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10 days agoI fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
What sort of file manager crashes were you having?
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023
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Pacman doesn’t fetch from the AUR.
Yeah, I can see that. But I don’t think that knowing Ansible will teach you that difference. OP seems to know enough about Linux to be comfortable so I would expect him to be able to distinguish between those.
I agree that Nix has a steep learning curve and it’s not for everyone, but OP specifically asked for a way to declare their system, and Ansible doesn’t work for something you’ll setup now to use in 6 months when you decide to reinstall the system, because the best case scenario is you get your system as it was 6 months ago, but more realistically it doesn’t work and you have to spend time fixing it or doing it manually.
Don’t get me wrong, Ansible is great, I manage my home server with it, but if I go a while without running the pipeline when I do it rolls back several changes I made manually to test and forgot to consolidate. Nix is annoying because it forces you to declare everything every time, but you’re guaranteed to get the same result you have now, which is very important for the case OP asked about.
You should have a look at NixOS. It’s a Linux distro where you declare the whole system in configuration like files, in a language called Nix (hence NixOS), then you run a command and that gets resolved into your system.
It takes a long time to setup the first time, but it’s a breeze when you need to reinstall, and you will never need to reinstall as every boot is a fresh copy of the system you declared.
There’s also a thing called home-manager which uses the Nix language to declare your home configuration. That part can be used in any other Linux by installing the home-manager package.
You can declare your OS in a way that the home part is portable for machines running other systems. I do that, then my machines are very easy to declare, and with some groups for things like Base (Terminal, prompt, some things I expect to have on every system like Python, nvim fully configured, etc), Gaming (Steam mostly), UI (Sway, many GUI things I use like browser with extensions, etc) I can add configs for a new machine in instants depending on what I expected for it, and if I ever want to convert my “Steam machine” into a desktop it’s just a couple line changes, regenerate the config and it’s exactly the same as my laptop.
Honestly I don’t think Nix is for everyone, but it’s a very niche thing that works extremely well for what it sets up to do, and if you’re in the target audience it’s a game changer.
Just post the same info on any Linux sub. Linux users bash on Linux a lot (pun intended) when it’s deserved. The thing that most people from the outside miss is that we’re very sensitive to what is and isn’t a Linux problem, your game/software not working is not a Linux problem, just like how it’s not an Android problem not to run the same game.
I haven’t seen that community but I would guess the majority of posts there are not actual Linux problems, therefore you might be downvoted and corrected if you post those links on a normal Linux community, but I don’t think any of them would outright ban you unless you were constantly spreading missinformation.
Edit: just gave that community a quick look, currently the top threads are:
- The one you replied, which makes no sense, no one says that’s a bonus, it’s a known issue and is in fact a fault somewhere in the Linux ecosystem. So posting about that issue would be acceptable in any Linux community.
- A post about someone being banned from an online game for using Linux. This is not Linux’s fault, but still would be allowed in any Linux community, the general answer would be to stop giving money to a company that bans people for no good reason, but it is a valid topic of discussion as to how Linux users are mistreated by different companies. But as is the post is a Straw man of “Linux users say X” when no one has said X.
- A post making a joke about Linux being good for development, yet under-develop. The content is about how professionals don’t use Linux, and I think that’s bullshit. A post about how companies force people to use Windows would be better and get the same point across. I have worked in several different companies, one of them I worked for over a year on Linux, writing backed server code, and one day they decided I couldn’t work on Linux anymore. It happens, it would be a valid post on Linux communities as well but it’s not a Linux problem, some companies allow it and it works well for them. Also a Straw man, the joke has no link with the content, and the content is about how people are forced to use a different system and act as if that’s their choice. Bb
- A post about sudoedit, that’s a good one can be reposted as is.
- Meme post that makes no sense outside of that community
- A post about a long list of arguments from Linux users. There are a lot of interesting points of discussion there, but posting everything together is not insentivising discussion. A lot of the arguments there are simply wrong, but a good faith discussion can be had on each of those individually, however the answer to a lot of them will be among the lines of “but that IS Windows fault, or hardware manufacturer purposefully not targeting Linux”. In short this is Gish Gallop, which is not to say there aren’t good critics, but this should be split inyo multiple posts to allow proper discussion of all of them.
