In addition to what was said by somebody else about atomic updates, even a simple update via package manager on a regular distro will do all the work up front, and not take extra time on next boot. Before you reboot, most things will continue working fine - and most of the remaining things that might not can be worked around.
“Calling out” gnome for needing extensions for customization seems stupid when those extensions are easy to find, easy to use, and work really well. On the other hand, I have not been able to find a taskbar for plasma that would let me group windows from an application together while also letting me rearrange the windows inside of a group. I know I need to try implementing it myself someday, but I feel like gnome ends up having more options.
If you look at the screenshot, you can see this is the “Repair tips” tab/button. I don’t know what it looks like, but it does say something about repairing.
I think Arch is meant for people who want to learn the software - so that you can also choose, control, customize, diagnose, and fix the software!
That said, archwiki is still a great resource on other distros for when something does go wrong, or when it’s not obvious how to do something, particularly when messing with experimental or server stuff.
That’s the point of the fediverse and activitypub - posts from one platform are federated to other compatible platforms. I know this also includes kbin, but there’s probably other platforms.
As others mentioned, archwiki is the information source if you want to use Arch, and a great source of information even if using other distributions.
For other distros, I’ve seen people mention Linux Journey.
All that said, you might not be able to drop Windows entirely - if we’re talking CAD software, the Adobe suite, that kind of stuff, you might not be able to find suitable alternatives for Linux. That said, you can always dual boot, or you might even be able to work with a VM.
If you do want to try a dual boot, I strongly recommend setting up the Linux boot partition on a separate physical drive, to minimize the risk of Windows overwriting it… As well as you accidentally messing up your windows install. I’d also recommend using rEFInd as the bootloader, since it’s very easy to set up and will automatically show a boot option for Windows.
Feel free to ask questions, I’m no expert, but I’ll try to answer when I have time.
I will happily recommend Arch to a new user… If they’re interested in learning Linux, and not dependent on it working reliably, while warning them of the risks and telling them about the advantages.
I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who wants something that just works, but for tech-inclined people looking for a system they are in control (and responsibility) of, willing to learn how to set it up, I think a manual installation is a good experience.
But they will be warned.
By the way, for editing server files consider nano. It’s also widely available, has simpler shortcuts and displays them on the screen. It’s obviously not powerful like vim, but a good match when you just need to edit a config file.
It’s usually combined with a rectangle/window selection, thus clipping a part of your screen into an image/clipboard.
Not tools like screenshots, screen recording - because Wayland is inherently different, you couldn’t make those work in Xwayland without sacrifices.
I think Wayland is in a good enough state to be a daily driver for most (non-NVidia) users, but there’s still big caveats to keep in mind that can be deal breakers.
I’m pretty sure hotfixes are still being released. It’s more so that there are two release streams, stable and unstable, and when there isn’t a new unstable release, the unstable stream is just on the same version as the stable stream.
That’s the thing - none of those would’ve affected you negatively if you’ve been using Nvidia, so if you’re just playing games and not following the news, you’re more likely to just hear people complain about AMD this, AMD that, they broke it… But everything works fine for you
I’m pretty sure most people love NVidia, since it’s the popular option, generally works, and provides features that aren’t available elsewhere, both in gaming and GPU compute.
Of course, most of NVidia’s advantages come down to marketing and pushing for their proprietary technologies, while avoiding supporting niche users and refusing to release their code. The thing is though, if you use Windows, NVidia is probably the better choice from an end-user’s point of view.
By that logic, any sorting implementation is O(1), as the indexing variable/address type has limited size
if developers keep pushing incomplete and buggy software to the end users instead of actually fixing bugs
My understanding is, the issue is that fixing bugs in X has become too much of an issue due to bloat and bad historical architecture, so the developers working on it - and providing the software for free, if not working for free - instead worked together to develop a new standard aiming to fix the issues inherent to X’s code and design.
The “list of problems” is absolute bullshit right from the start. The first two sections are “It didn’t used to work like this in X, Wayland is trash!” and “I had some screen recording software using X APIs and they don’t work when not running in X!”. In fact, a lot of them follow this pattern, blaming Wayland because it doesn’t have 100% backwards compatibility. It’s not an X rewrite, it’s meant to be a new, better piece of software.
I will not deny that Wayland has problems, of course - but those mostly come down to NVidia refusing to support open protocols, missing features that are yet to be implemented, and missing software support for Wayland.
I will also say that on Arch, which doesn’t assume I’m using X, Wayland does work completely fine for me when following instructions. It might be an issue with the distro you’re using not having good support, or one of those edge cases like problematic hardware. I definitely agree that you should stick with X for now if you have problems, but I’ll also say that you’re getting it for free, and if you don’t report problems, they might also not know about them, for example because it only occurs on specific hardware.
Removed by mod
I know that after arch is Gentoo, the last one is FreeBSD
I think calling it “a page worth” is understating it somewhat, especially if you want a full install to actually use stuff. In reality, when installing at first, you’ll be finding stuff you missed for a while, like hardware video decoding.
Also, are you referring to just the direct instructions for one choice? Because to me, the point of installing manually is educating yourself on the choices, choosing one that suits you, and understanding what you’re doing to set it up. Of course, when you’re doing subsequent installs, you already know that stuff - but at that point you might just want to write an install script instead of running them manually.
And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)
Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.
I think the reason you’d want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you’ve already forgotten about, which I’ve done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.