Saying bye to Debian in general

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

I am moving permanently to Manjaro MATE, since I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of Canonical, willy-nilly, removing programs from the repos that I need.

I tried to compile GTK2 on 19.04, which I needed, and returned error after error. I'm no coder, and couldn't correct a script error.

Then, I dual-booted with Manjaro MATE. I tried building Aqualung, a gapless music player that I NEED, and it worked like a charm. Installing source code does take longer, but I have a program which is customized for my system.

Sorry, Wimpy. I will contribute monetarily to fund further MATE development, but I'm sick of Canonical.

#2

I have used Manjaro Mate a lot and can offer the the following observation

Good point

A truly enormous repo of applications (the Arch repos) massively bigger than any Debian repo. Also, if you enable the AUR repos, several versions of the same aplications are available.

Bad point

Because it is constantly upgrading on a rolling distro model basis, things can break unexpextedly. This happens much less often than it used to and certainly far less than Vanilla Arch. But, it does still happen more frequently than with any Debian based distro. Also, precisely because you have access to so many application, this allows you to install stuff that is not stable and can break your system in ways that you are given no warning about.

Personally speaking, I like it a lot. But, it is important to be clear about what it is and is not in terms of stability.

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#3

I'm well aware of Arch distros, especially Arch itself, being broken with an ill-advised upgrade. It is also true that the Manjaro devs do check out just about all the files they upload to their standard repos. I certainly understand the very real risk problem with the AUR, which is not curated. I, so far, have been fine with the few apps I have installed from the AUR. The most-common apps are pretty safe.

I'm going to see how it goes. If it borks itself regularly, I'll go back to UM.

Again, I'm still supporting MATE development.

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#4

I also departed to Manjaro last month, but the KDE edition.

Granted, I spent considerable time customising KDE so it feels familiar to my traditional GNOME 2 inspired workflow. In the process, I switched to Qt apps and tweaked the toolbars so it's comfortably familiar, yet different. This wasn't a migration that happened over night. :slight_smile:

I was actually surprised the repositories (and AUR) had everything I needed. Even Wi-Fi drivers that I had to manually compile after kernel updates in Ubuntu. Only one gotcha... I ran into an optional dependency (AUR) issue for spotify (AUR), but I found a solution. :+1: The AUR will always carry that risk.

I did try Arch from scratch last year... while I got a working MATE desktop, it was the NVIDIA driver and kernel updates that "broke" the graphical part of the system too much. :confused: I like that Manjaro (being based on Arch) has a layer of testing, and so far, it's been stable for me, a power user kind of user.

My 3 reasons for switching...
  • Something different to GTK-based desktops.
    • I loved GTK2 (16.04) so much that differences lost features in GTK3 feel foreign. :alien:
    • Not sure on GNOME's development of GTK, which MATE is based on.
  • Continued loss of faith in Canonical over the years.
    • For example, Canonical wanted to drop i386 libs. They reverted their decision for now :+1: It was the intent/communication in the first place that upsets me. :-1:
    • Not a supporter of snap technology.
  • 16.04 LTS was getting old.
    • I was clinging onto 16.04 LTS, and apps were becoming outdated due to older dependencies.
    • I couldn't use my 4K display, as this version is based on GTK2.

I will still be around, as I continue to develop Ubuntu MATE things. I'd say I stepped farther away from Ubuntu, since I would happily pick up a GParted Live CD, which is based on Debian.

MATE is still a fine desktop environment. Ubuntu MATE is just one implementation of it. :slight_smile:

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