My experience testing Antergos

[GreyGeek]

I had heard about it on a Quidsup video and from a guy on Gab who was running it.
Burned the ISO to a 4GB USB stick and booted it up.
Did I ever tell you how much I hated Gnome? My dislike was renewed and strengthened.
Antergos is well constructed but the ISO comes with Gnome as the default.
I inserted a 16GB USB stick and installed Antergos to it selecting KDE as the DE and using Btrfs as the fs for /.

When I booted up I was disappointed. The @ and @home roots for Btrfs were not present. When running btrfs-find-root it pointed me at /var/lib/machines.

So, how do I get my preferred btrfs file system structure? One method is explained here.
http://blog.fabio.mancinelli.me/2012..._on_BTRFS.html

All of that in order to create @ and @home at the root of the btrfs file system, something Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Neon do automatically when you chose btrfs as the file system for / during the install.

Antergos did leave me a little going away present ... despite my careful avoidance of my sda @ sdc drives, on which my main installation resides .... it corrupted my boot loader. So, I had to chroot proc and run grub-update to recover it. For good measure I rolled back to my most recent snapshot. Everything came up fine and Antergos is just a bad memory.

[Rod J]

Did I ever tell you how much I hated Gnome?

Agreed!

But it's funny how people love Gnome and hate KDE/Plasma ... why? Beats me, I'm very much of the opposite opinion myself and probably most people here are too.

I liked Ubuntu back in the day before Unity came along but even then I felt Gnome had a "cobbled together" feel about it, especially with Compiz on top. KDE was a complete revelation to me the second time around (my first taste of Linux was with Mandrake/KDE around 2001 and I felt it was a bit too amateurish, especially the geeky documentation back then). KDE has improved so much since then.

[jpenguin]

I used Manjaro/KDE & Apricity/Cinnamon for a while

[GreyGeek]

In order of most use:
Kubuntu
SuSE
Neon
The rest were used a year or less
Mandriva
PCLinuxOS
Mepis
Mandrake
Kanotix
KNOPPIX
and a handful I don't remember because I tried them for a day or an hour, like I did Antergos, and dismissed them.

[jpenguin]

My list has most of the too. Plus: Funtoo, VidaLinux, Lycoris, Peanut Linux & Gobo Linux among others

[claydoh]

My list has most of the too. Plus: Funtoo, VidaLinux, Lycoris, Peanut Linux & Gobo Linux among others

I was part of the Lycoris community, back in the day. Heck, I was there near its beginning when it had the ridiculous name of Redmondlinux, and left when Mandrake, err Mandriva bought the distro for some reason. Way back in those days, a simple, single-cd installer with only one program for each purpose was quite the novel idea, and one I quite liked.

[oshunluvr]

I can't even remember how many I've installed over the years. I've been using Linux regularly since IBM dropped support for the non-commercial version of OS2/Warp - which would have been 1996-97.

My list in order of longest use:

Kubuntu (9.04 to 16.04)
PCLinuxOS
Centos (strickly at work, mostly version 3)
Mandrake/Mandriva
KDEneon
Bodhi (on an HP Mini)
OpenSUSE

Those that I can remember trying in no particular order:

Sayabon
Fedora
Ubuntu (Gnome 2)
Ubuntu (Unity)
Lubuntu
Xubuntu
Arch (never actually got to a desktop - this was forever ago )

Currently installed on my Desktop:

KDEneon User Edition (daily driver)
KDEneon Dev Edition
Kubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 16.04
Manjaro (both free and non-free versions)

Pending installation:

Kubuntu 18.04

I'm sure there's a couple I forgot. Based on my experience, if I decided I needed to leave the *buntu world, I would go to Manjaro and learn Arch. I use openSUSE for a year but the third or forth time I descended into "RPM hell" I went looking and found Kubuntu. I really don't care what anybody says, RPM packaging sucks heinie.

[Bings]

Bar a brief dalliance with red hat about 20 years ago. I started with Ubuntu. Moved to Xubuntu after the amazon thing and moved to Kubuntu after seeing videos of the Plasma desktop. I used Trisquel for a short while because it was the only thing that would work. until I realised I'd plugged my hard drive into the wrong SATA port . I've also used Ubuntu Studio on the side. Manjaro won't work for me because of my graphics card, it will only work with nomodeset on most stuff I've played with but Manjaro it doesn't like at all. I am guessing that will be the same with all Arch. I'll try stuff in VM and on USB sometimes but I don't switch too often.

