I’m an Ubuntu-user. My wife and myself have a Windows laptop from work and my kids also from school. Not to have to buy another laptop for personal use I made an Ubuntu-usb-stick to boot from any of these four available laptops. I’m not a power user. I need some office-apps, web-browser, … . And gaming is done via Gforce-Now cloud gaming. If that makes me a noob 🙂 I mostly don’t have the time anymore to tinker with all this anymore. Been there, done that.
That’s nice. Be sure to set appropriate flags to mount the USB (e.g. in fstab file) to prolong it’s life span. The thumb drive could deteriorate rather quickly otherwise.
Reading the article, it seems like the configuration of the fstab-file needs to be done at creating the bootable usb-stick? Or can it also be modified afterwards?
To do the tune-ups, the usb drive must be unmounted. But it might not be as relevant as I thought… the same wiki entry says, that if you do 10gb of write operations per day, the USB drive (whitout tune-ups) should last you 10 years. But you still might consider disable journaling as it will speed things up (less of those costly write operations). (See “3.5 Disabling journaling” on the second link).
I didn’t think these people were real until I had to explain to one very carefully that I do not have time nor the want to fuck with Arch and Ubuntu works for me when I was asking a simple display IT question on Reddit.
That sucks man. There needs to be less division and derision in the Linux community. Not that there is a lot, but there is enough to drive some people away. It's not as easy as windows to daily drive Linux. It is SO MUCH better than it used to be, but it still isn't something you can just dump on a family member or friend and expect to not get calls about it.
And worse, it isn't the same for almost anyone. I've had good luck with Arch derivatives (Manjaro and Garuda), but I've got friends that tried running the exact same OS and build etc. on very similar hardware and can't get half the games working that I play regularly with minimal effort - even following the same steps I used with no issues. They install Ubuntu or Mint and suddenly it works fine... Happy it works, but none of us know why or what to do if something similar happens next time...
And somehow, it seems every problem any of us runs into are so bizarre (or we don't know enough "likely causes" to google specific and correct terminology) that it seems like no one on the internet has ever had it happen before. Thankfully it's been going great for me, but one of my friends is just having a rough time of it. :(
TL;DR - Thank you to all the actually helpful people in the Linux community that make this journey possible for the rest of us. To the people being dicks: if you have to swing down constantly to feel good, re-evaluate your life choices and leave us out of it.
Yeah, I need more of an all 'rounder, but Linux choice is all about use cases. Ubuntu is just so bog standard I can set it and forget it for most things and I appreciate that.
I mean, currently I’m having less trouble using Arch to game than I was with anything else. I think the big thing is that Aech has a rapid release of updates, and the Steamdeck is based on Arch.
If you want those benefits without a lot of the annoying complexity during setup, there is always EndeavorOS. It’s pretty close to a basic Arch install, but it holds your hand a lot more.
Sounds like something you might say if you hadn’t used Arch to daily drive? I’m about to hop off Lemmy and play some ff7 remake which cost me exactly no effort to install. Maybe arch used to be hard, but I’ve yet to see it and I built from minimal install. Meta packages yo.
PopOS gaming was a shit show for me, steam wouldn’t work and installing non free drivers borked my system like it was Ubuntu 12.04. I honestly don’t have any idea what PopOS does that others don’t for gaming, steam/wine/lutris/bottles are distribution agnostic. I’ve only ever heard people say PopOS for gaming but never seen anything showing why it’s better.
Full disclosure this was a while ago and I’ve gone separate ways with Debian and derivatives for now.
What PopOS’ did different was not any of the software you mentioned. It was proprietary NVIDIA drivers. They shipped them with the ISO and put it front and center.
Yeah as far as I can tell, the current big user-friendly distros are either PopOS or Linux Mint because Ubuntu is doing the whole snap thing, and also Mint (maybe Pop too, i havent looked into that one much) is Ubuntu-based just without snap
To avoid them entirely, yes. Ubuntu ships some of its core functionality via snap. That’s how it was tested, and how it will be updated for the foreseeable future. Ripping that out puts you on an untested path that you’re responsible for managing. To keep things working as designed and tested, and avoid breakage, I’d leave snap alone and pretend it doesn’t exist, if I wanted to avoid it.
To avoid them for your personal needs, no they’re not hard to avoid. Just don’t install anything yourself via Snap. Use apt, Flatpak instead. Or any other means.