So, in short if you reword things I expect you can post most of them on any Linux sub, but word for word might get you downvoted as they’re mostly fallacious arguments.
If I had to put a name I would say customizability and ease of use. I dual booted for several years, it started as Linux was my programming OS and everything else was on Windows, but organically I started to spend more time on Linux and at some point I noticed Windows had become my gaming system, anything else I was doing in Linux. I fiddled with Wine and some games I could get to run on Linux so I only had to reboot for some games. Then Humble Bundle gave me a few games for Linux and I found other ones that offered Linux builds like Project Zomboid and I decided “you know what? I don’t even game all that much, between Humble Bundles and Wine I can probably get enough games to keep me entertained and I don’t have to keep dual-booting” so I nuked windows from my system and a short while later Steam came to Linux consolidating my choice.
So yeah, it wasn’t that I chose Linux it was that using both for long enough pulled me to one side. I can’t tell you exactly what pulled me, but whenever I try to use Windows everything seems so clunky and rigid that I think that played a large role. I remember several times when I had issues on one OS I would jump to the other, the issues in Linux were mostly self-inflicted (even though I didn’t knew it at the time), whereas the Windows issues were random, unpredictable and unfixable with time the Linux ones became fixable and even predictable.
I’m not saying its not possible, I am disagreeing that his is a valid point as an argument for “the distro does not matter” statement.
But when the question is between Ubuntu and Kubuntu you can “convert” between them very easily. Not to mention that the fundamental difference between all Debian based distros is the version of the packages they offer, so you can very easily jump between them expecting most things to be the same.
These are not the only reasons, but good reasons WHY the distribution matters. BTW I also think that some distributions are technically superior for certain use cases. In example CachyOS is more up to date, has optimizations even on Kernel level, compared to an old Debian distribution that is focused on stability. These are technical differences that matter, for whatever you want to achieve. It’s not just a personal taste.
Yes, that matters for you, it doesn’t matter for someone who just wants something to use. That contributes to the decision paralysis of switching to Linux, when we say distro doesn’t matter we’re trying to remove that hurdle, because for the average guy that will just use his computer the difference between Debian and CachyOS is the name. Someone without experience in Linux doesn’t understand what stability means, they think it means the system won’t crash so they always try to use stable distros and get frustrated because they’re out of date, or alternatively they think they want bleeding edge until it cuts them. And that’s the crux of the issue, when we make a distro choice, it matters because we understand the differences, when a new user is trying to pick their first distro they’re essentially throwing a dice, it doesn’t matter where it lands, it matters how they feel about it.
It’s hard for us to put ourselves back in the shoes of someone just getting started,
They are thetorical questions
But they’re not, they might be to you or me, but for someone without Linux knowledge they’re very real questions. I have answered some form of some of those from people in the past.
If they don’t understand the differences, then they SHOULD research and debate until they do.
Oh really? Would you mind telling me what’s the difference between Pop, Ubuntu and Mint in a way that would matter for someone who doesn’t understand anything about Linux?
Choosing a random distribution and hopping until they understand is not only waste of time and resources, it will teach them wrong lessons this way.
Having to research what to use before understanding the difference will teach them nothing and make them give up before starting.
I for myself researched for months before I landed on Ubuntu in 2008 as the default, to replace Windows XP. Then I kept using it for… I think 15 years straight or so (forgot the exact numbers).
Yeah, but 2008 was a very different playing field than it is today. 2008 we were almost unanimously recommending Ubuntu or Mint, every forum you asked, every thread you found online it would have been essentially the same recommendation. It’s easy to make the decision then. Today if you open 4 different articles from 4 different sites you will likely get at least 4 different answers to which distro you should choose. And theyake it seem like it’s this big important decision that you have to get right the first time around, that’s the mentality we’re trying to fight.
I don’t like the analogy of “clothes” or someone else with “colors”. Distributions are extremely complex and there is way more work and knowledge involved, they have way more impact and dependencies.
An expert in clothes might tell you the same about them, and that’s what you’re missing, you are an expert, to you the difference between Mint and Pop is concrete and mensurable, to someone who doesn’t understand what I package manager is it’s just vague words without any meaning.
