Yeah, I get that. I do, however, really like how FireDragon comes with a lot of the extension I'd like to use, and with searx as the default web search. It also takes almost no time to switch to a much better KDE layout as opposed to the seemingly script kiddie dr4a6onized default.
I wouldn’t use firedragon. It is a very outdated fork of librewolf, which is hardened even more. While librewolf is only a few days behind regular Firefox, firedragon sometimes is months behind making it a horrible choice for security.
Over the years of using Vim both professionally and for my own uses, I've learned to just install LunarVim and only add a handful of packages/overrides. Otherwise I just waste too much time tinkering and not doing the things I need to.
I usually keep most of the config. I just move them around to make it more comprehensive. The only time I made a huge change during a rewrite was when I learnt about treesitter textobjects.
If you actually try to understand what's happening, I think it's one of the best ways to learn how a system is composed, at least if you install manually. What's a partition, file system, what does mounting do, chroots, you name it.
I don't use Arch anymore but still think it's a great distro to learn the basics while still having the luxury of new binary packages. Manual Arch install abstracts basically nothing away from you, for better or for worse.
Currently on NixOS, I'd say while its engineering is better overall, the things you learn there are much more distribution-specific or maybe concept-specific and often not applicable to other distributions.
I guess there are also probably ways to install e.g. Debian manually, I've never seen instructions for it though as there was always the focus on the installer, and frankly I'm not a big fan of apt and all. It always seemed to be much more convoluted than pacman plus it does a lot of stuff for you, whether you want it or not was my impression.
The vast majority of people want to start by using Linux, they don't want an in depth lecture about Linux. It's like making someone take a course on bicycles instead of letting them get on the bicycle.
It appeals to a very specific niche who are already familiar with Linux and want that in-depth lecture. It's not a good approach for beginners, and it's not a good approach for experimented users who just want to install Linux fast.
Hey, I never said this is what people want, just that it is in fact a transferrable skill. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone just trying to get their machine running, but if you're looking to gain some insight, is not the worst choice.
What I meant by [non] transferrable is that the process is so highly specific to Arch that it won't benefit you on any other distro. You will learn to connect to WiFi on Arch but this will not help you connect to WiFi on Ubuntu or Fedora. The Arch process does not tell you which concepts are generic and which are not. At the end of the day you've learned Arch Linux, but not necessarily "Linux".
Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It's only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I've fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it's literally what landed me my current job and promotions.
Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch's install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor's DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.
If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there's nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.
Anyways, after about a decade I've recently switched to NixOS. Now there's a distro where the skills you learn can't be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.
I explained my reasoning and you made no attempt to engage with it and just asked a question I already answered in depth. I'm not sure what you want, but it's clearly not an answer.
Interesting how similar our distro careers are. My switch was also after a long time (15 years). Wouldn't go back to Arch. Still think it's a good distro for what it's trying to achieve.
I was once checking out Garuda, because the name popped up a handful of times. Outside of the absolutely repulsive front page, the moment i saw unmarked and unexplained “fun scripts” in the installer, i unplugged the installer
Very fair. I'm a far cry from an advanced user - I know just enough to be dangerous to myself, and didn't see that. As I said in another comment, though, I do like that the default browser is somewhat hardened and uses a decent searx instance as the default search. It does seem to be marketed towards teenagers, though, unfortunately.
It’s not even really about how advanced you are. Using something more trustworthy, and something you can depend on, is always better. For arch(-based) distributions, i would always recommend Endeavour. Plain Arch will just do it too, if you can follow instructions as listed
I wasn’t a fan of it, personally. I’ve only tried it once, because the regular install takes me less than 10 minutes start to full completion, but didn’t really like some of the opinionated choices for the setup here and there. Still appreciate that it’s there though
Arch is pretty stable and often more usable than something based on Debian from my experience fedoras better but has so many more bugs compared to arch. I chose arch because everything was broken on Debian and fedora based stuff. Leave me alone with your philosophy about "out dates software is stable software".
Not everyone uses a ten year old system and bugs in graphical software that exist when the new version of Debian drops exists for pretty much the whole releases lifecycle from my experience and that's painful.
Debian is literally one of the most stable systems out there. It only pails in comparison to RHEL and RHEL like systems but the stability difference isn't huge. Arch on the other hand you get updates daily and they create breaking changes.
