I’m trying to be the devil’s advocate here: one could say that one is an innocent “life” while the other is not.

Weird, that used to work last I used Debian based with KDE

It was Debian with xfce.

For the time being, yes

Wasn’t this the OS of freedom? Hmmm

But you don’t, so you shouldn’t try to install stuff manually

I tried to install ISO image writer on Ubuntu, on my laptop. Went straight to the package manager, no terminal bullshit, downloaded it, open button is greyed out. Fantastic. Stable version btw. Solved by uninstalling and installing another version available on the manager. Linux is literally problems after problems after problems.

install an APK

Like, download the APK, enable Unknown sources, tap on the icon? I don’t use android since 2017 but i’m pretty sure is the same, isn’t it? Not an happy comparison.

When i want to uninstall and app and all the dependencies connected to it (autoremove, right?) is Linux able to tell if some of those dependencies are necessary for other apps and “whitelist” them?

I don’t know man, i don’t care anymore. It worked in Ubuntu, it didn’t on Debian.

Yeah, totally not for me, for now. I couldn’t resist in that hell for more than 3 days.

Mistake number 1, Debian is not beginner friendly.

If i got a beginner friendly distro how will i learn how to use linux properly?

if it’s not in the package manager it’s too advanced for you for the time being

So if an app is not a package manager i’m fucked?

You could have also double clicked the Deb file

I tried, it did nothing, i went online to search for a solution.

which you could manually install

This is mental. This shouldn’t be a thing even for pros. I need 15 minutes to install an app? Sorry i won’t go out this evening, i need to install an app and god knows what can happen.

You might be thinking this is stupid

Well, yes, of course. Also i read some contradictions in your post: the installer only installs what is supposed to, but it needs dependencies to actually make the app usable. But that’s what package managers do, right? Different apps could use the same libraries but also different ones, so the system could become bloated nonetheless. I don’t see how is this beneficial for the user.

the majority of issues you encountered were self-imposed.

How? I’ve installed Debian with KDE, downloaded the .deb from steam website, learnt to install that using sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb, opened the app and i’ve been welcomed with a text inviting me to press enter to continue, pretty simple. The program downloaded stuff, steam is ready now. Not bad. Repeated the exact same thing on Debian with xfce, that apparently doesn’t come with a software installer, nothing works. An alert says i need to download dependencies (i know dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies). Where’s the “enter to continue”? How is this my fault??

I won’t choose any distro. I chose to stick with windows. I spent 1,5 hours setting EVERYTHING UP. Apps, accounts, settings, everything. I spent the exact same trying to figure out why the fuck steam is not automatically downloading dependencies as it did on my laptop and didn’t even get an answer.

I’ve never, ever got a virus on any of my pcs. I grew up with internet, since the ADSL days, i know my shit.

Some of the apps i use are very important to me and some of them don’t have packages so i had to rely on commands in the terminal.

I was not expecting any help actually. The amount of problems i encountered is too much. The past 3 days dealing with linux have been extremely stressful. No wonder linux is still super niche. I can fairly say that i’ve been reckless going for non beginners distros but linux has problems, huge problems.

Why?

I’ve used win11 and didn’t like it. Time’s ticking.

One is Debian based and the other in Arch based. Debian uses apt, Arch uses pacman. Debian has a slower release cycle to ensure compatibility while Arch has a faster release cycle to ensure the latest versions of things are available. Like these there are thousands of small differences between any two distros. It’s mostly philosophical, so just pick something beginner friendly and stick with it until you find a reason to switch.

Yada, yada, yada.

They’re not, they’re different. Doing stuff on Windows is also complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing, excepts you’ve had years of experience, in a few years Linux will feel easy and Windows complicated.

Things to do to install an app on Windows: download the exe, double click on the icon, follow the instructions, done. Things to do to install an app on Linux: check the package manager, if the app is not there go on their website, cross your fingers, copy and paste x lines in the terminal, cross your fingers (had problems with windscribe, enpass, spotify), wget command not found, install wget, retry, cross your fingers one last time, done (?).

if you switch distros every time you run into something you don’t understand you’re going to run out of distros fairly quickly

Man, there are hundreds (nonsense) distros out there, i need something like 3 lives to try them all.

Why not? AFAIK RetroArch should have cross compatible saves.

Apparently not. I’ve saved a copy of the saves folder and simply pasted it in the retroarch folder on linux but the game doesn’t read anything.

That’s weird, I don’t remember last time KDE crashed, but then again I’m not using Manjaro so maybe the current version there is broken? What was the error? Did you submitted a bug report? That might be an important finding.

There were no errors. Screen went black and then everything was reset.

If you had started with Ubuntu you might not had either of those problems

This is actually fun: i have Ubuntu Budgie on my laptop and i was trying to create a bootable win10 on my pendrive with ventoy given that jesus christ woeusb is super complicated to install with all those manual dependencies installs and woeusb-ng gives problem with python. Installed ventoy, copied the iso, pasted it, nothing shows up in the drive. Copied the iso again, pasted it again, file already existing. ???. I’ve extracted the drive, plugged it back in, nothing. Extracted it again, plugged it in on my desktop, iso is actually there. Wtf is wrong with linux?

Yeah, i think that’s it for me for now. Can’t create a simple shortcut to an .appimage in two steps. I need to manually look for the icon. Going back to windows 10 until they discontinue it. It’s been a pleasure (not)

So, this is why people don’t like recommending Manjaro. It’s ArchLinux with a coat of paint, but still relies on Arch’s infrastructure for the AUR.

I have another question about this. I’ve tried Arch but realized was too much so i’ve chosen Manjaro because i thought i could learn about linux faster than using another beginner friendly distro. Let’s say for example i decide to hop on Mint. Would that be that easy that i don’t learn anything important?

I promise that is my experience in the last 2 days. Frustrating. I’ll try to stick with linux for the rest of the week and see how it goes.

Is it wise to go for arch to try linux for the first time?