Personally I use a mix of Snap and Flatpak on top of Ubuntu LTS. That keeps the base OS boring stable and provides a way to keep user apps like GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice up to date, without the risk of breakage that comes with PPAs. Docker’s great for running services as well as many other use cases too.
To avoid them for your personal needs, no they’re not hard to avoid. Just don’t install anything yourself via Snap. Use apt, Flatpak instead. Or any other means.
Not entirely accurate. Some apt packages like firefox and chromium just install the corresponding snap.
Snap has it's use cases, but it should not be a silent substitute for .debs
Yes that’s true and in my opinion perfectly fine. As a developer who’s done some deb packaging work, that’s how I’d migrate from a deb to snap in order to minimize breakage on upgrade, especially if I’m no longer supporting the deb. This strategy also keeps compatibility with scripts that apt install firefox which would otherwise break on upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. It’s a pretty elegant way to do it.
I can see using snaps when the alternative is to break things. But mozilla team is already packaging as .deb for ubuntu available through the mozillateam ppa.
This seems to be canonical arbitrarily injecting the snap store as a dependency for firefox with no clear benefit and noticeable performance issues
I don’t know who packages what and what the SLAs for each is. That is, who makes the snap, who makes the debs in the mozillateam PPA, is it the same people, are they different with different mandates. What is the security patch expectation for the snap and deb. I suspect that there’s a difference there. From purely technical perspective, building a single snap is probably less time and work than building 5 debs, one for each supported Ubuntu release. What we know for sure however is that Ubuntu comes with a security patch expectation for the packages in the base OS along with varying expectations for the packages in the different Ubuntu repositories - main, universe, multiverse, etc. The snap version of Firefox falls under this umbrella. The mozillateam PPA does not. Maybe the latter is also patched as quickly. For users who can’t or don’t want to think about those important details, whatever is shipped with Ubuntu is probably the safest bet, especially when we’re discussing possibly the largest attack surface on end user systems - the internet browser.
Snaps have borked my device table, now lsblk lists every single fucking snap install. I will get a new SSD for my system partition, and I’ll probably go with Debian. If I have to deliberately avoid an OS feature because the vendor has decided to shove it down my throat I will drop that OS like it’s hot.
Im just here waiting for the inevitable reverse of this reverse meme. Real question, and maybe its just this extreme luck of mine: have anyone of you guys actually see a significant body of smugly Arch users put it in your face, because I havent seen one but i’ve seen this meme idea for the nth times now. Hiw is this any different from “I use Ubuntu btw”?
I’ve never seen anyone being smug about their distro, but I’ve also never seen a comment where somebody have said they use Ubuntu. Arch on the other hand is everywhere, meme or no meme.
Genuinely, I have only seen mentioning of Arch as the distro they use because they mentioned something arch-specific (e.g pacman) or its actually important to make a distinction (package name), and usually they anticipate the meme anyways because its the butt of the joke now. For me at least it isnt hard to find an equivalent ubuntu/fedora/suse comment, and I think its fine! But why are we fighting this ghost of “Arch is only for edgy guys that want to break their system and be smug about it on the Internet”?
Could also be im tired of seeing this meme everyday now… Linux has a lot more jokes than this guys… Just dig Linus Torvalds’ mailing list for some ideas
I’m just learning Linux so I literally Googled the easiest version and installed Ubuntu. I can’t even figure out folder permissions. I’m in over my head, but at least I’m also getting made fun of.
Ubuntu is where most of us start, so fortunately there is a lot of help! Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it in time. It’s not hard, it’s just complicated because it’s introducing a lot of new things. I put Linux on a whim on my laptop and after two years I have started to convert everything over. I learned to appreciate an OS that does what I tell it and not assume what I want to do. I choose Ubuntu because it’s what I knew from the computer labs at college ten years ago when I needed to print things. I’ve tried others, but it just works.
Dude, I've been messing with this stuff for a decade and permissions still get me sometimes. If something is breaking, always do a check on permissions. It's often the issue.
You will learn, it just takes time, even those fanboys didn’t know anything about chmod when they started, and some of them install Arch and end up running back to windows because they started on hard mode.
Tried arch today. Didn’t even get to installing it on the partition. Pacman just won’t sync extra repo. No chance of letting reflector do it’s thing. Nobody seemed to have the exact same problem before. Mostly found half- or unanswered threads from before 1876. Gave up after an hour and installed Ubuntu with about 2.5 clicks.
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