And to your point if someone asks me “do clothes matter?” i will say “off course”. Not just to contradict you, but because I think clothes do matter depending on how they fit to me, to the situation I am and how nice it feels, how it looks and so on. Even on practical side, if it rains or if I want to swim. While I don’t like this clothes analogy, I still wanted answer that question you assumed I would say “no”.
Cool, now explain to an alien who walks around naked why this jean and t-shirt is different from that jeans and t-shirt.
Just because it does not matter for most, does not mean that it does not matter at all.
And if the alien above asked you what clothes to wear to go to the supermarket, you would just say “any jeans and t-shirt would do”, only to have dozen of other people telling him “use this shirt and this pants”, “No, that’s a bad color combination for your eye color, use this one instead”, “No, that show is hard to lace, use this outfit instead”, “You’re not really dressed unless you wear a custom tailor suit”, etc, etc…
They don’t know it does not matter.
Precisely why we tell them it doesn’t.
I think there are choices better suited to them, even if they don’t know and say it does not matter - it does, they just don’t know it yet.
Yes, exactly, but they won’t know until they understand, and you won’t know until they understand, and they won’t understand until they do, and no amount of reading will make them understand. The initial choice between 5 different “noob” friendly distros doesn’t matter, the understanding you get from that will guide your next step, trying to take the next step before knowing where you’re standing is a recipe for disaster
I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter.
For certain things it doesn’t. Usually this is brought up in the context of someone wanting to choose between 5 possible valid alternatives to start using Linux, and the advice is “it doesn’t matter, just pick whichever and when something annoys you you might understand the difference”
One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that.
You can disagree all you want, it’s 100% possible, stupid, but possible.
If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions?
Because philosophy matters. You don’t pick a distro because it’s technically superior or because it has features others don’t have (with some exceptions like NixOS). You pick a distro because it’s philosophy speaks to you, be it “I aim to be user friendly” or “I aim to follow KISS”. This is why for the most part distro doesn’t matter for newcomers, because they’re looking at 5 examples of “I aim to be user friendly and…” distros.
- … why distro hop?
Because I want to try something different and see how I feel about it.
- … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?
I did, for a long time, then I decided that building my system up was easier than tearing it down. If I was using Plasma or Gnome I wouldn’t have switched probably.
- … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?
Because Arch philosophy is KISS, meaning you have to build everything from the ground up and you’re expected to understand the steps and read the manual. This is why I believe distros like Manjaro or CachyOS cause issues, they remove the initial hurdle of Arch but don’t change the core philosophy, making them ticking time bombs for people who don’t know their way around Linux.
- … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?
You do you, my servers don’t usually need all of the extra tools a distro with the philosophy of “I’m a pen tester tool” has.
- … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?
Because usually I want my daily driver to do computer stuff, and those distros philosophy is “I’m a gaming console”
- … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)
I don’t trust either more inherently than the other, I trust distros that have a track history of good behavior.
I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.
Distros matter, they tell a lot about what you’re trying to accomplish. But most newcomers are debating for days whether they should use Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, Fedora or CachyOS, and realistically they’re unlikely to even understand the difference between those. Think on distros like clothes, if you’re just going to the market it doesn’t matter what clothes you wear, if you’re going to a job interview it matters, and if you’re going to do something very specific like swimming some clothes are simply better than others. But if someone asks you “do clothes matter?” You will probably reply no, because for most stuff you do as long as you’re not wearing clothes with holes in them you’re fine, but you can tell a lot about people by the clothes they decide to wear. It’s a similar thing for distros, for most stuff it doesn’t matter, for certain things it’s important for others it gives some information and for some specific cases it makes a huge difference, but for the most part it’s a personal choice.
Pros
I get to own my system. I get to do what I want, if something is not to my liking there’s likely a way to make it work like how I want.
Cons
I have to own my system. If something breaks I have to fix it, if something doesn’t work I need to figure it out.
and what if any do you miss from windows?
Expect things to work. Linux is a minority of users, any manufacturer or dev HAS to make their products work for Windows, so much so that Windows users don’t even consider the possibility that something is not made for Windows.
Maintenance is a breeze, setup is a bitch. I switched from Arch a short while back, getting the initial thing up to the same level as what I had before took me a few weeks, and a few months to get to the current iteration. But then to setup my other system to the same level was a couple minutes and I had the exact same system on both machines.
