntu and Fedora I choose Fedora since they don’t have ads for Ubuntu Pro :) I also like SELinux by default and wanted to broaden my horizons

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip.

    This I find a very weird statement. Perosnally I use arch on a laptop for work and I never ran into the scenario of not having a working laptop always ready.

    1. I have btrfs snapshots pre and post update that I can roll back to

    2. I update my packages every friday in the last hour of work, where I can roll back or do the required manual intervention in peace

    3. When I have an important time period where I judt don’t want to deal with it, I just don’t update anything. At some point I had everything out of date for 7 months due to a big and stressful project. Once it was over, I updated as usual.

    4. Nothing ever broke since I started doing it like this and following the arch news.

    And for that I get way more packages, no missing out on the newest features and it is way easier to install anything not in the repos/AUR by creating my own PKGBUILD so that I have updates - than manually installing it on debian from make and it never updating.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      1·
      7 months ago

      I think the last three points are exactly what is wrong with Arch for nornal users. I don’t need to follow Windows or macOS news sites to know if I can update Firefox or not, but in Arch you kind of have to dig into this stuff.

      On every Debian (derived) machine, I’ve set up automatic updates. Every now and then a bigger update prompts me to click “yes”, and sometimes it asks me to reboot when I have time. The brain space wasted on updates and recovery just becomes usable again without Arch.

      BTRFS snapshots are something Debian sorely needs (preferably with a GUI, like Timeshift), and the PKGBUILD based system is very nice indeed. However, they’re not worth the risk in my opinion.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      1·
      7 months ago

      Imagine being able to turn on automatic updates and nothing breaking or requiring rollback. That’s Debian Stable. 🫠

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      7 months ago

      Yknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Considering that aptitude needs shortcuts it might feel like a throwback to pacman for OP.

      There’s also synaptic for checking out dependencies and searching etc. which doesn’t need the user to learn shortcuts.

      Where aptitude absolutely rules and saves the day is in fixing complex package conflicts… but often if your system has reached that point you might as well consider reinstall.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        0·
        7 months ago

        You can use shortcuts, or you can use the keyboard menu, or a mouse.

        It also works well in case you ever get restricted to a text interface.

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            1·
            7 months ago

            I don’t know how I ever managed to launch it, but I think aptitude has a TUI. I mostly use it to resolve conflicts introduced by me adding external repositories and ignoring warnings, but I know there’s a way to turn it into a visual package manager that reminded me very much of the old DOS ers applications.