No idea how it compares to other distros, I never tried any. It is a breath of fresh air compared to Windows 10 so!
Fedora works flawlessly in my experience.
Great community and excellent documentation wiki that'll hold your hand every step of the way.
If you're literate enough to be able to read the wiki, you can manage to install, use every day, and get good at, Arch Linux.
"Most" beginners just lack the patience and energy or motivation and cannot or do not want to follow instructions or read documentation at all.
If you do not have enough dedication, just go with a beginner-friendly distribution or whatever.
I have used Arch as my main system for 6 years now (was Gentoo before) and never had anything of the sort.
How does this even happen?
Update was documented, but I didn’t look. Did my `pacman -syua` as I normally did on a daily, and rebooted to a totally borked system. This is when I was a grad student and really needed that laptop that week.
I still love Arch, but I can’t trust it anymore as a daily driver.
Gentoo would break a lot when I used it, and I also learned a lot by getting it to work when it broke.
But I do not blame Gentoo for it. It was mostly my fault, for using ~x86 ("testing" keyword) instead of x86.
Arch Linux is not a great choice for someone who just wants to use Linux. There's a lot of learning just to install it, while less expert-oriented distributions can have a system up and running in 20 minutes with very little expertise on the part of the user.
When ignoring the short term, what's the advantage, if any, of using a system without mastering it?
I say this as someone who has run Linux on the Desktop for over 20 years. I do not give a crap about knowing the ins and outs of everything on my system. I have zero interest in learning how bluetooth & Wifi & and all of the hundred other subsystems on my computers work. 99% of the time I want to install the OS, and get on with work.
Sometimes that work means getting down and dirty with a subsystem when I want it to do things that isn't on the normal happy path, but the rest of the time, I want Wifi to autoconnect with a saved password and my bluetooth headphones to autoconnect like a normal person and not futz around learning the intricacies of every daemon and config file in the OS.
It's same reason I pay someone else to service my car. I have fully capable of learning to do it, but I don't care. I have better things to do with my time and money, and there's only so many hours in the day.
(Several edits because I misplaced lots of words pre-coffee)
I disagree about cars though. Back when I had a car, I did my own work, because it took less time and would be done properly. Unless you have a chauffeur or something (or take Uber I guess, but that costs more money), it takes a lot of time to have someone else service your car: you have to drive it to the shop, then sit there for a while until they can get to it, then sit there while they do the work, then sit around a while longer until they can finally check you out (while also trying to upsell you a bunch of crap), then drive home. Then you find out later they messed something up, got grease on your carpet, etc. Even if they fix that, that's even more time you have to spend. It was a lot easier for me to just do it myself. Someone will probably say something about "loaners" here, but that's usually for larger jobs, not just oil changes.
I also want to learn Rust, Zig, Nim, D, Go, GLSL, Lobster looks interesting, some game frameworks (Bevy, Monogame, Raylib and Pyglet come to mind), Supercollider, Flutter, LLM's, Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other stuff I can't even remember.
Learning linux simply has to wait its line in the queue, and unless I happen to master it naturally using Fedora, with that queue ever growing, I'm not sure its time will ever come. Maybe, but then I want to say that for all the above too.
No and no.
A few years ago, I ran Fedora w/ KDE Plasma. What _seemed_ to be random is the GTK fonts throughout the UI changed to a mono-spaced font regardless of what the control panel showed.
It "resolved itself" within a few weeks.
I don't know if it was an update that caused and subsequently resolved the issue, or something else I did.
This was just one of many hair-pulling examples I ran into across KDE Plasma and Gnome on Fedora.
I have different frustrations with both Windows and macOS.
Windows caught up quite some time ago to macOS. I don't see Linux as superior with font handling. Certainly lacks on the rendering side of things (DPI etc).
> comparable with advertising in the Start menu and file browser
Wouldn't know. I use Win 11 Pro so those updates don't seem to have come down to it (yet?) and use Win 10 Ent at work where those will never arrive.
How so? I use Windows 10/11 at work and macOS at home, and Mac's font rendering is light-years ahead of Windows IMO. The font rendering subsystem is why macOS is the go-to choice for graphic designers IIRC.
Nah, it was for the color accuracy of _classic_ Mac OS. Windows caught up in the Vista timeframe.
Agreed.
However, I can continue to feed the Microsoft maw, or I can make a different choice. I choose to tell Microsoft to pound sand.
Installing and running docker on windows was a nightmare lol
And snaps are basically an all in one packaging solution, the main evil relevant to you are forced updates and officially speaking there is no way around it last I checked, at best you can set a grace period. Also they put files in weird locations so good luck trying to edit their settings, etc.