PS. This is not a critique to Debian-based distros. And i’m not suggesting you to skip Ubintu for Arch either. Arch is a bit advanced and not too easy to new users, so that won’t do for some people…
… just install Linux Mint instead.
As an Arch user I hate these memes. Guys, the only difference between distros is effectively the versions of packages you’re getting, and what the default packages and configs are. In Ubuntu you are completely free to have a very minimal i3 setup (I did for several years!) while in Arch you can use some bloated Gnome UI. This “Arch is fast and Ubuntu is slow” really isn’t true if you compare Arch-Gnome vs Ubuntu-Gnome, or Arch-i3 vs Ubuntu-i3.
really isn’t true if you conpare Arch-Gnome vs Ubuntu-Gnome,
So what I’m hearing is “Fuck Gnome”?
This shitpost was bought to you by the KDE/XFCE gang collab
Be cautious about fucking gnomes. Most of them do know a spell that will make it fit, but it doesn’t always wear off.
Trust me, it’s worse if it wears off too soon.
KDE uses more RAM than Gnome.
This is XFCE/LXQT territory.
Is Gnome even bloated? I’ve settled on it because it mostly just works and stays out of my way.
IDK if it’s bloated or not, I’m just capitalising on the opportunity to shit on Gnome because I dislike its design choices.
I mean no ill will to the devs or the users of gnome. It’s a bit of banter
Compared to i3 it is, but I admit that’s not a fair comparison as i3 is going for a very specific style that is cheap to implement.
Not horribly. If you have quite old/weak hardware you might notice more memory usage and stuff. If you are on a modern machine with decent specs, it won’t matter
I have to use Ubuntu (22.04 specifically) because I’m stuck with a 15yo laptop that can’t handle much at all so I game via Shadow which only supports that Ubuntu version… it sucks and it’s dumb but it’s the best option. It’s a constant fight against making it not auto update and run things automatically. If I have Shadow running and anything else becomes active the laptop goes into full jet engine mode and I have to pause the game or whatever I’m doing on the Shadow client, and often close it completely, or else it all crawls to a complete stop. It seems no matter what I do it refuses to stop qutomatically checking for updates whenever it feels like it via the several apps used to do so (software updater, snap store etc.). It does this a few times a day, it’s so fucking annoying but nothing I’ve tried fully works. I dream of getting to use Linux Mint, Arch and a few other distros, but so far it doesn’t seem like Shadow will expand their Linux support.
Have you tried Kubuntu? Shadow should work on all Ubuntu based distros including that, and KDE is lighter than Gnome while still being good for gaming.
Xubuntu
The only substance I can see to it is when do you draw the line from a modified Debian (or Ubuntu) setup to a “new” distro?
If you start with an Ubuntu image its technically possible to ship of Theseus it right into an Arch image, but you could argue the default config of both is best representative of the actual distro maintainers goal (even if irrelevant to power users).
(Saying this all as a NixOS user with a system that hardly even looks like Linux sometimes so maybe I’m a bit biased on how blurry all the lines are lmao)
Mint user: I don’t care how much RAM my system uses as long as it works.
I dunno. There are some of us who run Mint not because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we do* and we don’t want to have to deal with any more nonsense than we absolutely have to.
From that small cohort, there are those of us who’ll frown when all we have open is a few browser tabs and the system’s using 8GB of RAM, twice the “recommended” spec. On startup with nothing running it’s over 1GB.
It’s hard not to see it as wasteful when you’re old enough to remember perfectly good machines running on single-digit megabytes. **
* Or at least, think we do.
** Yes, things are much more complex these days. But are they really a thousand times more complex?
Hey! I some of us run Mint because we hope to know what we’re doing someday!
Consider trying void. If you can live without system d, it’s quite comfy though still low on ram usage. Also, the package repos ship closer-to-latest software. Mostly you’ll get all the way there on release day with just a few relatively niche things here or there that you’ll have to wait a bit for; ime, go’s compiler is a common example; after a very annoying, though admittedly forgotten by me, bug was introduced a couple of years ago we usually only get new versions after the first bug fix has come out. Another is skim, the fzf alternative but that’s technically not seen a new version since the auto-selecting-empty-lines bug was fixed.
