I'm sure you can have a good experience on it just like you can have a good experience on Windows, etc. But first of all if we are recommending stuff then either Arch & derivates shouldn't be recommended at all if it's a newbie or one should recommend straight up Arch (if it's not a newbie and needs Arch) and frankly if you want Arch made easy either going to OpenSUSE tumbleweed if the issue is stability or EndeavourOS/Arco if it's the installation will probably net someone a better experience, so what's the point of Manjaro anyways, and secondly none of that invalidates the bad practices by the manjaro team
I mean I don't use nor ever plan on using BSD systems and disagree with their philosophy quite a bit but I think them dying is overall bad for the open source community.
please for the love of god do not use Manjaro and if you do forget about using the AUR, Manjaro claims to be more stable by waiting 1 week before adding Arch's packages to their repo, this breaks the AUR packages you use which may need newer dependencies. They also often forgot to renew the security certificates of their website.
Arco is better but frankly all being Arch distros the differences are close to none.
I do use my OS but I also like to play with it, that's one beauty of Linux: you can set it up and forget about it till the end of times or you can spend days tinkering with it if it provides you joy.
I don't intend to be a developer. I do code a few things sometimes but that's not the life path I'm oriented towards. That said you bring some good points. I am starting to believe NixOS may not be suitable for my uses sometimes, tho I did fix the SDDM issue, even though it involved changing my configuration in a way I didn't find intuitive. I'm still evaluating what to do. Maybe is 24.05 proves to fix my issues and stays out of my way I'll stay.
I should try matrix tbf yeah, just didn't like having to use yet another platform that's why I went to what I already have to use.
I'm not saying you're wrong, you convinced me to try Fedora on a VM. And obviously there's worse than RH, tho it is owned by IBM. All I'm saying is that since the fedora team is financially dependent on RH that is worrying to me. So is the Linux Foundation being dependent on corpos don't get me wrong tho at least in this case it'smore than 1 corporation. I have nothing against people who don't mind and still use fedora mind you, I just try to avoid/minimize corporations for what is reasonably possible.
Also just to be clear: I don't think there's an obvious incentive for RH to pull the plug on Fedora either, but I don't trust them to not do something that is apparently stupid to us. For example, I thought Canonical adding ads and doing questionable stuff would be damaging to them too yet I see they're doing it/trying to despite it being clearly a bad idea given who the main customers for Ubuntu are.
my issues with debian are beyond just the outdated packages, I know of debian testing and sid I just don't like some approaches debian has which are not for me. nothign against Debian tho it's just not for me
I mean, after reading all your comments my position on Fedora has moderated, but in a comment you said they are financially dependent on RH. Now sure, right now RH doesn't stand to gain from taking/screwing over Fedora and right now they don't seem to want to but who's to say one day they won't try to? I don't trust corporations for many reasons so having a distro that, while independent in the development decisions, is financially dependent on a corporation doesn't sit too right for me. Sure maybe they will never do it but hey I'd rather avoid the off-chance it happens if there's alternatives.
I will check it out in a VM alongside the others though.
Yeah the thing is I'm not the most rtfm or read the patch notes type guy. When I used Arch I just went balls-to-the-wall yolo but updated weekly. Updating less frequently seems like more of an hassle.
I don't trust corporations in general, mainly I don't want Red Hat (or any other corpo) to suddenly destroy my distro or do something I don't agree with. I still remember the whole debacle some months ago. If it wasn't for that I'd definitely give Fedora a shot but the fact they're sponsored by RH (and their upstream) makes me question how independent they are from RH and how at risk they are from being taken over by RH.
As for use-case I think any distro can in some way fulfill my computing necessities and has most if not all the programs I need available in some way afaik, it's mostly a matter of technicalities and other stuff that is fairly important to me personally but maybe not too relevant for most
I heard of them. Vanilla AFAIK uses GNOME, that's a major deal-breaker for me. Originally I was considering BlendOS in the past before switching to NixOS at some point, I don't remember exactly why I ended up deciding against BlendOS tho
yes but I've also known of the opposite, and I had breakages happen regardless. Leaving it unattended for months is one thing, I'd prefer something a bit more stable if possible. Nonetheless I will consider it
I do know about the possibility of having nix everywhere, but I frankly don't want to use it if I'm not on NixOS. A lot of the problems I have with NixOS are also in part due to how the packages work.
As for Arch that's a good recommendation, I'll consider it for sure
beginners don't care but you, person recommending them Linux, should. We shouldn't recommend distros whose maintainers do bad practices that can affect the noob negatively, especially if they don't care because that means they will associate all those problems with Linux.
Besides, the putting ads thing is a big no no. Why would I recommend someone coming from windows to use a distro that has one of the major flaws of windows when there's better alternatives?
yes the welsh and all other brits should stfu