Honestly I can’t see myself going back, the assurances when I do a change/update that I’ll be able to rollback if anything goes wrong it’s just too valuable to me. If you’re willing to pay the price of the initial setup it’s absolutely worth it, but that price is high and the learning curve is steep, so it’s not for everyone. If you’re interested I strongly recommend you check out https://youtube.com/@vimjoyer and maybe setup a VM or an old machine and get your feet wet and learn the basics.
When I first started using Linux I used Kate, I know, I know, not command line, but I didn’t needed a command line editor for my own computer. Eventually I started using nano for quick edits and that became my default CLI editor for a while. I don’t remember what I used as an IDE back then, but maybe it was Eclipse, although I think it was mostly just Kate.
Eventually I decided to learn either VI or Emacs, and a friend who used Emacs pushed me to that side. I ended up switching everything to emacs, CLI, IDE, I even learnt org-mode and had tables and presentations in it.
Eventually my pinky started to hurt too much, so I switched to Pycharm for python, and kept emacs for C++, text edits and org-mode. I ended up slowly switching emacs everywhere and reverted to nano.
Some years back I decided to properly learn vim. I have been using nvim for a few years, and while it’s not the everything tool that emacs was for me, it’s still pretty darn useful. I also haven’t become a movement ninja and oftentimes I go
wwwwwwto get where I want to be. But still, there are some very nice shortcuts that I use a lot like Change Inside/Around or Delete X lines. Macros are cool, and sometimes feel magical, but other times they don’t work like I expected and I can’t figure out why. I don’t see myself changing to something else, the ubiquity of vim shortcuts in other programs makes it very convenient when I have to use something else.
Everyone who said proxmox didn’t read your post to the end. Proxmox is great for people who want a machine to just self-host things and don’t care about how things work. You don’t seem like that sort of person, and you also mentioned Moonlight which will be annoying to do on proxmox as it’s not intended for that use case.
Every system capable of being used as a Moonlight client can run self-hosted services, but the other way around is not true. So it’s better to start with the Moonlight part.
So, with that in mind I imagine you want this machine to be plugged to a TV in the living room or something similar, so it needs to have a GUI, and the GUI probably needs to be something you can navigate with a controller (although the new Steam controller probably increases that definition dramatically).
You will already have one system with a GUI, so it’s easier to use the same thing. Really, don’t overthink this, if it’s good for general use it’s good for self-hosting, and you don’t want to have to learn how to solve the same problem in multiple ways because of different distros. In the future considering different distros makes sense, but when you’re just getting started nailing the basics is easier with consistency across systems. Think about it this way, if you were learning how to write mixing cursive and print at the same time would be harder than choosing one and then learning the other.
But why proxmox is great? It’s because it makes it easy and gives you a GUI to add services. How hard is it to do the same on Linux using docker? Ssh into the server, edit a small text file and run a single command, all of which should be easy for you since you’ve probably done this in the past, but for most people that is very hard and that is where proxmox shines.
Don’t believe me? You said Jellyfin, this is the whole Jellyfin file with comments:
# Services that this file creates services: # Name of the service, it can be whatever you want jellyfin: # Image this server runs, this is what tells what the service is image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest # Volumes to mount. In the format <local>:<inside the image> # So this will mount the ./jellyfin folder inside /config for the image # some services require specific folders inside of them, e.g. /config to store jellyfin's configs, otherwise the folder would get lost with every restart of the service volumes: - ./jellyfin:/config # Rarely needed, but this gives hardware access to the image. Specifically access to the /dev/dri device # Jellyfin specifically benefits from this for transcoding devices: - /dev/dri:/dev/dri # This shows what ports you want to expose, again in the format <local>:<inside the image> # So if you want Jellyfin on port 8080 on your machine you don't need to change settings, just do 8080:8096 ports: - 8096:8096 - 8920:8920 - 7359:7359/udp # This tells docker to restart the service if it crashes, unless you've stopped it restart: unless-stoppedThat’s it, and this is one of the most complicated ones out there, here’s a simple one:
services: radarr: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest volumes: - ./radarr:/configOf course there’s more to those files, and lots of extra configurations to be used, but the core is very simple and the rest is just needed for special cases.
You’re completely missing the point. Discord is a chat app, not a package manager, therefore it should NOT update things EVER. You’re complaining that discord tries to do something it shouldn’t, fails and somehow you seem to think that’s pacman’s fault.
