I feel called out

I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

Debian is sometimes frustratingly out of date for daily apps like the web browser. I'd rather recommend something with a bit more updates like Mint.

After many years of using multiple devices and even servers with Archlinux installed it never broke because of an update (spoiler: I use systemd-boot instead of grub). If a system is to be used by a less experienced user, just install linux-lts Kernel instead.

Unstable does not mean it crashes/breaks often, it just means it does not guarantee to not bump to the newest upstream version and that it does not do backports. This can be a problem when using unmaintaned software that does not like using a recent python/php.

This is also great because if you find a bug in a software you can report it to upstream directly. Debian maintainers only backport severe bugs, not every one of them. It can take over a year for new features to arrive - especially painful with applications like gimp, krita, blender, etc. You can use debian-unstable of course, which is close to upstream as well.

Arch has rolling releases and is super stable.

because Arch is more lightwheight than Debian, and also more stable than non-arch users think it is

with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.

every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.

Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn't have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.

Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn't the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.

It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.

Incompetent users ig

I do Linux research for a living and I barely give a shit.

I got my grandma a chromebox for easy updates and minimal tech support. I get a call from her probably once a month when a random tab she got to through Facebook puts her browser in full screen and says she has a windows virus. Sometimes she calls them but is smart enough to not give a credit card. Every time she calls me all scared and asks "I don't have Microsoft right?" lol

Not sure grandma would be visiting this site

You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.

If that number is more than 0 then I would be very surprised. There are buttons on the side for volume and volume buttons have been standard on devices since at least the early 80's.

This reminds me of that time where my mum entered the fastboot menu on her phone by mistake. She panicked and I just told her to restart, making sure she holds only the power button this time. It also reminds me of the first time I got into my first smart device (my Tablet's) bootloader by mistake. I was 10, my parents had just bought me the tablet like a week ago and I was at my grandma's so I understandably panicked a lot. But of course, no damage was done.

I don't know, it sounds a bit Linux circle-jerky to me but then again a lot of people are indeed very clueless, true!

I wouldn't say braindead. They just don't care (because all they need a computer for is to read emails and use a text processor) or haven't had the time to learn yet (every known fact must be learned for a first time at some point in your life, which means there is a time in your life where you don't have that knowledge yet (ie. the time before you acquired that knowledge)).

I think you mean a "Samsung". Because like 50% of people using Android have no idea that they are.

downloading software from the browser? Are we windows users?

that's what AUR is for.

i use arch btw (not really I use EndeavorOs which is basically Arch with a gui installer)

Shouldn't that be a FreeBSD user?

The correct solution (as with languages on websites) is to auto-detect but then make it super easy and obvious how to change if the auto detected version is not what the user wants.

Also if any web developers out there are reading - don't use the user's location to determine the language/region they want, and especially don't force it. I have no idea why so many websites do this but those responsible deserve to permanently have small amounts of sand in all their socks.

Does librewolf do that too? I didn't realize that was a feature of firefox

Man of culture

And before he blew up with these comics, he made a fantastic series of RimWorld comics, which I highly recommend!

Doesn't he draw mostly naked characters in this series that look like they're goddamn 12 year olds? That might relate more to related materials than the visual novel itself, but still.

Yeah, the one who draws an imaginary teen girlfriend and unfunny cringe comics

You're being generous.

98%

Same. He's got some suspiciously weird posts and a lot of his comics are kind of low-brow.

Where you at then, kbin?

I don't know if they fixed the bug, but it only spun for me when the username I entered was already taken.

un-Linux-able

Damn, that should be fucking illegal

Oh it was we just had to return it and buy the right one haha the shareware copy held me over for a bit longer