[lumb63]

Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu about 6 years ago after seeing how aggressively Ubuntu would auto-update, and because of Zeitgeist. I would never look back.

Arch is customizable, simple (in the sense that there are no surprises; things work as expected), and has a great community. Folks here can argue about snaps or flatpaks, and I can happily use AUR to install nearly anything. If it’s not there, I can publish it.

I’m not forced to adopt whatever GUI Canonical thinks is best for me in a given year or whatever their trendy new craze is. I can enjoy i3, tmux, vim, and ignore the rest.

[wing-_-nuts]

I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot'

Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.

[lumb63]

Yeah, Arch is definitely geared toward a more technically proficient user base. Their users, myself included, are typically willing to wrestle with changes like that. Recovering a system that won’t boot is almost a rite of passage in the community, since there’s an expectation that you probably built up the entire boot process by yourself, so you ought to know what it’s doing. For some users, that’s simply not true.

For future reference, if you ever decide to switch back, breaking changes or ones which require manual intervention are usually announced on archlinux.org.

[wing-_-nuts]

Yeah I was using endeavoros which was basically vanilla arch with an installer at the time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_tr...

[trip-zip]

That was the event that got me to stop using "Basically" arch (Endeavour, arco, etc) and just use arch itself.

[wing-_-nuts]

iirc this also happened in arch itself, the endeavor team just happened to have the better writeup on it.

[7speter]

Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop.

Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse a bit more user friendly.

[wing-_-nuts]

I don't understand the hate for gnome, but xfce / kde / i3 or whatever is just a sudo apt install away.

I've heard good things about tumbleweed and it even has support for WSL, so I might try that if I ever build a gaming pc and have to main windows.

[JohnFen]

> I don't understand the hate for gnome

I avoid it because I find it hard to use and hard-or-impossible to configure adequately. It takes a "my way or the highway" approach. If you like how it does things, it's great. If you don't, you're better off using a different DE, which is what I do.

[7speter]

Regarding gnome, I personally don’t like that you have to install browser extensions to change settings on the ui.

I’ve tried adding desktop environments to a pop installation, but I really don’t like having all of the apps included with other desktop environments cluttering the taskbar menu and the like.

[wkat4242]

Yeah this is what keeps me off arch personally. The community that instantly goes 'just get good' when you have an issue. While I never needed any help, I didn't like how the community treated other newbies. I know it's not always meant in a bad way, there's some tough love 'don't give a man a fish but teach him how to fish' sentiment there that makes sense. But the elitism is pretty strong too in my experience.

Also I wanted a distro without systemd and the init system is the one thing you can't choose or change on arch. I tried it but didn't like arch, in the end I moved my stuff to alpine which still runs my docker server.

In the end I chose FreeBSD which has a really nice combo of stable OS but rolling packages which is not common on Linux at all. And the community is much nicer IMO.

[shrimp_emoji]

Shilling Manjaro as the best of both worlds, imo.

It's a user-friendly and maintained Arch with some goodies like kernel switcher and driver updater GUIs.

[vorvac]

https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi...

In regards to this specific incident, The Arch team did release a statement on how to handle the update.

[DavideNL]

Same here, also i was surprised how well popOS worked "out of the box" with just the default settings, running on a new pc/latest hardware.

[wankle]

> Canonical seems to be trying to push users off of Ubuntu.

I'm on Ubuntu for now because Snaps can be disabled but it does make me wonder since they also dumped Unity Desktop a few years back. It almost seems like they don't care about Linux Desktop users any more.