I did it, I jumped ship from Ubuntu to Antergos and I honestly can’t see myself going back. Here’s some thoughts on that.
Why I switched
There’s many reasons for my switch, but the main one has been stability. Ubuntu has been getting more problem-filled with every new release for me so I had enough. Not only that, but due to it being dependent on GNOME packages, stuff was being stripped away too and it’s just a mess now. Some applications have normal title-bars, some have GNOME’s new styling with everything sodding hidden and it’s just all mashed together.
Audacity would constantly screw up and just skip over audio while trying to record or playback, or just flat out not work.
Multiple games wouldn’t give me audio until I killed PulseAudio and reloaded it or did other trickery. It was becoming a nuisance, especially when I want to livestream and “oh sorry guys, let me fix my audio, fuc…”.
It seems Ubuntu has a lot of problems with their setup of PulseAudio. I don’t know what they’re doing to it, but they’re murdering the poor thing.
Antergos, I choose you!
If Antergos is anything, it’s like walking in heavy rain without a coat and — suddenly the clouds part and the almighty sun is shining down on you to make everything better. Something like this essentially (thanks Samsai):
I’mdefinitely probably not overselling it — okay maybe a little.
I adore the Arch User Repository (AUR) and have found it so incredibly useful for multiple applications I use on a daily basis, especially when those same applications on Ubuntu could be out of date for weeks and months. The brand new Minecraft launcher was in it the day it was release by the official developers, the itch.io app is in it, everything I need is right there and tested by tons of people. It’s essentially a far better PPA-like system. It’s easier to understand too, thanks to a much clearer layout on the actual website.
Just don't outright trust everything on the AUR, make sure you read a few comments before installing a random package. I'm sure you're all smart enough to know to do that anyway.
Getting used to KDE after being on GNOME or GNOME-like desktops for many years has been a challenge by itself, but wow, it’s actually a lot nicer. Things aren’t hidden away where I don’t expect them to be, if I want something it’s usually right where I would expect it in a proper menu.
There was two “gotchas” I had to sort out. I couldn’t figure out why OBS Studio wouldn’t pick up any video, so eventually I tested gaming and games ran at 5 FPS. Turns out that installing the nvidia drivers didn’t come with the 32bit libs as a dependency. So, if you do decide to check out Antergos with Nvidia, make sure “lib32-nvidia-libgl” is installed too. This took me a good day to figure out too, as I didn’t think to test games until the next day and that made me realize it was a driver issue.
The second was that one day I booted up to a black screen with a cursor, as the system booted so fast that LightDM didn't load (Arch Wiki entry). I had to edit "/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf" to include:
I also learnt about bash aliases thanks to being on Arch, so instead of running something I can never remember like “Yuarty -sYusudaadasdas” to update, I have it setup so I just run “upall” in terminal and it updates everything for me — glorious! It’s easy to do as well, simply edit:
Add at the bottom:
You can substitute “yaourt -Syua” for anything, like “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” for Debian/Ubuntu and so on.
And then save it.
Lastly, enjoy a shot of my KDE Antergos dual-desktop:
Seriously, you should give Antergos a try. It’s Arch, but a more tame Arch since it has a live-media option and you can pick what desktop you want from the installer. This was a key selling point for me, and the installer was a breeze too. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Why I switched
There’s many reasons for my switch, but the main one has been stability. Ubuntu has been getting more problem-filled with every new release for me so I had enough. Not only that, but due to it being dependent on GNOME packages, stuff was being stripped away too and it’s just a mess now. Some applications have normal title-bars, some have GNOME’s new styling with everything sodding hidden and it’s just all mashed together.
Audacity would constantly screw up and just skip over audio while trying to record or playback, or just flat out not work.
Multiple games wouldn’t give me audio until I killed PulseAudio and reloaded it or did other trickery. It was becoming a nuisance, especially when I want to livestream and “oh sorry guys, let me fix my audio, fuc…”.
It seems Ubuntu has a lot of problems with their setup of PulseAudio. I don’t know what they’re doing to it, but they’re murdering the poor thing.
Antergos, I choose you!
If Antergos is anything, it’s like walking in heavy rain without a coat and — suddenly the clouds part and the almighty sun is shining down on you to make everything better. Something like this essentially (thanks Samsai):
I’m
I adore the Arch User Repository (AUR) and have found it so incredibly useful for multiple applications I use on a daily basis, especially when those same applications on Ubuntu could be out of date for weeks and months. The brand new Minecraft launcher was in it the day it was release by the official developers, the itch.io app is in it, everything I need is right there and tested by tons of people. It’s essentially a far better PPA-like system. It’s easier to understand too, thanks to a much clearer layout on the actual website.
Just don't outright trust everything on the AUR, make sure you read a few comments before installing a random package. I'm sure you're all smart enough to know to do that anyway.
Getting used to KDE after being on GNOME or GNOME-like desktops for many years has been a challenge by itself, but wow, it’s actually a lot nicer. Things aren’t hidden away where I don’t expect them to be, if I want something it’s usually right where I would expect it in a proper menu.
There was two “gotchas” I had to sort out. I couldn’t figure out why OBS Studio wouldn’t pick up any video, so eventually I tested gaming and games ran at 5 FPS. Turns out that installing the nvidia drivers didn’t come with the 32bit libs as a dependency. So, if you do decide to check out Antergos with Nvidia, make sure “lib32-nvidia-libgl” is installed too. This took me a good day to figure out too, as I didn’t think to test games until the next day and that made me realize it was a driver issue.