[oshunluvr]

What graphics card? Off-topic, but curious..

[Bings]

Radeon 7870

[jpenguin]

I remember when I first install Mandrake on a PPC iMac DV+, the default desktop was way to much for my ATI Rage Pro 128

[GreyGeek]

I can't even remember how many I've installed over the years. I've been using Linux regularly since IBM dropped support for the non-commercial version of OS2/Warp - which would have been 1996-97....
I really don't care what anybody says, RPM packaging sucks heinie.

RPM indeed! While running Knoppix I installed an RPM package that, unkowningly, was for KDE 3.x, and suddennly the installer said "removing 324 packages", then it proceeded to install KDE 3.y. I was stunned. Thought the install was toast. When I rebooted KDE 3.y came up beautifully. A few days later I installed another package but it was for KDE 3.x. I was presented with "uninstalled 300+ packages" followed by an install announcement about 300+ packages, but didn't get alarmed. When I rebooted Knoppix was trash. I had tried a distro that used dkpk but didn't give it much thought until I learned it in order to use Kubuntu. IMO, the difference between RPM and Dpkg is like night and day. That's the reason why I will only use distros that use dpkg.

Back in the mid 1990's I was running Win3.11FWG but was experiencing crashes which affected my productivity. I installed OS/2 and then Win3.11FWG in its DOS Box. Somehow, OS/2 kept it working (probably silent reboots to safe points). I loved OS/2.
In Dec of 1997 I bought a Sony VAIO desktop that came with Win95 installed. It also had something called "Sony Medi-Kit" running in the background. That box crashed at least once every half hour, or more. I got into the habit of saving my code (Ctrl+S) at the end of each line of code, or at least a paragraph. Between Jan 1 and May 1 of 1998 I had to reinstall Win95 FIVE times. I got sick of it and decided to reinstall OS/2 and Win3.11FWG. But, I had given away my OS/2 so I went to Barns & Nobel to get another copy. While there I perused the Computer rows (at least 6 with 5 shelves on each row) and noticed a curiosity - "Learn Linux in 24 Hours" by Bill Brush. Never heard of Linux. Speed read the book and noticed a CDROM in the back which had RedHat 5.0 on its lable. Wow! A $25 paper back that came with a free OS! What did I have to lose?

I installed it by overwriting Win95 and then took my pick of at least two dozen DE's. I picked the one which looked and worked most like Win95. My Sony never crashed once. In September I was browsing PC Magazine and noticed an ad for SuSE 5.3 which featured something called "KDE 1.0 beta". From the picture gallery I thought they had inadvertently used Win95 and Win3.11 pics. I installed it and it, too, ran on that Sony perfectly. SuSE was not free. I paied $20 for each release. Over the period of 5 years that I used it I sent WindRiver 20 payments. Money well spent. Then Novell bought SuSE and it became SUSE and openSUSE. When Novell's CEO stood on the stage with Ballmer and claimed that Linux was stealing Microsoft's IP and agreed to pay licenses for SUSE's use I went looking for another distro.

[jpenguin]

I honestly never had that bad of an experience with RPM- in my first virtualized peanut Linux or my first distribution on hardware, yellowdoglinux. Those were both around 2000

[Snowhog]

It really does depend on ones mindset and skills; IMO. I also think that how one 'thinks' has a big impact on how a particular Linux implementation is perceived (by that user). When I first ventured in to Linux (Debian), I found it (personally) extremely hard to get my head around. In fact, I abandoned it and stayed with Windows. About two years; maybe a tad less; I tried Linux again, this time with Kubuntu. With the combination of Kubuntu and this Forum, I ended up dropping Windows completely in favor of Kubuntu Linux and I haven't looked back since.

[dequire]

It really does depend on ones mindset and skills; IMO. I also think that how one 'thinks' has a big impact on how a particular Linux implementation is perceived (by that user). When I first ventured in to Linux (Debian), I found it (personally) extremely hard to get my head around. In fact, I abandoned it and stayed with Windows. About two years; maybe a tad less; I tried Linux again, this time with Kubuntu. With the combination of Kubuntu and this Forum, I ended up dropping Windows completely in favor of Kubuntu Linux and I haven't looked back since.

Ahhh a true Tux love story. Makes meh tear up a little!