I have used Arch for >13 years (btw) and use the terminal every single session. I also work with Linux servers daily, so I tried the other families with DEs (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux/Fedora).

I’m comfortable (and prefer) doing everything with CLI tools. For me, it’s a bit difficult to convert my Windows friends, as they all see me as some kind of hackerman.

What’s the landscape like nowadays, in terms of terminal requirements?

Bonus question: Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages? Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR?

  • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
    3·
    1 day ago

    I’m same as you (7 years though), but I have Fedora as a family computer. I mostly like it. I used Fedora for a year almost exclusively a couple of years back, and I quite enjoy the experience as a macOS refugee. Tried Silverblue (immutable distro), it looks even better for an average folk, but I haven’t used it for a long time to comment on that.

    Recently, a Fedora installation broke on me (bad kernel upgrade), and was so for a month, spanning 4 kernel upgrades. I had to manually boot into a working kernel (F8 during boot in grub), and remove the new kernel. I avoided updates till there was a newer kernel version, tried again, to no success. It took them a month to fix the regression, now it’s good back. The kernel versions were since 6.17.10 till 6.18.4, and time frame was since December 14th till January 12th this year. It was relatively trivial to troubleshot (I used ChatGPT for assistance, but I was knowledgeable of what I was doing).

    I have no idea what would a regular new user do. I have no idea how a Silverblue version would handle this situation, I have a regular Fedora Workstation installed.

    However, apart from that, I have been running Fedora without any issues for years. One computer runs about 5 years now. The other served me for a couple of years, now it’s Arch Linux server, but it had no issues at all.

    I guess I’d avoid Ubuntu. I might have tried Bazzite (if for gaming) or Pop_OS! (for their Cosmic Desktop thing). I have no other distros in mind. I don’t like Debian, especially for a desktop, it’s too old, and running testing… well, I’d rather run Arch then.

    Fedora has RPM Fusion, which is kind of AUR, so distros based on it should theoretically have it too. But I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.