The second was that one day I booted up to a black screen with a cursor, as the system booted so fast that LightDM didn't load (Arch Wiki entry). I had to edit "/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf" to include:
[LightDM]
logind-check-graphical=trueI also learnt about bash aliases thanks to being on Arch, so instead of running something I can never remember like “Yuarty -sYusudaadasdas” to update, I have it setup so I just run “upall” in terminal and it updates everything for me — glorious! It’s easy to do as well, simply edit:
~/.bashrcAdd at the bottom:
alias upall='yaourt -Syua'You can substitute “yaourt -Syua” for anything, like “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” for Debian/Ubuntu and so on.
And then save it.
Lastly, enjoy a shot of my KDE Antergos dual-desktop:
Seriously, you should give Antergos a try. It’s Arch, but a more tame Arch since it has a live-media option and you can pick what desktop you want from the installer. This was a key selling point for me, and the installer was a breeze too. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: Creak@liamdawe I'm sorry to hear that you've went KDE, but especially because you had troubles with GNOME... But reading your post, I'm not sure if you were using a regular Ubuntu or an Ubuntu GNOME spin, since you're talking about the mixes between "normal" and "GNOME’s new styling" title-bars. If you were running vanilla GNOME, you shouldn't have this kind of problem, all the applications look and feel are the same (at least on Fedora). So, could you clarify that please?This was on standard Ubuntu Unity.
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Quoting: fabertawe"You will experience problems occasionally but I'd call these niggles and I've never had one I couldn't solve quickly just by checking the forums or Wiki. Call me perverse but I actually like problem solving any issues anyway!"
Haha, that describes me too.. I do run into issues occasionally when I'm upgrading packages, but it just forces me to do a little reading and applying work arounds. Normally 5-10 min distraction and everything is back up and running.
Last edited by lejimster on 19 January 2017 at 5:24 pm UTC
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liberodark Jan 19, 2017
hello why not use manjaro is better than antergos more stable !
"This is only my opinion"
Cordialy
"This is only my opinion"
Cordialy
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Quoting: lejimsterQuoting: fabertawe"You will experience problems occasionally but I'd call these niggles and I've never had one I couldn't solve quickly just by checking the forums or Wiki. Call me perverse but I actually like problem solving any issues anyway!"
Haha, that describes me too.. I do run into issues occasionally when I'm upgrading packages, but it just forces me to do a little reading and applying work arounds. Normally 5-10 min distraction and everything is back up and running.
As a GNOME 3 user I can tell you that Arch adopts their updates a little bit soon, and the DE generally becomes stable only when it gets released with Fedora... that's a problem I was tired of. Also, several years ago, a friend of mine was using XFCE on Arch and the image viewer (ristretto) was updated with a completely unstable version that they kept for quite a long time. So, not all of Arch's problems can be troubleshooted, but that's the deal when you use bleeding edge distros. Oh and I forgot about adopting systemd, we had to adapt all our config files and stuff, and write systemd config files from scratch, without really knowing how it worked. That's a great experience as a user, I made many bug reports and contributed a lot, which is rewarding.
On another hand, on Fedora there's the automatic bug reporting tool, and I still report more accurately when needed, but not quite as often as with Arch.
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Quoting: CreakQuoting: chimpyMan all this talk of switching to Arch, now I'm tempted to give it another shot :)Give a shot at Fedora, it's the future!
I tried a lot of distros for the past 10 years (from Debian to Arch), but at my surprise, I tried Fedora a year ago and I think it's one of the best so far.
I actually have given it a shot, but isn't rpmfusion/copr sorta the same as Ubuntu's ppas? I'm kinda tryin to get away from that, plus even though I like the idea of using Wayland + Gnome by default it lowers fps on games :(
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Finally someone realize that the major problem with pulseaudio is the fact that Ubuntu developers are incapable of configuring the thing properly (it's the same on Gentoo as well) and that users of this distro will assume that it doesn't work for the wrong reasons.
Last edited by Nyamiou on 19 January 2017 at 6:34 pm UTC
Last edited by Nyamiou on 19 January 2017 at 6:34 pm UTC
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Well, if we are here for the distro hype train, I want to shamelessly promote Solus. Since late last year it moved to a rolling release model, is heavily optimized for desktop use, blazing fast, integrates a native Steam runtime and much more. The repos are a bit thin, but steadily growing. Only thing that keeps me from using it for more than gaming is the fact that there is atm no way of mounting NFS like my NAS. But they are working on it.
Oh, and for work and duty I rely to my very stable Ubuntu 16.04, which runs all my dev tools and so on. I am also using Vagrant for web dev and the base image for Vagrant boxes is Ubuntu 16.04, so there is a good reason for using it. But to each his own :D
Oh, and for work and duty I rely to my very stable Ubuntu 16.04, which runs all my dev tools and so on. I am also using Vagrant for web dev and the base image for Vagrant boxes is Ubuntu 16.04, so there is a good reason for using it. But to each his own :D
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Quoting: JudasIscariotI don't know about Vsync but as someone who uses Antergos daily since I first installed it, our Linux installers have no issues installing on Antergos. I've verified this with quite a few Linux native games myself :)
I am going to build a side gaming rig this weekend and test it out.
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Now you also can avoid the whole Mir mess, and go along with Wayland transition.
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