Review of Arch Linux

[fox]

Jesse from DistroWatch did a good review of Arch Linux yesterday (find it here). It made me nostalgic for our "old" PLUG, when we met regularly and various topics were presented. One of those was Arch Linux, which Jason presented some years ago. He left instructions on how to install it, and I took up the challenge. I put it on my XPS laptop, and although I only used it occasionally, I supplemented it with all of the programs I regularly use and kept it up to date for two years; never encountering a problem. I removed it eventually; getting tired of the huge updates and the time required to build some of the updated packages. It served its purpose; giving me more confidence in my limited Linux skills.

While I no longer have Arch on any of my computers, I put Manjaro on an external drive about two years ago and use it occasionally. It's very fast like Arch, and I have yet to encounter a problem when I update it. It's actually more fun to use than Ubuntu because of how fast it is, but being risk-averse, I still won't trust a rolling release distro as my primary OS.

[Jason]

Which desktop environment are you using with Manjaro, Fox?

Regarding being risk-averse, I hear you. The use of Timeshift can help with this as any number of updates can be rolled back easily and usually fairly quickly. But there's still some time involved.

Thanks for letting us know about the article.

[fox]

Manjaro Plasma. Just to have something different.

[Jason]

Have you used it much? Wondering what you think of Plasma. You might notice that it's faster than Gnome unless that's just on low-memory systems.

[fox]

I don't use it much; I maintain it and use it occasionally. In terms of speed, it's definitely more responsive than Ubuntu. But that is likely because it is Arch-based. Since I use Ubuntu Gnome and Manjaro Plasma, I can't separate out the effects of the distro from the desktop.

[Jason]

I don't use it much; I maintain it and use it occasionally. In terms of speed, it's definitely more responsive than Ubuntu. But that is likely because it is Arch-based. Since I use Ubuntu Gnome and Manjaro Plasma, I can't separate out the effects of the distro from the desktop.

It's probably more likely Plasma. Btw, I hadn't realized that Plasma was the default for Manjaro. That's cool.

[fox]

Manjaro puts out three official images, one with Plasma, one with XFCE and one with Gnome. I think that in the past, XFCE was the default but now, the three appear to have equal status. I chose Plasma because I wanted to play with that desktop. My Ubuntu is with Gnome, and I consider XFCE to be just a lighter version of Gnome. As to speed, I think it is Manjaro itself and not the Plasma desktop that makes it faster. I say this because I used to have Arch as a secondary distro. I used Gnome on it and it was fast like Manjaro. Why do you think that Plasma is faster than Gnome?

[buster]

" I consider XFCE to be just a lighter version of Gnome."

I think some of us will disagree with this statement. Have tried many times but find Gnome awkward. Too many things to be 'fixed' before comfortable use. And I know that you love it.

As a contrast XFCE has always been comfortable to me, from the moment it is installed.

[fox]

Buster, I'm pretty sure you are referring to the desktop configuration and in your case, I'm I think that you are most comfortable with anything that is set up like Windows XP. XFCE is set up that way by default, but Gnome can be set up almost like that with the help of extensions. In any case, the GTK toolkit (GTK3, I think) underlies both Gnome and XFCE, whereas Plasma uses the QT toolkit. In that way, Gnome and XFCE are related.

The default Ubuntu desktop is not the same as vanilla Gnome; I don't care for the configuration of the latter either. Vanilla Gnome hides the dock and provides no application menu, except when you hit the cmd key. (Then you get applications in rows and columns.) In Ubuntu, you get a dock, but on the left-hand side of the screen, which I prefer. But the settings allow one to move the dock to the bottom. Add the ArcMenu extension, and you get a customizable application menu not very different from that of XFCE or Plasma. I have ArcMenu installed, though I rarely use it, as my most used applications are on my dock. I know that there are other differences between XFCE and Gnome, but given my setup, I find XFCE to be just a simplified version of Gnome.

[Jason]

It's a rare thing to say but I'm with Buster here. Besides the toolset, Xfce has nothing to do with Gnome. All of the major desktops can be configured to look like one another as you've pointed out but Ubuntu and Xfce are very much different in looks including the setup tools that come with each.

When you said lighter, I thought you meant in resource requirements when I saw you first mention it. Xfce definitely uses fewer resources although Plasma is very similar in that vain. Having said that, if you have even a desktop less than 10 years old with sufficient memory (over 4 GB) and a decent graphics chipset or graphics card, you're not going to notice a difference in performance. I don't. And my desktop is 10 years old. But on the Toshiba laptop, I had, anything more than an Xfce desktop was virtually unusable. Using Windows 7 was painful. It had only 4 GB of RAM and a low-performance chipset. Even MATE was too much. Ran MX Linux beautifully, though, for two years.

