As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.
So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.
I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.
I am an old hand at Linux. I started with Red Hat’s Halloween release. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad and I slapped Pop!_OS on it and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Rock solid and stable. If you have shit to get done and don’t have time for shenanigans, Debian is hard to beat.
'94! nice!
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Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.
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I mean, a portion of my experience is switching to Gnome, yes. I also touch on multiple other aspects that are different from my regular system on a deeper level (package manager, release system, package version, etc).
In arch it’s just very easy to forget to install a specificoptional package for a subsystem that makes a feature of gnome work.
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Imagine being able to turn on automatic updates and nothing breaking or requiring rollback. That’s Debian Stable. 🫠
I have a spare laptop that I use to play with different Linux distros and BSDs, but everything I rely on runs Debian, work and home.
Same! Debian with gnome on my desktop and work laptop. Raspbian on my Pi4. Headless Debian in the cloud…
I can see why. Really liking how everything feels so far. I might also use this laptop to try a flavour of BSD at some point
If you start missing the classic taskbar and startmenu it is easily available in GNOME too:
Startmenu: ArcMenu
Taskbar: Dash to Panel
App Indicator: AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem SupportYknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.
I’m also a gnome shell convert. Down with the taskbar!
And up with The Cube (and the Wobbly Windows. I can’t live without the wobbly windows)
If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.As a a part time tiling window manger user, I love the workspaces. So much cleaner and easier to keep track of for me than simply alt+tabbing between numerous windows glommed into the same desktop.
Check out MX. It has some nice tools and defaults to make Debian better as a desktop distro.
Debian + Nix (home-manager) gives you a stable system and bleeding edge userland packages. It’s a perfect combo.
I tried Debian + Nix once upon a time too. Honestly flatpaks and containers did everything I needed and more, and every dev team I’ve been on already has familiarity with the container workflow.
I’m a huge fan of Debian and Nix, don’t get me wrong, but it was shy of perfect for my use case. Glad it works for you though! I’ve been using Fedora + Nix home-manager with flakes for almost two years and I don’t think I’ll ever go back
Flatpak is imperative. Nix gives me less headaches than docker. I haven’t tried distrobox.
Why Fedora? That’s what I initially started with, but it was less stable than arch on my t480, nix unstable has newer packages, and I couldn’t get nix to work with selinux.
Haha I’ve had a journey to get here, all because I have a 12th gen Framework.
Initially I got Debian Sid working but ran into power management issues with the module system. I switched over to arch and loved that for a while but frankly I was too careless and kept breaking my system. The way I use Arch it wasn’t a stable daily driver. Then I switched over to NixOS and loved it, but I bricked 3 of 4 ports with a firmware update (again me being careless). Graciously, Framework helped me fix the issue.
After all of that I decided to go with a distro that is officially supported by Framework. Between Ubuntu and Fedora I choose Fedora since they don’t have ads for Ubuntu Pro :) I also like SELinux by default and wanted to broaden my horizons
I once installed MX Linux KDE spin after using manjaro around 2021.
Found out that almost all applications lacked features, specially Okular ( Pdf reader ). It also felt less visually pleasing out of the box.
Hence is switched back to Arch based distros.
I agree. I did a lot of distro hopping when new to Linux to try all the desktops and have the latest apps etc. But after years of that I just wanted something stable that will be reliable and I don’t have to maintain.
I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 as soon as it was released and it’s fantastic. Stable Debian base with Cinnamon on top. I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve always been confused by pacman/arch in general and always preferred apt which I find straightforward.
As one who worked in IT for years, I’m tired of micro managing systems and unnecessary complications. Linux Mint Debian Edition/Debian + apt just keeps it simple.
Timeshift is a must. Creates a system restore point in the event that an upgrade goes wrong and it really works well. I highly recommend that to all Linux users.
I also like Warpinator which is Linux Mint’s version of airdrop. Works between my android and my pc perfectly.
And there is tons of help online for Debian, unlike other distros.
I tried Debian a few times and never liked it… I like the Arch experience better.
I’m genuinely curious what you consider to be the “Arch experience”, other than pacman.
Install process/freedom of choice for more things (It’s more of a blank slate)
I won’t speak to the distro part of this, as this is too broad a subject, and there are too many distros I like for different use cases. Now, about Gnome, which is my favorite DE, second only to Cosmic (yes, the Gnome based one), has 1 issue since version 45 that made me jump ship to KDE 6 (which I’ve been able to set up fairly close to how I used Gnome, with some trade-offs) and that is Gnome’s choice of not allowing any Screen Shot app to work, other than their own, using the current Apple justification that “it’s for the user’s own security”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Sure, I can force run Flameshot from the terminal, but who wants to do that? I want mi screnn shot app to work from the Print-Screen key, as it should. I do miss everything else about Gnome, for sure, but I screen shot and annotate them too much to go through all the steps that are required to make it happen in Gnome 45.
If you want to take a step in between: I am running Debian Testing on my notebook. Testing is the staging ground for the next major Debian Version, right now 13.
Still very much stable, but inherently more up to date packages. Not a real rolling release, but the closest you can get to a rolling Debian. Plenty of updates, but no problems in the past year I used it.
I can recommend debian testing. I’m using it on laptop and desktop for several years, always running “apt update && apt full-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove” and it never broke. It’s not officially a “rolling release” but practically it is.
Now, use these extensions (ignore the one disabled).
My setup:
This is interesting because I’ve been thinking about switching from Debian to Arch. I’m already running Nix inside of my Debian installation to get more recent apps (I don’t like how snap interacts with the rest of the system, so I avoid it if I can).
Is there anything else on a more base OS level (like apt v pacman) that you’ve noticed is different, if you’re willing to share?
Welp, I’ve only been at it a few days, plus I’m kind of treating this system as plug and play. Meaning, on my desktop I’m happy to get my fingers into all types of config files and such, while on this laptop I intend to leave as many things default as possible. Bottom line is I haven’t looked too deep under the hood, so I can’t give too much insight on how the inner workings compare. I fully recommend giving Arch a try though. Just take things slowly and read the ArchWiki carefully.
