[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.