I bought a second hand surface pro 7 recently and I’m quite in love with it! With a few GNOME plugins it’s a quite capable tablet AND a quite capable laptop on the go.

After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.

My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.

Now : I’ve moved to stable channel, because it’s updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.

TBH I’m not sure wider adoption would worsen things ? Gaming distros would probably ship bullshit anticheat modules by default while the others would not, or at most provide some documentation on how to opt in.

I think it’s quite similar to the situation with NVIDIA proprietary drivers? (I don’t own a graphics card so I’m not super aware on this topic)

I opened the topic while knowing there will be a ton of super enthusiastic and well-constructed answers. I’m not disappointed 🍿

Sadly I kept it private because it exposes a bit of my company’s network structure (with encrypted secrets, but still…) :/

It’s not the best experience though : the pencil doesn’t work as well as in Fedora (GNOME doesn’t detect tablet mode, which only seems to affect buttons behavior) and it recompiles the kernel everytime it needs to be updated (very often, so I pinned a version).

I’d say arch is a great distro if you love to tinker a lot and/or want to learn a lot about the Linux ecosystem. If you don’t recognize yourself in previous sentence I’d probably stick with fedora 🤷

I briefly used Fedora (Gnome) on my SP7 which worked super well. Then I moved to NixOS because I’m a nerd 🤓

I moved to NixOS this year and it really felt like something new. You need to learn a little functional language for configuration (nix) and can manage your whole computer on a descriptive and reproducible way.

There is also an awesome side effect : packages (and OS configurations) are built the same way as you build your configuration. For me, it meant that it was the first time it was obvious how my distribution works and how I could contribute. It took me about one hour to submit my first ever PR to update a package : https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/290710

Also note that you can experience nix (the package manager) on any distro, if you want a safe try you could for example have fun with home-manager to handle your dotfiles.

I have a channel on my team’s Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬

#windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅

I’m not that surprised, a lot of people around me dot have a clear picture of what is the relationship between MacOS, Linux and Unix is. So I suppose some of them would guess that Linux is a modern fork of Unix and MacOS based on Unix.

The point of Arch is not that it’s hard to install the point is that it’s modular and you can choose exactly what you need. So in order ton maintain it you may need to know about pipewire, bluez, Wayland, synaptic, tlp, …

Once you know the name of most modules and graphical application it’s indeed pretty easy because Arch’s wiki is great. But I don’t think it’s a great way to discover the ecosystem and you would probably not benefit from Arch specificities compared to another distro.

I think the only person I would recomand this to would be a computer scientist who needs to learn as much as possible about Linux in two months.

I’m not sure a newcomer will notice the difference between xorg and wayland?

they want to appeal to proprietary companies

Wtf does that even mean? (Maybe English is not your native langage and you meant something else tho?)

stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family

Wtf is wrong with these people?

Thanks a lot for the presets, I’ll give this another try.

But yeah you could have stopped at darktable being better without the “shit” part 😅

When I tried darktable as a complete begginer I was completely lost and ended up learning rawtherapee instead. Would you say it changed now?

Darktable seems more popular than rawtherapee, but is there a big difference feature-wise?

I think the “etc” shows how f***ed up it might be to package for every single distro. Releasing a tar with no extra bloat and letting each community doing its own things over it is probably one of the best approaches?

I’ve been using the unstable branch for this exact reason. Otherwise I’d have to change my scaling every time I launch a game.

I’m using NewPipe daily and it doesn’t seem broken at all?

Yeah I can totally see that happening 🫣

Here it was especially infuriating because it’s mixed with all the company policies, like the 1 month process it took me to have administrator privilege in the first place.

These process also make some sense as I’m in a company of several hundred thousand employees, but all of this mixed together is exhaustingly anoying.