Nibodhika

You’re completely missing the point. Discord is a chat app, not a package manager, therefore it should NOT update things EVER. You’re complaining that discord tries to do something it shouldn’t, fails and somehow you seem to think that’s pacman’s fault. The “issue” doesn’t exist on flatpaks because discord probably checks if it’s installed via flatpak and runs an update using the flatpak command without your say so. The “solution” is to stop discord from trying to be “smart” and failing and let it be updated when pacman decides to. The idea of a package manager is to let it manage your packages, if you want self-updating apps you don’t need a package manager, and good luck with dependencies and overlapping libraries.

I have only ever had this issue with discord on arch. The issue you describe is not Arch specific and it’s not an issue. Using a package manager means using a program to manage your packages. Things can’t auto-upgrade, that breaks the point of a package manager. Whenever discord has an update, it will not fetch the update, but it tells me that an update can be downloaded. Of course, if you install discord through pacman, then pacman manages the update. As for the JSON file that’s a very hacky approach, discord shouldn’t outright fail to launch if there is an update. And in fact the Arch wiki says it has a flag to skip the version check completely: To disable the update check, add the line “SKIP_HOST_UPDATE”: true to ~/.config/discord/settings.json. If the file does not exist, create it and add the following: ~/.config/discord/settings.json { "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true } More info on wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord

What is the air branch? Discord has a package on pacman, so it should just get updated with your normal system update, there's no config or anything that could prevent that, pacman doesn't care. What JSON do you have to edit and why?

All of the things you mentioned are annoying level problems.

ATMs

Card payment should still work, ATMs are more of a footnote in today’s world. I can’t even remember the last time I used one. If I were to use one and it didn’t worked it would be annoying.

There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day.

And there are lots that don’t. Plus, wine has excellent support for old windows versions, I would be very surprised if something didn’t just worked. So there would be some downtime while people annoyingly set things up with wine.

A lot of POS devices too.

And a lot of POS don’t, the ones that do would have to change OS, an annoyance.

Almost all accounting is done on Windows.

The ones that don’t would receive lots of new clients, and the rest would leave clients annoyed while adapting.

The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense

I think you’re probably exaggerating the proportions, nearly 100% of the hardware that runs Windows runs Linux. Yes, there would be some chaos until things migrate, but there are alternatives that are reachable and usable.

Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked,

That’s an annoyance. It’s not just some phones, it’s absolutely every network connected device that is not a Windows or apple thing. If you Google something on your phone yo go through possibly 20 different Linux devices back and forth.

literally all of the internet just stops working

This is the big one, removing Linux menas breaking the internet (and most intranets). And it’s not breaking one thing or another, it’s breaking every single internet service, the ATMs in your windows example wouldn’t work, nor would any PoS, since they usually depend on inventory management and card connectivity.

And it’s not a “until people reinstall their system” deal, it’s breaking in an essentially unrepairable way. There’s a very high chance that outside of a very small subset of devices there’s just no alternative to Linux. That’s the difference, Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt, Linux disappearing is chaos without a foreseeable solution, 90% of electronics become e-waste.

Yup, that sounds like a good approach. I could even see people doing Pacman -> Flatpaks -> AUR and it would make sense to me.

What makes it confusing to you?

Your question is not Arch specific, it’s “should I use flatpaks?” And the answer in my opinion is probably no. Flatpaks are a good idea to isolate certain applications and to provide a uniform way of installing packages. So there might be some apps that are not available in your native package manager, but do provide flatpaks. For those cases flatpaks are probably preferred. But Arch based distros have the AUR, so there are a lot of apps that aren’t packaged for Arch that you can still get as a native package. Sure, using the AUR is risky and if you’re not on actual Arch things might break sporadically because of mismatched dependencies (although I think CachyOS is full parity of packages with Arch, so that’s maybe more of a Manjaro warning). But flatpaks are clunky, bloated, require annoying permissions to be set to do basic things, and require you to update two package managers to do a full system update. They are more appealing for systems where you don’t want to give users root access but still allow them to install programs, but for your own computer I have never seen the appeal.

Yes, that should work, but as someone who went through that phase before BTRFS was a thing keeping /home in a separate partition helps quite a lot, because then reinstalling the system is just a 15 min afair and you’re mostly back where you were before except some programs you might have installed that you will need to do so again.

The next logical step for me was to keep a list of those programs, so I could just run a single command and get all of them installed. That eventually evolved into convincing me to use Gentoo, since it has this concept baked into the system. But compiling everything wasn’t for me, so I went back to Arch where I stayed for over a decade. And even though I almost never broke my system again, I always had that fear. I even switched to BTRFS when it became more stable, but never had to use a snapshot, so can’t help you on how much it restores.

Recently I’ve migrated to NixOS, and I’m very happy with it. The appeal of it for me was how the system is declared, which is a very advanced version of my packages in a file that also includes configurations. This makes it so that making changes to your system requires you to modify those files and rebuild your system, and at boot time you can select from the previous generations of the system in case you broke something. In short, this makes your system unbreakable because worst case scenario you boot into the previous generation that worked and figure out what you did wrong.