I'm not talking about stability I'm talking about it actually working on modern hardware without receiving updates that break things or a lack of support at all. Trust me, I've tried on multiple devices and it was painful. I'm never gonna recommend Debian for anyone who wants to use it on a desktop period.
Also Nvidia drivers broke on Debian she couldn't watch anything off the movie server until I rolled back the driver, a fix I've never had to do on my primary computer. A much newer version on my arch install and I didn't have to worry about back ported patches bricking software.
I don't care what you guys think just stop trying to convince people that the choices they make are wrong. Everyone has different use cases and different requirements.
"stable" just means deal with different issues that are often more confusing, annoying, and don't exist anywhere ese like outdated libraries that don't work with concurrent git projects.
Trying to get any non free software working in an intuitive manor when the internet doesn't even work out of the box and your looking at a 4 year old version of gnome for one of your first forays outside of Ubuntu. I'm sure that recommendation works out real nice for newcomers. So fucking annoying to take advice like that and barely manage to install it just for it to be a mess of expired ssl certificates and apt to not work when you finally managed to connect it to the Internet.
I downloaded it from the website how hard can it be to make it work out of the box. Give me a raw arch install anyday. At least I know what's even happening. Or at least give me something that works out of the box like fedora tries to do.
I'm sorry for any Debian fans I offended. It's great for a server but you gotta know something about the weird stuff Debian does to even understand how to coexist with it. Ubuntu became popular for a reason and it's annoying that it solves so many of Debian shortcomings but thems the breaks.
I don't like Ubuntu but Debian alright in my book it's a community thing and Debian users have their own language I can't speak. Most my computers just didn't run Debian, too new and buggy because of it.
I guess what I'm getting at is stable is great. But it doesn't run on half of my shit and things that are simple in other distros are (at least for me) unintuitive and not very well documented on the Debian wiki.
It would make it easier if it didn't take five minutes to load every page and sometimes fail to load at all. I'm fond of doing my own research but Debian's wiki is super slow.
No, it's a rolling release. Stable means that behaviours don't change during a support cycle of a major version. A rolling release can't be stable since it doesn't have major versions.
Your funny, I think the word your looking for is stagnant. I've never seen any substantial evidence of a distro with outdated packages really being any more reliable than a rolling release.
I've only had a Debian server for six months and have already ran into issues with botched updates multiple times on bookworm. I only use it for zfs because Debian often runs a kernel old enough to support it. I had an arch server run for nine years no issues zfs just takes a bit to support the latest lts kernel.
I've troubleshooted Debian just about as much as I've troubleshooted arch so what's your point.
The behavior doesn't change until they brick a driver or mess up your software without any worning months after that release taking them over a week to fix it. 😆 Thanks Debian for consuming a whole afternoon just before movie night with the family started.
I’ve never seen any substantial evidence of a distro with outdated packages really being any more reliable than a rolling release.
I think the fundamental issue here is that you conflate the concepts of reliablility and stability. Those are not the same. Stability in distros is a question of how much they restrict change during support cycles in order to not be a moving target for developers and system integrators. Fundamentally a rolling release can't be stable. It can absolutely be reliable to use, but you wouldn't use it as a basis for an embedded system you're trying to develop.
I've heard the counter argument from developers that jumping from a two to four years old codebase is an absolute nightmare to deal with and moving to a rolling release means not dealing with the burden of migrating over to a newer version and implementing small patches when needed.
Entire fixes, features, and upgrades miss the deadline and have to wait because of a process like this. It's still a moving target but on a different scale. They try to roll the newest packages possible into the release meaning the majority of the bug fixing and testing happens mere months before release.
It's a solid concept but so much changes all at once it's a big project to migrate to a newer version. It frontloads a lot of the work sometimes to the point of delaying support for the newer version. Unless you build for Debian unstable and work backwards from there (basically rolling) but doesn't guarantee back ports don't break the software.
It only benefits users who need a set it and forget it solution. I chose it for my server because I don't want to touch it but I dread the day I have to upgrade the whole system and something small like the zfs filesystem, docker, or my samba setup suddenly has issues and makes it unbootable like that kernel update that bricked my Nvidia drivers a couple months ago. I'm hoping that's a fluke because it happened at the worst time for me.
It's four years from now, I don't have to think about it yet.
