My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn’t Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!
The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.
why arch and not something with more stable updates like debian?
I’ve spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I’ve dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.
Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.
It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.
Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.
As if apple users had no fuckin clue
weeeeelllllllll …
(jk)
There are some tech illiterate people, who use Linux without knowing it, because their child set it up for them.
Personally, if you can’t tell me if you are running Windows or MacOS, I don’t really want you downloading my software
Why? Are you feeling bad about all the adware you bundled in?
Penguin people for sure know theirs
And they’ll tell you about it every time.
You mean, there are still websites that don’t auto-detect what OS you’re running and make you actually choose?
I actually hate it when a website does that, especially when it doesn’t let you download the application you want because your OS is not compatible. For example you wanna download some windows software to run it with Wine/Proton and the website detects you are running linux and does not let you download. I always need to spoof my User-Agent string to get access.
Absolutely one of my favorite james acaster quotes! His whole Netflix special, “Repertoire” is just fantastic
