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.
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.
I know this was a long comment and I’m only reacting to 1 word, so, I’m sorry in advance… But man, your mention of Mandrake really brought me back… I couldn’t for the life of me remember the distro I used to use all the time and this just clicked it all back into place. So much nostalgia, switching from like red hat 5 or 6 (not rhel, old plain red hat) to mandrake and being so happy.
Debian is sometimes frustratingly out of date for daily apps like the web browser. I’d rather recommend something with a bit more updates like Mint.
frustratingly out of date for daily apps like the web browser
Use flatpack for those then?
After many years of using multiple devices and even servers with Archlinux installed it never broke because of an update (spoiler: I use systemd-boot instead of grub). If a system is to be used by a less experienced user, just install linux-lts Kernel instead.
Unstable does not mean it crashes/breaks often, it just means it does not guarantee to not bump to the newest upstream version and that it does not do backports. This can be a problem when using unmaintaned software that does not like using a recent python/php.
This is also great because if you find a bug in a software you can report it to upstream directly. Debian maintainers only backport severe bugs, not every one of them. It can take over a year for new features to arrive - especially painful with applications like gimp, krita, blender, etc. You can use debian-unstable of course, which is close to upstream as well.
I setup a pacman hook to reinstall grub and rebuild the config file after every grub update. This is apparently how the grub team expect people to use it. They want each distro to setup their own install scripts or something.
So far no issues from grub and I’ve had it set up that way for half a year.
If she only does basic web browsing, why not something more stable like Ubuntu or Debian?
with arch it’s relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that’s it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there’s nothing to break.
every time I’ve tried “out of the box” desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it’s been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.
Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn’t have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.
Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn’t the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.
It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.
Personally, if you can’t tell me if you are running Windows or MacOS, I don’t really want you downloading my software
I used to work with internet service for trains. I remember one support ticket filed by the train conductor:
“Internet doesn’t work”
No info regarding area
No info regarding when
No info regarding which carriage
…or even which train.
Well, I managed to jump through a few hoops, figuring out the schedule for this particular individual, and could deduce which train at least. Nagios reported everything as fine, but sometimes Nagios can lie, so I tracked it down and did the usual diagnostics onboard. Couldn’t find anything wrong.
I phoned up the guy and it turned out he’d forgotten to enable wifi on his phone.
Related IT Crowd scene
Does anyone really not know if they have an apple or windows device…?
I got my grandma a chromebox for easy updates and minimal tech support. I get a call from her probably once a month when a random tab she got to through Facebook puts her browser in full screen and says she has a windows virus. Sometimes she calls them but is smart enough to not give a credit card. Every time she calls me all scared and asks “I don’t have Microsoft right?” lol
Sometimes they can afford to not know because they have a relative who can manage the device for them. In which case they really wouldn’t be installing software on their own really.
You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.
You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.
If that number is more than 0 then I would be very surprised. There are buttons on the side for volume and volume buttons have been standard on devices since at least the early 80’s.
Had someone ask me why their phone didnt make noise or vibrate when they recieved calls the other day. They were pressing the volume down button with the unlock button to get the screen to turn on/off. So it would slowly mute the phone and take the vibrate off once muted.
They would have benefited from the buttons not being less than half an inch away, and possibly on the opposite side. (Not sure what kind of phone it was, it was a cheaper device it seemed.)
This reminds me of that time where my mum entered the fastboot menu on her phone by mistake. She panicked and I just told her to restart, making sure she holds only the power button this time. It also reminds me of the first time I got into my first smart device (my Tablet’s) bootloader by mistake. I was 10, my parents had just bought me the tablet like a week ago and I was at my grandma’s so I understandably panicked a lot. But of course, no damage was done.
Now phones lock bootloaders, to protect others from making the same mistake you did.
Isn’t that so nice of them? /s
I wouldn’t say braindead. They just don’t care (because all they need a computer for is to read emails and use a text processor) or haven’t had the time to learn yet (every known fact must be learned for a first time at some point in your life, which means there is a time in your life where you don’t have that knowledge yet (ie. the time before you acquired that knowledge)).
I think you mean a “Samsung”. Because like 50% of people using Android have no idea that they are.
I think you mean a “Pixel” because most Samsung customers only care that it’s “Not an iPhone”
Penguin fellas only download software from package managers and official repos tho
Unless it’s not in a package manager, and you’re assuming those links don’t point to official repos
