As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.

So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.

I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    8 months ago

    I’ve never run Debian, but I did use Fedora on a laptop with Gnome for several years and it was rock solid.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 months ago

    I agree about plain english in the package manager.

    Years ago I wrote a script (now unmaintained) called “human Bash” where I wrapped a bunch of my commonly used commands in english words.

    Some examples (parameters in cursive):

    • "please install minecraft "
    • “please update”
    • "search package by command ifconfig "
    • "search file by name /home/user/Downloads *.pdf "
    • "search file by content p_color "

    and so on.

    But since then I moved on to gui tools entirely.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        please was basically a more complicated alias for sudo :D it originated as a meme on twitter I believe

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Yknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.

      • anamethatisnt@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
        I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.

        • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          8 months ago

          As a a part time tiling window manger user, I love the workspaces. So much cleaner and easier to keep track of for me than simply alt+tabbing between numerous windows glommed into the same desktop.