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.
These kind of posts confuse me. What you’re describing is not the distribution, but a vanilla GNOME experience. That can be achieved on basically any distribution with a healthy package repository. Not to mention that troubleshooting rarely involves the package manager, unless you are aware of a package that specifically breaks something. The recent pixman regression would be an example of this
I mean, a portion of my experience is switching to Gnome, yes. I also touch on multiple other aspects that are different from my regular system on a deeper level (package manager, release system, package version, etc).
On Arch, full Gnome is packaged in a billion optional packages, and requires some manual configuration to work right just in case you wanted to run Gnome on an outdated Linux version with System-V and no PulseAudio. The defaults are for compatibility with the wacky setups Arch users like, and not so much the “it just works” approach.
On Debian, you just get all the packages an end user would reasonably expect. That’ll take up a few hundred extra megabytes and add a bunch of shortcuts you’ll probably neve use to your app selector, but it’ll work well out of the box.
You can get the Debian experience on Arch and the Arch experience on Debian, but both ways you’ll need to do a lot of messing around.
Of course, Debian is not specifically any better than alternatives like Fedora or Ubuntu in this regard, but there is a clear distinction between Arch and Debian in my experience.
In arch it’s just very easy to forget to install a specificoptional package for a subsystem that makes a feature of gnome work.