That’s what I always thought about AUR. Seems like you can install anything you want but also seems like the trouble you could have would be like using Ubuntu PPAs times two. Maybe the amount of oversight for AUR is similar to a PPA. I don’t have much experience with AUR and only through using Antergos and Manjaro for a few months each.
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@xahodo @ihasama @pdecker @Rosika ,
Thank you all.
I am dealing with suggestions as noted
OK. Nixos is quite a different challenge
I went to Artix.
Now that Arch has an installer, I think they all belong together
You want Solus higher in the list… easier than Debian? OK
Antix is non-systemd… it is in the other list
Gentoo is one of the best learning challenges … i agree not impossibly difficult, but it takes time.
I have not experienced that yet with Artix…but it will come. Arch without AUR is very limited
I have not tried overlays yet. More to learn
I think it is less. Ubuntu does do something to moderate PPA’s.
What I dont understand is how Gentoo gets by faultlessly when it is essentially all raw package releases. Either its management is very clever or portage has builtin safeguards or portsge gives users the power to cope with problems.?
OK , distilling all that, here is next draft of systemd list
Mint
LMDE
MX/Systemd
Peppermint/Debian
Solus
.....
Ubuntu (and variants)
Ubuntu with PPA
......
Debian
Fedora
OpenSUSE (tumbleweed or leap)
.....
NixOS
Arch without AUR
Manjaro
Arch with AUR
.......
Gentoo/Systemd
Criticise by all means.
The idea is that our ranking might help someone wanting a learning challenge to take an appropriate step.
I hope I did not forget anyone
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I had a worse case with Antix. I wanted the gnumeric package. Pacman could not find it. I tried with yay and it offered only minimal-gnumeric, and when I tried installing that there were missing dependencies. So no spreadsheet at all? I went back to MX.
All I wanted to do was look at an .xslx file.
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Never used Mint for any length of time, so I can’t really comment - but - I’d place Pop!_OS somewhere ahead of Ubuntu on easiness - they take most of the heavy lifting out of doing GPU drivers - so long as you pick the right one (i.e. they usually release one version for Intel or AMD GPU, and another for NVidia - they’re identical AFAIK apart from GPU specific)…
I’ve used Manjaro for little while, and tried Garuda once - but wasn’t impressed with Garuda, as it seemed to have two different things running trying to do the same things - it was confusing, and some of it was in terminal windows popping up - that’s not ideal for the new user…
From my experience (easier to harder) :
- Pop!_OS
- elementary
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- Debian
I base the above on the default GUI that the vendor ships it with - in the case of Debian I usually go for Gnome 4x… I haven’t really stuck with elementary for a great length of time - but it was my goto distro about 10 years ago. One thing that annoyed me about elementary, was how locked down it was - and there’s a tweak tool (like Gnome Tweaks) but it breaks with every release…
I haven’t used Fedora for 2-3 years now - but that whole RPM-Fusion thing annoyed me - so gave up on it (you have to use it if you want GPU acceleration). Also - there’s a fair amount of stuff in Fedora / Red Hat where you need to add other third party repos like EPEL.
I’ve tried Arch before too (in a VM) - and I couldn’t see the point…
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Thanks, placing Pop!_OS is important
Fedora easier than Debian? I cant answer that
Another systemd list redraft
Mint
LMDE
MX/Systemd
Peppermint/Debian
.....
Solus
Pop!_OS
Elementary
......
Ubuntu (and variants)
Ubuntu with PPA
......
Fedora
Debian
OpenSUSE (tumbleweed or leap)
.....
NixOS
Arch without AUR
Manjaro
Arch with AUR
.......
Gentoo/Systemd
Thanks Daniel… that has rounded it out nicely
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Today’s Ian Murdock’s (Debian founder) birthday - he’d have been 52 today…
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He died young. That is so sad
It reminds me of this story. There was a clever young physics graduate who worked with me at CSIRO. He was into networking right in its early stages in the 1990’s. He taught me heaps about Unix, made all sorts of computer linkups happen, and generally helped build our research group. He left when our lab closed and went to a commercial outfit. About 10 years later, into my retirement, I heard that he had passed away unexpectedly aged 39. It was quite shock… I discovered it accidentally on the internet.
We all have a limited amount of time.
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Sad but true, important to grab every second of it and enjoy whilst you can
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Hi,
About Manjaro (with KDE)
It’s the distro I use on my laptop and I like it a lot. I don’t use AUR packages and what I have installed is pretty much what comes with the installation, plus a dozen other programs.
I don’t know if it’s because it’s a rolling release, but it’s happened to me 3 times and now it’s having the same problem again: sometimes I notice that the updates start to affect the laptop’s performance and it degrades until it becomes very slow.
If I install Manjaro again, I get a “new” laptop.
I can’t find what could be causing the malfunction.
As it’s slow again, I have to install the operating system again, but, although I really like Manjaro, this situation is becoming annoying and I’m seriously thinking of changing distro, but I haven’t decided what to do yet.
As for installing Manjaro: it’s very easy to install
This is my personal list of the distractions I’ve used, from the simplest to the most complicated,
LM
MX
DEBIAN
MANJARO
AntiX
FEDORA
OpenSUSE
For me, FEDORA and OpenSUSE are too complicated, perhaps because I still know little about linux. I have to spend more time to learn more about these distros.