Buster and I diverge on how easy each desktop is to use. For the average user, Gnome has far less stuff to fudge with, which can be a lot simpler for most folks, including myself. I've had no problem moving to Pop OS, which could possibly be considered a more complex form of Ubuntu. You get used to it. The argument could be made that Windows is much harder to use because it takes too much work to make it look like any Plasma-based distro which is pretty much impossible unless you get an add-on program. It's a lot easier to just adapt or stick with what you prefer than change everything to look like another desktop environment.

[fox]

Well we'll have to disagree on the XFCE-Gnome relationship. I think that the toolset does define the relationship, not the performance.

Interesting about your Toshiba laptop. When it was mine, I never noticed it to be particularly slow, with either Windows or Ubuntu. I suspect it's a combination of aging parts and the greater resource requirements of current operating systems, although the latter doesn't explain why MX Linux would run any better. Ironically, I used to have MX Linux as a backup distro on my Dell xps 13. I found it to be slower than Ubuntu. Eventually I changed it for Linux Lite; not because of its speed but rather, just to try Linux Lite. (Your recommendation awhile back.)

I do agree with your argument about ease of use. As we know, Buster is not particularly interested in learning new things; at least as far as operating systems go.

[buster]

" Buster is not particularly interested in learning new things; at least as far as operating systems go"

Absolutely true. Spending too much time playing with desktops interferes with 'learning new things'. There are only so many hours in a day to learn.

Interesting that the desktops that most of the world uses are the same day after day.

[Jason]

Interesting about your Toshiba laptop. When it was mine, I never noticed it to be particularly slow, with either Windows or Ubuntu. I suspect it's a combination of aging parts and the greater resource requirements of current operating systems, although the latter doesn't explain why MX Linux would run any better. Ironically, I used to have MX Linux as a backup distro on my Dell xps 13. I found it to be slower than Ubuntu. Eventually I changed it for Linux Lite; not because of its speed but rather, just to try Linux Lite. (Your recommendation awhile back.)

Xfce is definitely lighter than Gnome or Ubuntu's flavour of Gnome (in terms of memory use). 2-2.5 GB on startup has noticeable performance issues when you only have 4 GB of RAM. Especially when up to 512 MB of that is used for graphics. MX Linux uses Xfce which uses only about 300 MB on startup leaving a lot more RAM for applications.

It's really weird that you'd find it slower. Perhaps you had a different mix of applications. Was it on the same PC hardware? One thing that could be happening is if you use a lot of Gnome-based programs. It may have to load certain runtimes in memory in order to run them which could amount to more than Xfce would use if it were running more native applications. I also think that Xfce is directly built on the GTK toolset. The Gnome desktop isn't. It's built on top of the Gnome libraries which are built using the GTK toolset.

As for Windows, I think you hit it on the nose. Originally it had Windows 7 which was a bit lighter than Windows 10, but it's more so that Windows becomes more and more bloated as time goes on. You can see this when you do a fresh install from a couple of years ago of Windows and then update it although that might just apply for systems with 4 GB or less of RAM. I notice that Windows also uses 2-2.5 GB of RAM on startup.

Of course, whether a system feels fast or slow is relative. Buster might find that Windows 10 on one of his old 4 GB systems is fine, for example. But it's not tolerable to me. My wife has an even older PC than mine (which is 11 years old now) and she's fine with Windows 10 because she has 8 GB of RAM and the SSD drive doesn't hurt.

I still have a soft spot for Linux Lite but Pop OS is nicer for me now. It's less distracting because of fewer options. That's what I need. I'm distracted enough nowadays. I suspect, but can't prove, that at some point I had COVID as the last year I've been suffering more from heart palpitations, temperature regulation and brain fog, all issues associated with long COVID.

That reminds me. It's totally off-topic but are you still having COVID symptoms, Bill? Or back to normal? How about you Buster?

[Jason]

Interesting that the desktops that most of the world uses are the same day after day.

Do you mean Windows-like desktops? I'd suggest they don't have much choice if they're using Windows. Btw, the Windows 11 interface is quite a bit different than Windows 10. I haven't delved into it deeply but it looks more like MacOS. The program bar is quite different from than usual Windows interfaces of the past. And Windows 7/8.x/10 are different from the previous version with the tiles and MS Store for those that use it.

[buster]

"are you still having COVID symptoms, Bill? Or back to normal? How about you Buster?"

I will never get back to normal. I have never been normal. Being normal is highly over rated.

(All symptoms gone.)