The Bone Yard
Moving to Ubuntu
Why and how I switched my primary working distribution
I haven't posted anything new in the last few days, and the reason for the pause is that I have transitioned the distribution installed on my primary laptop from Arch to Ubuntu. What precipitated the change? Well, I was having difficulty with the Dell monitor I attach to my laptop when working at my home desk. The monitor would, at random, power cycle itself, which would wreak havoc with the graphics rendering on my laptop screen, as the display manager continuously switched between 1 and 2 outputs. Being that my laptop is a newer Skylake model, and that there are a number of bug reports circulating concerning recent kernel versions running with Intel graphics, I assumed that a recent package update from the Arch repos had introduced a change that was behind this flaky monitor handling. However, after experimenting with older kernel builds, and troubleshooting with other non-linux laptops, it became clear that the monitor itself was malfunctioning.
In the end, the monitor problems were not due to an Arch software upgrade, but nevertheless, the situation led me to act on an idea that had been germinating in my mind for a while now. My idea is that I'm finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate the degree of software change/environment churn that comes along with a "bleeding edge" distribution such as Arch Linux. With very exceptions, I'm tending to now value stability over feature evolution in most of the major applications that I use. So, from that vantage point, the decision I needed to make was identifying a distribution that had a deliberately slower release schedule, but was still as well-maintained and richly documented as Arch.
At the start, I looked into Fedoora, but for whatever reason, I could not complete a successful installation using the Fedora graphical installer. Having experience bootstrapping installations without any graphic tool, I then turned to attempting a console based installation using DNF (Fedora's package manager), but without success. Actually, I found that even the Fedora live image was not operating very well at all on my new laptop, and would freeze up with alarming frequency. I don't have a good sense what was behind these issues, but it did prompt me to avoid using Fedora, at lease with this laptop for the time being. Instead, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
What are my impressions of Ubuntu a week into using it? So far so good, I'd say. I think it's a fair assessment that Ubuntu has a much more comprehensive selection of packages in their repositories than Arch, even accounting for Arch's AUR user repo. This should come as no surprise, given the much larger usage share that Ubuntu has in the linux ecosystem.
From a package management perspective, I'm beginning to adapt to using aptitude and the various other satellite package tools. It's difficult at this point to compare it, either favorably or unfavorably, to Arch's pacman utility. There are graphical front ends for apt, which is lacking for Arch's pacman, at least as far as I know. This kind of thing might appeal to one who has an aversion to working in the console, but it doesn't much matter to me.
I initially tried to use the Ubuntu graphical-based installation tools, but with a minimal installation footprint in mind, I found that the main installer tool lacked the precision and control I want, in terms of selecting what gets installed. I also gave the net installer a shot, but oddly I discovered that the maintainers of the net installer didn't create a UEFI-based image for it, meaning that it was a much more circuitous route to setup a UEFI boot process using the net installer. Ultimately I was able to piece together a terminal based installation procedure, thanks to the very nice Debian debootstrap tool. Here is a link to the document I wrote up outlining my steps for a minimal Ubuntu installation by way of debootstrap.
In the area of documentation, I find it ironic that in a sense, Ubuntu's popularity actually seems to make it too well documented. What I mean by that is, when attempting to Google search an aspect of troubleshooting, configuring etc., one is inundated by an ocean of blog posts, forum threads, syndicated articles, and various other items. In Arch, I found that their very nicely curated wiki entries tended to be among the very top items in a web search. There doesn't appear to be such an arrangement with Ubuntu, perhaps just by happenstance, how the search engines index the content, how people categorize their writing, or whatever.
Aside from these observations, I'm still attuning myself to using Ubuntu, so it may take a while to see if I really prefer a distribution using a regularly scheduled release model versus a rolling release model. I wouldn't close the book on Arch just yet; it's entirely possible I could eventually return to it. As for recommending Arch, I still would point to it as a strong distribution that is very well suited to those looking to learn about the inner workings of Linux (stripping away layers of configuration, management, etc.), or those who want to stay tightly in sync with the development cycle of upstream packages. I'd encourage you to try out Arch in a VM, and you'll see it is a minimal but intuitive and flexible approach to Linux.