Linux is Linux.

We should send all those people, pages and guides suggesting distros to hell.

And then instead we suggest update-schemes (fixed, rolling, slow-roll), package managers and Desktop environments. People with enough brain cells to start a computer are then absolutely able to chose a distro fitting them based on that. Everything else coming with a distro is just themeing/branding anyway…

(and just for the use statistic: Archlinux, Opensuse (Leap and Kalpa), Debian here…)

I’ve been using Arch and Manjaro for couple years each and in my experience they both break regularly. But, for some weird reason, Arch Linux is praised, when Manjaro is shamed upon.

No, there is not some weird reason but actual very good ones.

Things can break on a bleeding edge update scheme. That’s to be expected from time to time. But the questions are “why did it break” and “what is done to fix it”.

If something breaks on Archlinux it’s because of some new package with a issue that escaped testing. Then the fix come out as fast as possible (often within minutes even, but let’s assume hours as those things need to move through mirrors first…).

If something breaks on Manjaro it’s either because of the exact same reason as above, but 2 weeks later. Because Manjaro keeps back updates for two weeks “for stability reasons”, yet doesn’t do anything in those 2 weeks. So they just add the same problem later, completely defeating the argumant about stability. Oh, and fixes are of course kept back for 2 weeks, too, because… reasons.

Or it breaks because they fucked up their internal QA. For example by letting their certificates expire again and again and again and again… of by screwing up their very own pacman-wrapper and then ddos’ing the AUR for all users, not only Manjaro ones.

Or -speaking about the AUR- it breaks because they give their users full access to the Arch User Repository (without any warnings about user content being less reliable and used at your own risk) pre-installed. Also they do it on a system generally out-of-date because it lags 2 weeks behind. Which is not what AUR packages are build for (they assume up-to-date systems) and is a straight path to dependency hell and breakings… not because something went wrong but because the whole concept of an out-of-date system not running their own also 2-weeks behind version onf the AUR is idiotic. On the “plus” side they have an easy fix: blame the user, because he should obviously know that an pre-installed part of Manjaro is conceptionally flawed and shouldn’t be trusted.

Right decision but for the wrong reason.

with Apple dominating Europe…

Your own map diagrees, with 100% of the picked examples from Europe having Samsung as market leader.

Stick to a specific distro and train your staff

Linux is Linux. Train your staff to properly use one and they can use them all. “Distro” is just a fancy word for “which package manager and update cycle to we chose and what logo do we put on our pre-installed wallpaper”.

Yes, I actually just use Wine with a default prefix and pray it works. If it doesn’t (rarely) then the game gets his own prefix to tweak the settings.

you didn’t say what file system your /boot partition was using, so I don’t want to guess

It’s actually easy to guess. There is exactly one filesystem UEFI has to support by its specification, everything else is optional… so unless you produce for Apple -because they demand apfs support for their hardware- no vendor actually cares to implement anything but FAT.

When you say system drive this will also have your efi system partition (usually FAT-formated as that’s the only standard all UEFI implementations support), maybe also a swap partition (if not using a swap file instead) etc… so it’s not just copiying the btrfs partition your system sits on.

Yes clonezilla will keep the same UUID when cloning (and I assume your fstab properly uses UUIDs to identify drivees). In fact clonezilla uses different tools depending on filesystem and data… on the lowest level (so for example on unlocked encrypted data it can’t handle otherwise) clonezilla is really just using dd to clone everything. So cloning your disk with clonezilla, then later expanding the btrfs partition to use up the free space works is an option

But on the other hand just creating a few new partitions, then copying all data might be faster. And editing /etc/fstab with the new UUIDs while keeping everything else is no rocket science either.

The best thing: Just pick a method and do it. It’s not like you can screw up it up as long if your are not stupid and accidently clone your empty new drive to your old one instead…

misinformation != desinformation

Both exist plenty…

Btrfs can mostly fo everything you would normaly use LVN or raid for natively.

Btrfs raid0 lets you combine any number of differently sized drives into one (just without the speed boost of traditional raid0 because with flexible drive sizes data is not symmetrical striped). And btrfs raid1 keeps every data duplicated, again with flexible number and sizes of drive (also with metadata on every drive).

The sytemd hooks (instead of the traditional busybox ones) then manage the one other task you use LVM for: unlocking multiple partitons (for example multiple raid partitons and swap) with just one password. Because the systemd encrypt function tries unlooking all luks partitions it finds with the first password provided and only asks for passwords for each partition if that doesn’t work.

PS: btrfs subvolumes are already flexible in size and don’t need predefined sizes. So the only things that need to be created separately are non-btrfs stuff like the efi system partition or a physical swap (which you can also skip by using a swap file instead of a partition).

BTRFS raid on LUKS-encrypted devices (no LVM, all unlocked with one password via SystemD encrypt hooks).

The main trash you accumulate are config files in you home directory because they stay after the package is uninstalled. And they just sit there not hurting anybody.

Which is a good point to remind people to install pacman-contrib and make running pacdiff regularly a habit…

Which btw is the reason many people ended up with Archlinux… after the x-th time looking up some configuration issues on another distro and landing there.

I think it’s not a newbie but a general user issue. I have learned to recognize the linux newbies for whom Arch is a good fit over time… just by watching which people distro hop until landing with Archlinux.

PS: And among the typical distro hoppers is really a big chunk of them… because for a lot of them distro hopping is just a symptom of wanting to make the mandatory big system upgrades every few years at best worth it by trying something new. Those should actually get a rolling distro as a recommendation much earlier.

Yes, you are missing the fact that it’s mostly not people making Archlinux their personality, but people making meme’ing about “Archlinux users” their personality. For the vast majority it’s just an OS.

They are written but don’t replace something in the read-only OS. They are just overlayed, so once removed the original is still there. How they do it differs. There are actual overlay filesystems for the job, or some use btrfs where all subvolumes behave mostly like virtual partitions (and copies of a subvolume only take space for changes of the original).

An immutable OS is fixed and mounted non-writable. Every update you get, every program you install is handled on top of it via containers or filesystem overlays so the underlying OS is untouched. Basically the same concept you know from smartphones or other devices with a “reset to factory settings” function. No matter how hard you screw up your system, you can always reset to the base OS, either by granulary deactivating things installed on top, or by a reset to the working base OS.

Ventoy and…

Clonezilla, (custom) ArchISO, Tails

the stuff you might need to safe other people’s PCs sigh …

HBCD_PE, Windows 11

If I hadn’t included those in my ArchISO already I would probably add…

one of the usual Rescue ISOs, GParted Live.

Bonus points for Ventoy’s ISO partiiton doubling as simple storage.

PS: Thanks for the reminder to update some of them again.

Yes, time consuming. But it’s still working hardware, not a now useless, now unrepairable paper weight…

Which is the definiton of “bricked” although people nowadays start to use the term inflationary.