As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.

So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.

I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    2·
    4 months ago

    To me, the best OS will always be the one that gets out of my way as good as possible. That includes stability, maintenance, compatibility, usability and sensible defaults. I don’t want to deal with the OS when I’m trying to get stuff done or I’m looking for entertainment.

    And yeah, Debian is pretty good at most of those things.

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    3 months ago

    I’ve never run Debian, but I did use Fedora on a laptop with Gnome for several years and it was rock solid.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    I agree about plain english in the package manager.

    Years ago I wrote a script (now unmaintained) called “human Bash” where I wrapped a bunch of my commonly used commands in english words.

    Some examples (parameters in cursive):

    • "please install minecraft "
    • “please update”
    • "search package by command ifconfig "
    • "search file by name /home/user/Downloads *.pdf "
    • "search file by content p_color "

    and so on.

    But since then I moved on to gui tools entirely.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 months ago

        please was basically a more complicated alias for sudo :D it originated as a meme on twitter I believe

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    1·
    4 months ago

    I am an old hand at Linux. I started with Red Hat’s Halloween release. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad and I slapped Pop!_OS on it and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Rock solid and stable. If you have shit to get done and don’t have time for shenanigans, Debian is hard to beat.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip.

    This I find a very weird statement. Perosnally I use arch on a laptop for work and I never ran into the scenario of not having a working laptop always ready.

    1. I have btrfs snapshots pre and post update that I can roll back to

    2. I update my packages every friday in the last hour of work, where I can roll back or do the required manual intervention in peace

    3. When I have an important time period where I judt don’t want to deal with it, I just don’t update anything. At some point I had everything out of date for 7 months due to a big and stressful project. Once it was over, I updated as usual.

    4. Nothing ever broke since I started doing it like this and following the arch news.

    And for that I get way more packages, no missing out on the newest features and it is way easier to install anything not in the repos/AUR by creating my own PKGBUILD so that I have updates - than manually installing it on debian from make and it never updating.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    0·
    4 months ago

    Check out MX. It has some nice tools and defaults to make Debian better as a desktop distro.

    Debian + Nix (home-manager) gives you a stable system and bleeding edge userland packages. It’s a perfect combo.

    • genie@lemmy.world
      01·
      4 months ago

      I tried Debian + Nix once upon a time too. Honestly flatpaks and containers did everything I needed and more, and every dev team I’ve been on already has familiarity with the container workflow.

      I’m a huge fan of Debian and Nix, don’t get me wrong, but it was shy of perfect for my use case. Glad it works for you though! I’ve been using Fedora + Nix home-manager with flakes for almost two years and I don’t think I’ll ever go back

      • Shareni@programming.dev
        0·
        4 months ago

        Flatpak is imperative. Nix gives me less headaches than docker. I haven’t tried distrobox.

        Why Fedora? That’s what I initially started with, but it was less stable than arch on my t480, nix unstable has newer packages, and I couldn’t get nix to work with selinux.

        • genie@lemmy.world
          11·
          4 months ago

          Haha I’ve had a journey to get here, all because I have a 12th gen Framework.

          Initially I got Debian Sid working but ran into power management issues with the module system. I switched over to arch and loved that for a while but frankly I was too careless and kept breaking my system. The way I use Arch it wasn’t a stable daily driver. Then I switched over to NixOS and loved it, but I bricked 3 of 4 ports with a firmware update (again me being careless). Graciously, Framework helped me fix the issue.

          After all of that I decided to go with a distro that is officially supported by Framework. Between Ubuntu and Fedora I choose Fedora since they don’t have ads for Ubuntu Pro :) I also like SELinux by default and wanted to broaden my horizons

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      4 months ago

      Yknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.

      • anamethatisnt@lemmy.world
        0·
        4 months ago

        If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
        I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.

        • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          3 months ago

          As a a part time tiling window manger user, I love the workspaces. So much cleaner and easier to keep track of for me than simply alt+tabbing between numerous windows glommed into the same desktop.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Considering that aptitude needs shortcuts it might feel like a throwback to pacman for OP.

      There’s also synaptic for checking out dependencies and searching etc. which doesn’t need the user to learn shortcuts.

      Where aptitude absolutely rules and saves the day is in fixing complex package conflicts… but often if your system has reached that point you might as well consider reinstall.