I want to switch to void so bad. It’s just that my machine is a laptop that I carry around with me all the time. I don’t feel safe doing that without encrypting it, and all I’ve gotten out of attempting to manually configure LUKS is hours of wasted time.
edit: typos. Stupid phone keyboard.
“Hey look, my old af computer works again. Sweet”
That’s about how I see it. I’ve used other distros for niche projects (like un-bricking my OG Xbox with a 20 year old desktop, cause I fucked up the mod). But I use Mint for my daily computer, cause I’m not much of a software tinkerer… and my wife can use it without issues as well. Fuck, I do love Linux for all the hardware it’s helped me save, regardless of distro
A safe bet is the best bet.
I know this is just a meme but has Ubuntu fallen that bad?
Ubuntu did welcomed me to the Linux fam 16 years ago or so, so I am grateful but I have not used it for at least 12 years by now
Been using it at work for LAMP stack dev for like 3 years and it never gave me issues.
The only trouble I have with it, is that my company bought an arrow lake lenovo thinkbook and all the firmware is proprietary or too new… My camera doesn’t work well, I get crashrs, graphics glitches… But that is on Lenovo and my company not on Ubuntu afaik.
Good to know, thanks for taking the time to reply
Critique *
I think you can use both: https://comparewords.com/critic/critique
The word critic is a noun, the word critique is the verb.
You would have critiques of Debian, not critic.
ok
Damn you edited the original comment and now my reply is out of context. RIP
Gotteeem!
I got got.
You literally just used “critique” as a noun.
A critic critiques and can have a critique. A critic can’t critics nor can have a critic. A critic can criticize and can have a criticism.
Ergo the statement “critique is a verb” isn’t the whole truth.
Concordantly
Critical thinking suggests that it is critical that everyone understands this.
My statement was within the context of the thread text. Apologies for the confusion.
I was going to stack 4 to 6 Arch VMs inside each other.
Now I’m wondering if I can go further…
Tell me how deep the rabbit hole can go.
I’ll try. But if I forget, I’ll probably post about it on my Mastodon and an appropriate community here (got any recommendations?)
Arch, btw
Ubuntu bad am I rite guys!
Tiny core Linux: i can run on 64 MB of ram. (with GUI)
Does it get security updates?
probably
Arch is love. Arch is life.
Arch is like your psychotic ex. Sex is great, but one day, you wake up because she’s burning the sheets of your bed while you’re still inside.
I just fear what would happend if i just stop the daily updates
I’ve had Arch on a laptop for like 4 years now, its also my main gaming rig. The only issue I ever had was my own fault, I didnt put enough memory on the system partition (and just partitioning a terminal use-case device at all). I’m really interested in what’s happened to others cause I have yet to experience it lol
Like 7 years with desktop Arch and some more with server Arch, I’m with you. RAID-0 broke once, so I needed to assemble it manually, then update, then everything worked back again. Apart from that, cannot remember a thing.
Arch is nice, I noticed slightly higher fps in a few games after switching. Not sure how much overhead there is on it, but I use AwesomeWM which I launch from the commandline since I don’t have it run at startup, and I must say I do like the interface for launching programs, I can either do the commandline name or the name of the program will often be fuzzy find away in the launch bar…
If only windows had some kind of menu where you could find programs to launch (and not search the web), and not cram adds down your throat.
They’ve done the menu dirty. Used to just list apps. Now it shows you everything but the apps.
Are we really talking about 500mb nowadays?
I remember easily running Debian minimal with 128mb
I installed 26.04 the other day and it seems like a pretty decent release, I may keep it around for a bit.
Ptyxis is slow and big yes. But it is the only modern terminal on GNOME that is maintained lol
Arch gives me flashbacks to compiling kernels on really old salvaged hardware. Mint is good enough these days
I use QubesOS with Debian templates so ram is something in high demand. Luckily I have plenty of it to spare. I made minimal arch templates to try optimise but it really didn’t help once all the required bs was installed.

















