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Priyab Dash

I really like to use debian , I use raspbian but the biggest problem I have had is the issue of drivers out of box which is better in Ubuntu than debian. But I think that is something better to check out now

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rehman000 profile image
Rehman Arshad • Edited

If you want to check out something new. I reccomend manjaro Linux, it's basically Arch but without the hassle. I used Manjaro Linux with KDE. The support community is undoubtedly smaller than ubuntu, but I found customizing KDE much more easier than Gnome 3. I also really liked using the AUR (Arch User Repository) throw a stone at any software you'd want and odds are the community has already taken the task of compiling the source code and has executable binaries ready to use. Unity game engine? Check. Steam? Check. Pacman - the Arch based package manager is pretty nice, not like I had any issue with apt-get, aside from occasionally having to add a ppa certificate for some other repository. My only issue with ubuntu is it has older packages, that aren't maintained very well, such as node.js (which if I recall correctly is like on version 3 on ubuntu's repository) its beyond depreciated. I think the current version LTS version for node.js is like 10? Again you could just download the .deb installation file from the Node website or install the repository by adding a ppa certificate to apt get via the command line it only takes a few seconds to google it, but it just bothers me a little One thing I like specifically about manjaro is that you can actually use ubuntu's snaps in manjaro as well. I'm not the hugest fan of snaps but you have more of a choice on how you can install certain software. I just like having more options. One thing to note. In my experience drivers were not an issue. However if you have an nvidia gpu (like I did), and want to get the proprietary drivers it may be a little annoying to find, but I recall finding it somewhere in settings. The open source drivers are good enough, for most use cases but if you ever need to run any recording software just make sure to go into settings and make sure your default rendering method isn't set to OpenGL 2.0. As for audio. I encountered no such issues but your millage may vary.

 
oloryn profile image
Ben Coleman • Edited

I take it that it's been awhile since you actually looked at nodejs versions on current Ubuntu Server repos? Ubuntu Server 20.04 has nodejs version 10.19.0, 18.04 had 8.10.0, and 16.04 had 4.2.6. 20.04 is still a bit behind, as the current nodejs is at 14.4.0. Given that Debian testing is using nodejs 10.21.0, and Sid is using 12.18.0, the nodejs version situation on Ubuntu isn't as bad as you imply.

 
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Rehman Arshad

I was not using ubuntu server, sorry my mistake. I was using ubuntu 18.04 LTS for my laptop. The issue most likely has been resolved last I checked. I'll take this as an opportunity to expand my knowledge are there any differences between repositories from ubuntu and ubuntu server? I haven't tried out ubuntu server yet. My bad.

 
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Ben Coleman

No, they both draw from the same repositories. I specified Server because that's what I was checking (between work and my personal servers, I've got servers running on all 3 versions (16.04, 18.04, and 20.04)).

I note that the nodejs package is in the Universe repo, which is essentially community-supported, as opposed to the Main repo, which is directly supported by the Ubuntu team. I wouldn't be surprised if the nodejs package is generally pulled from Debian stable or testing at the time of release (given that 20.04 has 10.19.0, and the current Debian stable and testing both have 10.21.0).

 
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Rehman Arshad • Edited

Could it have been because I was using WSL (Windows Sub System for Linux) on my partition? That is a whole other can of worms. Honestly, I have no idea. I don't even remember if it was on my windows partition with WSL or the Ubuntu partition. Most likely it was WSL.

 
oloryn profile image
Ben Coleman

No. AFAIK, the WSL version and the normal Ubuntu use the same repositories. That looks like you're using Ubuntu 18.04. 2 years ago when it was released, 8.10.0 probably wasn't the latest, but it probably wouldn't have been obsolete.