The “issue” doesn’t exist on flatpaks because discord probably checks if it’s installed via flatpak and runs an update using the flatpak command without your say so. The “solution” is to stop discord from trying to be “smart” and failing and let it be updated when pacman decides to.
The idea of a package manager is to let it manage your packages, if you want self-updating apps you don’t need a package manager, and good luck with dependencies and overlapping libraries.
I have only ever had this issue with discord on arch.
The issue you describe is not Arch specific and it’s not an issue. Using a package manager means using a program to manage your packages. Things can’t auto-upgrade, that breaks the point of a package manager.
Whenever discord has an update, it will not fetch the update, but it tells me that an update can be downloaded.
Of course, if you install discord through pacman, then pacman manages the update.
As for the JSON file that’s a very hacky approach, discord shouldn’t outright fail to launch if there is an update. And in fact the Arch wiki says it has a flag to skip the version check completely:
To disable the update check, add the line “SKIP_HOST_UPDATE”: true to ~/.config/discord/settings.json. If the file does not exist, create it and add the following:
~/.config/discord/settings.json
{ "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true }More info on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord
What is the air branch? Discord has a package on pacman, so it should just get updated with your normal system update, there’s no config or anything that could prevent that, pacman doesn’t care. What JSON do you have to edit and why?
All of the things you mentioned are annoying level problems.
ATMs
Card payment should still work, ATMs are more of a footnote in today’s world. I can’t even remember the last time I used one. If I were to use one and it didn’t worked it would be annoying.
There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day.
And there are lots that don’t. Plus, wine has excellent support for old windows versions, I would be very surprised if something didn’t just worked. So there would be some downtime while people annoyingly set things up with wine.
A lot of POS devices too.
And a lot of POS don’t, the ones that do would have to change OS, an annoyance.
Almost all accounting is done on Windows.
The ones that don’t would receive lots of new clients, and the rest would leave clients annoyed while adapting.
The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense
I think you’re probably exaggerating the proportions, nearly 100% of the hardware that runs Windows runs Linux. Yes, there would be some chaos until things migrate, but there are alternatives that are reachable and usable.
Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked,
That’s an annoyance. It’s not just some phones, it’s absolutely every network connected device that is not a Windows or apple thing. If you Google something on your phone yo go through possibly 20 different Linux devices back and forth.
literally all of the internet just stops working
This is the big one, removing Linux menas breaking the internet (and most intranets). And it’s not breaking one thing or another, it’s breaking every single internet service, the ATMs in your windows example wouldn’t work, nor would any PoS, since they usually depend on inventory management and card connectivity.
And it’s not a “until people reinstall their system” deal, it’s breaking in an essentially unrepairable way. There’s a very high chance that outside of a very small subset of devices there’s just no alternative to Linux. That’s the difference, Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt, Linux disappearing is chaos without a foreseeable solution, 90% of electronics become e-waste.
Yup, that sounds like a good approach. I could even see people doing Pacman -> Flatpaks -> AUR and it would make sense to me.
What makes it confusing to you?
Your question is not Arch specific, it’s “should I use flatpaks?” And the answer in my opinion is probably no.
Flatpaks are a good idea to isolate certain applications and to provide a uniform way of installing packages. So there might be some apps that are not available in your native package manager, but do provide flatpaks. For those cases flatpaks are probably preferred. But Arch based distros have the AUR, so there are a lot of apps that aren’t packaged for Arch that you can still get as a native package. Sure, using the AUR is risky and if you’re not on actual Arch things might break sporadically because of mismatched dependencies (although I think CachyOS is full parity of packages with Arch, so that’s maybe more of a Manjaro warning).
But flatpaks are clunky, bloated, require annoying permissions to be set to do basic things, and require you to update two package managers to do a full system update. They are more appealing for systems where you don’t want to give users root access but still allow them to install programs, but for your own computer I have never seen the appeal.
Yeah, Gentoo is really good, but I dropped it the day I needed to edit a system, so I installed GIMP (there was no binary for it at the time), a few hours later I tried to open the image and realized I had forgotten to add the libpng (or similar) flag so didn’t had the support for the image type. Took me less time to install Arch than it would have taken me to recompile Gimp.