Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?
Last week I penned a cheesy fake relationship breakup letter to Ubuntu, my Linux distribution of choice for the last 15 years or so. It had well and truly delivered on its promise of a painless Linux desktop for most of that time, but the most recent upgrades had rendered it slow and bloated, with applications taking minutes to load and USB peripherals such as my film scanner mysteriously stopping working. I don’t have to look far to identify the point at which they adopted Snap packages as the moment when it all went wrong. I’d reached the point at which I knew our ways must part, and it was time to look for another distro.
My daily driver is a middle-aged Dell laptop, it’s about five years old but because I invested in the highest spec I could at the time, with an i7 of the day and 16 gigabytes of memory it’s still a contender. My problem when changing distros is that this machine is my livelihood, I can’t afford for anything to go wrong with it and any changeover has to be fast. I thus had to select a distro for which the installation is painless, the learning curve is minimal, and which doesn’t have too many neckbeard quirks. This is for earning a living, not messing about with.