That being said, it’s learning curve is very steep, but the payoff for those of us who like to tinker is huge. If you’re interested I recommend checking vimjoyer’s YouTube channel, he has several videos about it, and since you’re already used to running things in VMs to test it should be easy for you to get started. And the best thing is that once you’re done with configuring the VM, almost the exact same config would work on your main machine out of the box and give you the exact same system (the only caveat is that there’s one file that relates to hardware which would have to be different, but it gets auto-generated during the install process).

That reminds me of something I read once: If every copy of Windows were to magically disappear, some people would be annoyed. If every copy of Linux were to magically disappear, it would be utter chaos and absolutely nothing would work.

I know you’re not me because I’m definitely not going slowly hahaah

Hi, been on Linux for over 20 years now. Very recently (less than a month ago) I switched my personal system to NixOS, I also switched one of my servers to it. Some of my other systems are on Arch as that's what I was using before. My work computer is on Ubuntu as that is company issued. I liked Arch because of its simplicity and the AUR, but I missed the package sets from Gentoo, NixOS is excellent because it brings the package lists and also includes configuration on them. A pain to do the initial setup, but then you get reproducible systems very easily and most of the time you want your systems to be mostly the same.

I agree with this 100%, if you need Photoshop then you also need Windows or Mac, the things that Gimp/Krita can’t do are probably less than what you might lose by random bugs going this route. Most people who use Photoshop don’t need it though, and could do 100% of the things they do in either Gimp or Krita. But if your livelyhood is on the line, having a dedicated Windows partition or disk is way easier to maintain in the long run.

Not really, but this is a reply to most comments here about the video so without seeing the video and reading some of the other comments you are missing a lot of context. In the video Linus shows several different sites that recommend Pop, he even looks for recent sites written by people specifically because he got some bad comments about using listacle articles before. He also asks chatGPT, and while that’s not exactly reliable it is based on average messages online so it’s not fully random. Also, like I pointed out, the community we’re using to discuss this also lists is as recommended, which goes to show it’s not a fluke of the sites he used but that it is generally recommend broadly.

Tell me you didn’t even saw the video without telling me you didn’t even saw the video. But you want an extra one? This one, here’s the link to the pinned thread on this same community where the top 3 recommendations for beginner d’Ístria are Fedora, Mint and Pop: lemm.ee/post/37682729

Honestly, I think lots of people are hating on him just because. Pop is still highly recommended on a random Google search, and his reasons to pick it are legit. Plus he acknowledged that last time the issue was user error + unimaginable level of bad luck, and removing that there would be no reason for him not to use it. Also if you saw the WAN show he also installed Bazzite and Kubuntu on two other systems and got two other issues. As much as I want to say he did something bad like last time, this time I don’t see it, his issues are legit and to dismiss them because he’s using an “unstable” (that is the default and recommended) DE or because he chose a distro that is in the top recommendations on every site out there is disingenuous.

I know it’s not what you’re looking for because it might be overly complicated for someone getting started, but if you ever have the extra hardware (or can run a VM to play around) to give it a go I recommend you look into NixOS. Nix is very different from other OSs you might have used because you declare your system and it gets built, if you want to install a package you add it to your configuration rebuild the system and now the package is available in the new generation of your system, but the old one is still available and you can select it via boot menu. This sounds overly convoluted, but for someone with a PC that MUST ALWAYS work it’s unbeatable. You update the system and the new drivers broke the game you’re playing? Select previous generation of the system and carry on until you have time to figure it out. You installed a program and that broke something? Go to the previous generation keep on working and figure it out later. I’ve never been afraid of updating my system, but since switching to Nix knowing rolling back is not an easy option is nagging at the back of my head constantly. With all that being said, Nix is hard to get into, and this tip is unlikely to help someone getting started (I really think it’s better to get your toes wet on something more close to what you’re used to to avoid frustration). Nix requires learning a new language (which is very weird and not really that intuitive in certain things) and configuring your entire system with it. But the plus side is that once you’ve done it it’s done, and your entire system uses the same configuration format, and any hack quirks or random fixes you had to apply are there in code so you can’t forget about them when you reinstall the system or migrate to a new machine. This might not be helpful to you, but maybe it is to someone else.

Honestly, I think he’s right on that one. No tinkering means no tinkering, selecting a proton version to force to use the windows version of the game and passing command arguments is tinkering. That is the difference between gold and platinum in protondb, gold means it works with tinkering while platinum means works oob. L4D2 is marked as Gold, so protondb agrees that some tinkering is required, his complaint that a Valve game in a platform Valve is pushing should work without tinkering is perfectly valid.

Yup, it’s very clear there wasn’t a single person who understands about OSs in any of the proceedings for this law.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed, but I wonder how it affects embed systems, vending machines, etc, since all of them have OS in them. For Linux this can already be implemented by using groups for age so they can claim the OS already offers this and be done, then it’s up to the apps to query it and most apps wouldn’t need to so that’s that.