My first thought is, “People are actually reading and responding to my posts? Wild!”. I mostly started putting these up for my own benefit and only distantly believing that someone else might read these, let along leave some thoughtful comments.
By the way, thanks to everyone who has responded (and isn’t a scammer or spammer!)! For better or worse, I’m encouraged to write more (so you only have yourselves to blame!).
Last time, I talked about Manjaro being my forever distro. I’m still leaning heavily that way. I like the community. I like the variety of packages available in the repositories (I pull a scant handful from the AUR, mostly Vivaldi and Dropbox). It runs well and I won’t have to reinstall when there’s a new release, like I might in Debian world (Ubuntu, Mint, and the like).
Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid though, reading through the Manjaro forums. I’m not really living the Arch lifestyle. If there’s an update, I usually just update it. The laptop is just for web browsing, email, solitaire, and experimenting with distros, after all. I’m not worried about keeping my information. I’ve reinstalled dozens of time.
BUT… I mostly learn by reading forum posts and tinkering. I’ve managed not to break things. I can figure out how to get Linux to print to our home printer. I can do just about anything I want on that computer (except get Artemis to play, for some reason). I’m not one to spend hours perusing the manuals until I break something.
So I ask myself, is this the right place for me? Should I be on a Debian-based distro and just deal with reinstalling every two years (or so)? Should I spend some time on Fedora, which seems to be rolling but stable? I dabbled with Solus, but Budgie runs a little slow on that machine and I’m not totally sold on MATE (if they ever did an Xfce release though…).
Or am I just over-analyzing everything again? I’m really, really good at that.
At some point, I think I may move away from Windows. I know Windows, I understand where files are, I understand the tools, it’s been my computer home since… 1996? I worked through Win 95, 98, XP, 8, 8.1, now 10… It’s the devil I know. Linux is starting to make more sense to me. I can do little things. I’m learning slowly, but the data is being absorbed.
When I switch to Linux, I want to set things and not worry about it. Mint and Ubuntu usually have methods for upgrading their distros when a new release comes out and the software I care about (web browsers, email, security) are all updated regularly. Maybe Debian-based is best for me. Manjaro seems solid though, and I don’t think Arch is going anywhere, but there seem like there are risks there.
I know I’m not stuck in one place. I can get a second drive, make that home, and call it good. Then I can experiment with the distros all I want. A lot of Linux users seem to wander a bit, and that’s one of the things that’s cool about it.
Enough ranting. If anyone has any thoughts, I’d love to hear them! The TLDR summary is Manjaro good, Mint a possibility, I can’t make a decision to save my life.
