Moving towards NetworkManager

Ralf Mardorf silver.bullet at zoho.com
Fri Jul 29 17:18:35 UTC 2016


On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 15:33:48 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
>If you want to manage your own OS and desktop in detail, then a
>highly-automated, highly-integrated distro and desktop such as Ubuntu
>& Unity are not good choices for you, IMHO.

PS:

Indeed, but Ubuntu provides relatively minimalist install media too.
Since you mentioned Arch and I'm an Arch user, there's one big
difference between a minimalist Ubuntu install and an Arch install.

The policy of Ubuntu is, that if you install a package that contains a
service, then it gets enabled. The Arch policy is that the user has to
enable desired services on her own.

There are exceptions on Arch, e.g. if upstream provides
an /etc/xdg/autostart/ file, then e.g. parcellite could auto-start in a
way you might dislike, too.

Anyway, if you e.g have the need to install smartmontools, because you
need smartctl, e.g. to find out if something wakes up your green hard
disk drive, then Ubuntu does enable smartd, while Arch never ever
would do so. So if nothing ever has woken up your green hard disk
drive, then smartd will do.

Résumé, you need to know the policy of the distro you are using to
avoid trouble. Ubuntu by default e.g. installs recommended
dependencies, but doesn't install suggested dependencies, other
distros just care about hard dependencies and mentions the optional
dependencies, but they don't automatically install them, e.g. Arch.

Ubuntu is a user-friendly distro and Arch is _not_ user-friendly, it#s
user-centric.

Another thing to consider is, that some distros, e.g. Arch are
rolling releases. It's not comparable with a pseudo rolling-release,
such as e.g. Debian Sid, aka testing. Arch is stable and consequently
following upstream, but it requires users to care about what's going on
and to edit something, if transitions happen. So, if somebody needs a
LTS, then Ubuntu does provide it. A distro such as Arch is not
unstable, but the features of the software could change much.

Regards,
Ralf






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