Upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu completely borked my PC. I suspect it initially had problems because I had removed snaps a while back, which later caused the upgrade to fail, and my attempts to fix it just made things worse. But that’s just a guess.
Anyway. I took it as an opportunity to try something new, so I installed Fedora with the KDE Plasma desktop. And wow, KDE is just so much better than GNOME. I had really tried to embrace the “GNOME workflow” but the fact that I later installed the Dash-to-Panel extension out of frustration kinda revealed that it wasn't working for me. With KDE you can just customize things, and it just works. And I didn’t need to do much of that, it was good for me out-of-the-box.
One gets the impression that GNOME developers are chasing trends, while KDE developers are focused on real-world productivity. It works like a proper desktop should, not an iPad-like toy.
There's been a lot of KDE hype lately with things like SteamOS. I'm not much of a gamer, but I'm now aboard the hype train.
I can only interpret the desire to use the terminal for everything as a sort of trauma-induced atavism caused by excessive exposure to electron, convergent UI design, and GNOME.
I made the switch from Ubuntu 23.04 to Arch Linux. I embraced the meme. After over a decade since my last failed attempt at daily driving Arch, I'm gonna put this as bluntly as I can possibly make it:
Arch is a solid Linux distribution, but some assembly is required.
But why?
Hear me out here Debian and Fedora family enjoyers. I have long had the Debian family as my go-to distros and also swallowed the RHEL pill and switched my server over to Rocky Linux from Ubuntu LTS. on another machine. More on that in a later post when I'm more acclimated with that. But for my personal primary laptop, a Dell Latitude 5580, after being continually frustrated with Canonical's decision to move commonly used applications, particularly the web browsers, exclusively to Snap packages and the additional overhead and just weird issues that came with those being containerized instead of just running on the bare metal was ultimately my reason for switching. Now I understand the reason for this move from deb repo to Snap, but the way Snap implements these kinds of things just leaves a sour taste in my mouth, especially compared to its alternative from the Fedora family, Flatpak. So for what I needed and wanted, something up to date and with good support and documentation that I didn't have to deal with 1 particular vendors bullshit, I really only had 2 options: Arch and Gentoo (Fedora is currently dealing with some H264 licensing issues and quite honestly I didn't want to bother with that for 2 machines).
Arch and Gentoo are very much the same but different. And ultimately Arch won over the 4chan /g/ shitpost that has become Gentoo Linux. So why Arch? Quite honestly, time. Arch has massive repositories of both Arch team maintained and community software, the majority of what I need already packaged in binary form. Gentoo is much the same way, minus the precompiled binary aspect as the Portage package manager downloads source code packages and compiles things on the fly specifically for your hardware. While yes this can make things perform better than precompiled binaries, the reality is the difference is negligible at best and placebo at worst depending on your compiler settings. I can take a weekend to install everything and do the fine tuning but if half or more of that time is just waiting for packages to compile, no thanks. That plus the massive resource that is the Arch User Repository (AUR), Arch was a no-brainer, and Vanilla arch was probably the best way to go. It's a Lego set vs 3D printer files and a list of hardware to order from McMaster-Carr to screw it together, metaphorically speaking.
So what's the Arch experience like then?
As I said in the intro, some assembly is required. To start, the installer image you typically download is incredibly barebones. All you get is a simple bash shell as the root user in the live USB/CD environment. From there we need to do 2 things, 1) get the thing online, the nmcli command came in help here as this is on a laptop and I primarily use it wirelessly, and 2) run the archinstall script. At the time I downloaded my Arch installer, archinstall was broken on the base image but you can update it with a quick pacman -S archinstall once you have it online. Arch install does pretty much all the heavy lifting for you, all the primary options you can choose: Desktop environment/window manager, boot loader, audio system, language options, the whole works. I chose Gnome, GRUB bootloader, Pipewire audio system, and EN-US for just about everything. Even then, it's a minimal installation once you do have.
Post-install experience is straightforward, albeit just repetitive. Right off the archinstall script what you get is relatively barebones, a lot more barebones than I was used to with Ubuntu and Debian Linux. I seemingly constantly was missing one thing for another, checking the wiki, checking the AUR, asking friends who had been using arch for even longer than I ever have how to address dumb issues. Going back to the Lego set analogy, archinstall is just the first bag of a larger set. It is the foundation for which you can make it your own further. Everything after that point is the second and onward parts bags, all of the additional media codecs, supporting applications, visual tweaks like a boot animation instead of text mode verbose boot, and things that most distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora have off the rip, you have to add on yourself. This isn't entirely a bad thing though, as at the end if you're left with what you need and at most very little of what you don't. Keep going through the motions, one application at a time, pulling from the standard pacman repos, AUR, and Flatpak, and eventually you'll have a full fledged desktop with all your usual odds and ends.
And at the end of all of that, what you're left with is any other Linux distro. I admit previously I wrote Arch off as super unstable and only for the diehard masochists after my last attempt at running Arch when I was a teenager went sideways, but daily driving it on my personal Dell Latitude for the last few months has legitimately been far better than any recent experiences I've had with Ubuntu now. I get it. I get why people use this, why people daily drive this on their work or gaming machines, why people swear off other distros in favor of Arch as their go to Linux distribution. It is only what you want it to be. That said, I will not be switching to Arch any time soon on mission critical systems or devices that will have a high run time with very specific purposes in mind, things like servers or my Raspberry Pi's will get some flavor of RHEL or Debian stable still, and since Arch is one of the most bleeding edge distros, I know my chance of breakage is non zero. But so far the seas have been smooth sailing, and I hope to daily this for many more months to come.
Fun fact: GNOME desktop settings are managed thru dconf, a live registry whic stores its data in a binary file for quick access.
However, it is possible to dump any subset of the dconf registry as INI-formatted ascii text, and indeed to load any properly formatted INI string back into dconf, wher changes are applied instantly.
How to Make GNOME Desktop Look Like Mac OS Big Sur
This video shown step by step how to make GNOME Desktop Look Like Mac OS Big Sur. In this video, I use Ubuntu for implementing the theme look like mac big sur. This tutorial also work on Linux Distribution which using GNOME Desktop such as Fedora Workstation, Pop_OS, Zorin OS, Manjaro GNOME edition, Mageia GNOME Edition, Debian with GNOME Desktop, Solus OS GNOME Edition and Arch with GNOME Desktop.
Manjaro 18.0 GNOME Edition is official Manjaro Linux flavour with GNOME Shell 3.30 as default desktop environment includes several GNOME Extensions and enable by default like Arch Menu, Dash to dock, Appindicator, Pamac update indicator, remove drive menu and user themes.
Powered by the latest Long-Term Support of Linux Kernel 4.19, include pamac version 7.3. in manjaro 18.0, The Manjaro Settings Manager (MSM) now provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for installing and removing the many series of kernels. At the time of this release, eight kernel-series are available directly from manjaro binary repositories, from 3.16 series to the latest 4.19 release.
