𝕛𝕨𝕞-𝕕𝕖𝕧

i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.

arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.

i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.

i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.

when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… it’s kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.

sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.

i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.

arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.

one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.

granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.

idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…

edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.

it seems like a generated image possibly which is why the subtle styling is inconsistent (not that it matters).

i don’t hate the non-shadow vs shadow effect tho… maybe just windows could be shadowed? or maybe the shadow could be like ellipses and indicate that something opens a dialog/new thing instead of a single file?