bismuthbob

bismuthbob, 1 day ago

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

bismuthbob, 22 days ago

I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

bismuthbob, 27 days ago

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

bismuthbob, 3 months ago

What are you trying to build? A work laptop that you’re going to take on trips, a gaming computer, a server? Something else?

For you, what is too much hassle? Are you a new Linux user or an experienced user with no spare time? What are you accustomed to doing when you install an operating system and what do you expect to be preinstalled?

What is your favorite colour?

bismuthbob, 3 months ago

Ubuntu isn’t my favorite, but I used xubuntu for many years. A lot of noise gets thrown around about Snaps, but from an end-user perspective they tend to work fine unless you have very low system constraints. Better than adding a half-dozen repositories that may or may not be around for long. A lot of developers work to make sure that their software runs well in Ubuntu and the LTS releases tend to be a good long-term option if you don’t want any significant changes for a long time.

Even with their regular releases, I daisy-chained upgrades on an old Core2 laptop for something like seven years without any major (computer becomes a paperweight) issues. Sometimes (like with Snaps) Ubuntu insists on going its own way, which can result in errors/shitty OS things that don’t pop up in other distributions. I’ve had to deal with some minor issues with Ubuntu over the years (broken repositories, upgrades causing hiccups, falling back to older kernels temporarily), but I think that you’ll get issues like that regardless of what distro you pick.