• 0 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle



  • For a while, maybe… But the two distinctions I’d want to make is that, one, that’s also mostly the time you’ll spend learning what you need to set up as part of your system, and two, things that might be out of your control on many distros. I’d also say that by calling it a “meme distro” you’re lumping it together with Hannah Montana Linux and similar.

    I will certainly say, however, that I’m rather annoyed by all the people saying “Bro you can set up arch in a few minutes just run archinstal it’s easy”… Not only do I not believe it’s that easy when you don’t know what you’re doing and need to actually use the system, but that also seems to run counter to the point of arch. I think there’s at least two popular arch derivatives meant to remove the enthusiast aspect and provide a streamlined experience, so why recommend arch to new people if not as a learning experience?


  • Calling Arch a meme distro is unnecessarily insulting. I imagine the same applies to Gentoo, but I haven’t used it myself. It’s an enthusiast distro, for people who want to have control over how their system is set up while accepting the responsibility of having to set everything up.

    I absolutely agree with recommending against it for somebody’s first experience - but if you’re willing to read through the guides and troubleshoot issues, you can learn a lot about how things work on Linux. It’s the kind of distro where you will have issues, and they will usually be due to your own mistakes.




  • The wiki tells you what you need on arch, and what you need it for. Those packages also don’t seem to have kernel-specific or dkms versions, so seems like they’re not kernel modules.

    Mind you, the setup is clearly not monolithic, with different components for different purposes, including alternative options. On top of that, each distro will make different choices - Arch provides the components as packages and puts the responsibility of installing the right ones on you. Some features might be built into kernel drivers, like working video output, but Vulkan support clearly wants a dedicated driver.



  • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.detoLinux@lemmy.mlMicrosoft parody
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    I think on mutable distros, or at least arch, you can run a command to reinstall all installed packages, which will verify integrity of the package files (signatures) and then ensure the files in the filesystem match package files? And I think it takes minutes at most, at least for typical setups.

    I do think it’s also possible to just verify integrity of all files installed from a package, but I don’t remember if it required an external utility, pretty sure it’s on the arch wiki under pacman/tips and tricks





  • Why does every distro need yet another package manager?

    I think most package managers - the ones actually part of a distro - are old. It’s not a question of why they all use different package managers, it’s a matter of them having developed them long ago before any single one matured.

    That said, there are other considerations, which is also where new ones come from - different distros will have different approaches to package formats, dependency management, tracking of installed packages and system files, some might be implemented in a specific language due to the distro’s ideology, some might work in a different way (like NixOS), and there’s probably a whole bunch that just want a different interface.

    You wouldn’t ask why Linux has a different way of viewing installed programs from Windows, and in the same vein packages are not a universal aspect of Linux, so each distro has to make its own choices.

    Also I like pacman, some people complain about the commands being obscure, but I feel like they’re structured in a much more logical way. Don’t confuse it with yay though, pacman doesn’t build packages, and yay is specifically a wrapper around pacman that has different commands, while adding the ability to interact with the AUR.



  • Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?

    I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.


  • Windows 10. The reason I switched was pretty funny - I had previously bought a cheap SSD and moved my install over to it, and installed Arch on my HDD hoping to experiment with it.

    I never really did that, but one day before Christmas my computer booted straight to Arch to my confusion, and after a while I figured out my SSD failed. I ended up installing gnome to have something to use in the meanwhile, since I wasn’t gonna be buying a new SSD in the next few days, but then I just decided to stick with Linux. As I learned more about it I realised I was barely missing anything, and I preferred Linux for what I had.


  • Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

    You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

    Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

    Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.