From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love

Re:From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love by jraph on Sunday August 25, 2019 @05:02PM (#20795560)

I used a variety of GNU/Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch, Slackware, Frugalware, Fedora and more recently openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Honestly, I don't understand what makes Arch so special.

I have mostly learned things on Ubuntu and I can use Arch just fine, and I think I have a decent understanding how things work.

Really, I think there is nothing fundamentally different across these distributions technically speaking.

Their biggest differences lie in their package and release management and policies (and, agreed, this is huge).

I'm not sure what skill you would learn on Arch and not on Ubuntu. It seems some vocal Arch users are lying to themselves and to the rest of the world about this.

Gentoo (or LFS) might probably be more educational, but I haven't used Gentoo enough, and haven't tried LFS enough to say.

(Kudos for Arch's documentation though, useful even when using another distro)

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Re:From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love by jplayer01 on Sunday August 25, 2019 @07:07PM (#20796233)

I'm not a zealot or anything, I just like Arch because of certain good aspects. Great documentation for everything I could want to do (though it used to be better). Rolling release. Upstream, latest packages. AUR. On that note, I tend to prefer Manjaro unstable nowadays because it works out of the box and still gets me the latest packages.

I don't particularly care for the whole DIY aspect. I spend enough time tinkering with Emacs and other tools that I don't want to waste any time on configuring/tweaking the OS itself. The different Manjaro versions are pretty decent (currently using the Awesome WM one), and I really like the Manjaro CLI installer (manjaro-architect) if I want a bit more control over my installation.

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