As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.
So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.
I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.
I’m genuinely curious what you consider to be the “Arch experience”, other than pacman.
Install process/freedom of choice for more things (It’s more of a blank slate)
This probably does not relate too much to arch, but on Debian I found it extremely annoying to be unable to use reboot and shutdown from terminal. That was the dealbreaker for me.
Hmm, why are you not able to shutdown/reboot from the terminal? I don’t have any Debian systems running at the moment (other than Proxmox), but I’ve used Debian for over a decade and never had any issue using the terminal for power management functions (Proxmox included).
Sorry for the late reply, I also did not have a Debian system running. Installed it on an old laptop I had lying around to find the error. Seems like its due to Debian changing something around debian 10. Its still possible with systemctl reboot.
Ah, gotcha. I think that’s just due to /sbin not being included in the PATH environmental variable for non-root users. Running
sudo <command>will work in those cases.Maybe try this:
shutdown -P now-P argument is for poweroff, there is probably one for reboot.
You must be root to use this command.
systemctl poweroffsystemctl rebootOn Debian, you have to be root or a sudoer. Those commands are there, just not in the path of regular users.
Use
sudo reboot