[fingerprinter]

For anyone thinking of switching, here are some thoughts.

First, you'll hear all about arch. It's lovely, it really is. But, if you like the "just work" nature of OSX back in the day, look at Ubuntu proper or Ubuntu-gnome (if you don't like Unity). I'm sure people will chime in here with others that they have thoughts on here, though in my experience, Ubuntu is the best at this game and it's not even close. Yes, it has problems too (let's not start the nitpicking thing, I'm making a general statement), but it is by far the best stable linux desktop. Fedora is acceptable, particularly of late, but it /still/ is behind Ubuntu.

Second, with Ubuntu/Debian, stick with whatever is in the archive or PPA. Everything else isn't worth the pain. Perhaps Snaps can improve this problem, though I'm sceptical. Linuxbrew and other such things will not be worth the problems they bring.

Third, use a stable UI. Don't go with Pantheon, Mate, Cinnamon, Elementary or something else like that. Again, it's not worth the pain. I personally don't like KDE though it would qualify as "stable" along with Unity, Gnome-Shell and XFCE. I prefer Gnome-shell and Unity so that is what I use.

Lastly, things will be worse in some ways from OSX, and much better in others.

If the advise looks pretty straight forward, it is. Stick with the known working, well supported projects as your base, tinker in customisation to suite, and don't go with lesser known/supported projects if you only really care about something "just working".

[koyote]

I just switched back from Arch to Xubuntu recently and could not agree more.

I had been using Arch for over 5 years and I really enjoyed it but these days it's just not worth the effort. I had to format my hard drive and start from scratch and just didn't want to go through the pain of setting everything up to what it was before so I just went straight to Xubuntu. I was very positively surprised at how much just worked the way I wanted it to work out of the box. Sure, the default installer installed a bunch of packages that I did not want but it's easy to remove those.

[gajjanag]

> I had been using Arch for over 5 years and I really enjoyed it but these days it's just not worth the effort. I had to format my hard drive and start from scratch and just didn't want to go through the pain of setting everything up to what it was before so I just went straight to Xubuntu.

The installation work can be trivially automated with a shell script (note though that the Arch wiki generally discourages this). The benefits of this are that in the process of creating the script, one has a good sense of the installation process and can customize it, unlike the case of Ubuntu and many other distros where a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes. The con is that this script needs to be kept up to date with the (occasional) change in the Arch project.

I have had good success with this method - over the past 2 years and 3 fresh installs on laptops and a desktop. Basically, with a new laptop and a reasonably fast internet connection, I can go from the USB installation medium to a complete desktop environment tailored for my needs with everything configured correctly in ~ 10-15 minutes, with minimal interaction needed during the process (only to set things like the password).

Also note that in most use cases some post installation tweaking gets done, such as the installation of new applications as per interest.

So there are primarily 2 things the script can handle: 1. The annoying "low level work" - network configuration, boot loader configuration, etc. This should be relatively stable and fixed across a variety of hardware.

2. Application specific configuration needs (e.g vimrc, .bashrc). This may evolve over time/usage patterns - for this one can try keeping the script up to date, or not bother and simply focus on 1 above.

[simooooo]

Anything can be automated but it's the effort required to do that which is the hump. when you can just click through a UI otherwise.

[erikbye]

https://arch-anywhere.org/

[Pengwin]

If you use the Minimal CD for installing ubuntu (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD) you can pick a metapackage along the way that may be more to your liking. I dont know what exactly you dont want from a standard xubuntu install but there is an xfce "minimal" metapackage in the ecosystem which may help you install only what you need from the start

[fit2rule]

I've used Linux since day one, and I couldn't agree more.

In my case, as a musician/creative (and thus also a MacOS user) I absolutely recommend the UbuntuStudio variant of the Ubuntu family, because it comes with tons of great applications for audio/media/video production. Anyone who thinks that this is a Developers-/Hackers-only option should definitely take a peek at just the depth and breadth of the creative tools that are packed into UbuntuStudio setup.

[grandalf]

I end up choosing Ubuntu for the reasons you mention, and recently found that I get a lot of crashes of unity, seemingly due to the nvidia prprietary drivers running at 4K. I'd guess the crashes aren't this common for all users or else they would not be considered stable.

My take on unity is that the main problem is simply bugs, not design defects of philosophical issues.

[coldtea]

>I'd guess the crashes aren't this common for all users or else they would not be considered stable.

You'd be surprised.

[erikbye]

Yes, Ubuntu is the distro that has crashed the most on me. The software updater particularly seems prone to crashing. Actually ended up having to disable Apport in order to get any work done, too many annoying crash reports. I have lost count of how many times I've seen "Sorry, Ubuntu has experienced internal error" or "... problem detected".

It's not like this has been the experience on just a single install or a single system. I've used Ubuntu on and off for many years on various hardware. IMO Ubuntu has only gotten worse.

I've yet to experience a single crash in Arch.

As for those complaining about Arch's install being tedious, use Arch Anywhere; it's a great installer.

https://arch-anywhere.org/

[grandalf]

I tried arch a few years ago on a $150 netbook and liked it a lot. Is it fairly easy to map package dependency names to the Ubutnu versions? Also, is it possible to install both i386 and amd64 versions of a library?

[erikbye]

Yes, you can enable the multilib repository for pacman; 32-bit libraries go in /usr/lib32/ and 64-bit in /usr/lib/.

As for your first question, give me a few example package names and I'll check how easy it is.

[Ar-Curunir]

In my experience, Ubuntu (and Unity specifically) gets stale after a while; as more and more cruft builds up it is difficult to use the system without breaking things and you end up having to do a clean install to refresh the system.

I haven't experienced this with a ``cutting-edge'' distro like Arch.

[flukus]

I went with one of the "arch for humans" distros (antergos) recently and while the installation was simply enough it didn't help the day to day operations, like mounting my second hard drive. I agree with going with ubuntu for the "just works" stuff, but it may not work at all with newer hardware.

[wtetzner]

Is Cinnamon not stable? I've had good luck with it, and very much prefer it to the others.

[jtnegrotto]

Cinnamon is extremely stable. I haven't had issues in a couple of years now.

[erikbye]

For what's it worth I have had a much better experience (more stable) using Linux Mint and Cinnamon than Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu Gnome, or Ubuntu KDE.

But like I said above, I prefer Arch (with i3).

[macco]

If Arch is not for you, you can always try Manjaro. It is more stable, but still you get the power of Pacman.

[fulafel]

You can also run GUI Docker apps since Docker is (actually) native on Linux. Works for eg Skype chats.