Jorge
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I often find this is the case myself…
I nearly always find it quicker (in the long run) to re-install my OS from scratch - than to figure out a fix…
I remember I even used to do that with Windows NT, 2000, XP and Windows 7…
And since I started storing everything I care about on a NAS, or my personal cloud solution (Resilio Sync) - I don’t lose any data… But - to be honest - this current Pop!_OS build is getting a bit long in the tooth (2+ years) - the main reason I don’t re-install - is Steam - it will take me days to re-sync all my cloud saved games and game binaries (some hundreds of gigabytes) - and - sometimes - not everything comes back (e.g. scenarios I created in Age of Empires II HD - they don’t get sync’d to Valve / Steam’s cloud)…
If I was on limitless fibre - I’d probably re-install (see above), but the promised “National Broadband Network” has yet to deliver me fibre - so I’m on shitty VDSL and scraping the limit of what it can do (38 mbit at best)…
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@nevj :
Hi Neville, 
Hmm, I wonder.
Does Antix use a different repository than Arch?
Because Arch indeed lists gnumeric as part of its repo:
So using the pacman command wouldn´t produce the same results with different distros 
You´re right with yay. Only gnumeric-minimal available there:
As far as MX is concerned:
Did you encounter any major hiccups when using it?
Many greetings from Rosika 
@Tech_JA :
Hi Jorge,
Oh dear, that´s rather unfortunate.
I was having a closer look at Manjaro because the concept of a rolling releae distro seems appealing …
… unless you encounter any diffuculties regarding stability.
My research led me to the conclusion that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Manjaro were always on the top of the list in this respect. Both seem to be unsusually stable for a rolling release model.
Well, with Manjaro you need to pick the “stable” branch to achieve this end.
But you can always switch branches (Switching Branches - Manjaro), it seems. Even if Manjaro is already installed.
User Aragorn, who happens to be an administrator of the Manjaro forum, declared the following:
Manjaro is probably the most stable of all rolling-release distributions. Even Arch Stable is already fairly stable, and serves as the daily driver for many people.
Manjaro’s Unstable branch is actually Arch Stable, and from there on, we test everything more thoroughly in the Manjaro Testing branch before it percolates into Manjaro Stable.
His opinionmay may be biased, of course. 
Thanks for your post, Jorge.
Many greetings from Rosika
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Hi Jorge,
You have Manjaro simpler than Fedora , but with reservations about its stability
and you have Fedora and OpenSUSE harder than Debian.
I want to think about that.
That is strange.
In the old days I would have guessed the updates were filling up a filesystem, but that is unlikely today.
There are not many things that will slow an OS.
- filesystem near full
- too many daemons running
- a runaway process eating cpu time
- out of memory and swapping
- waiting for some event
I bet your issue is none of those. I will have a think.
Regards
Neville
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Hi Rosika,
Sorry that is a typo… it is Artix not Antix
I think it uses the same repo as Arch, except for daemons which have to be different because it is non-systemd..
Do I perhaps need to do a system update with yay instead of pacman?
No it is fine in MX.
Regards
Neville
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Manjaro had several issues which should simply not happen (SSL certificates expired, for example and then suggesting to turn back the time on your system), “testing” for them means delaying package updates a week (all the while doing exactly nothing to test them) and then moving them into stable.
I highly recommend against using that distribution. Just use plain Arch, or choose a Debian based distribution, such as AntiX, MX Linux, or (in the end it is Debian based) Linux Mint. You’ll do just fine.
If you want to stick to rolling release and still want a good end-user experience, go with Solus Linux. Rock solid and they actually test their software before releasing it in stable.
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Hi Neville,
thanks for the update.
I just looked at Artix on distrowatch.
You´re right, of course: package management is done by pacman.
O.K., in this case it seems you should´ve been able to install gnumeric via pacman (see my link above).
Strange that it couldn´t be done when you were trying… 
.
Perhaps the package was not part of the repo back then… ?
In my oponion a system update with pacman should suffice.
You might want to give it another try. gnumeric should be installable with pacman.
Thanks for the feedback. 
Many greetings from Rosika
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What you say seems to be reflected in Jorge’s issues.
I think I will leave it down the list, or maybe even remove it?
It is supposed to be “Arch made easy”. If you want that I think Artix is better managed as long as you can tolerate non-systemd.
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@xahodo :
Hi Xander,
thank you very much for providing your opinion on Manjaro and even suggesting some alternatives.
Uh, that´s not a nice thing to do. I´m disappointed in Manjaro then.
How on earth did the end up being ranked 7 out of (the first) 100 distros on distrowatch, I wonder.
I know that ranking doesn´t tell much, but at least there seems to be some kind of interest in Manjaro… .
Thanks. That´s good to know.
Also good to know. I´ll look into it.
I just noticed they use eopkg package management. That´s new to me. I´ll have to investigate.
Thanks again for you effort, Xander.
Many greetings from Rosika
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I used Manjaro many years ago so it might have changed to better now. Back then Arch was more stable on my hardware. Gentoo is more stable than Arch but it’s not on bleeding edge by default. You can mix stable and latest software on Gentoo. Arch can’t do that.
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Hi Rosika,
eopkg is a fine packsge system
Solus also has the best gui package manager I have seen.
Regards
Neville
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