Before my switch, i used Ubuntu exclusively for 13 years in row. I always heard of problems (and not at least because of the PPA repositories) when upgrading from one major version to the next, be it a LTS or not. I never did that and always installed fresh because of these stories. Mostly 4 years in between, or sometimes 2.

Its entirely possible that most problems happened because of packages from PPA that the user did not change for the new upgrade. Because PPA repositories were often designed for a specific version of Ubuntu. So its not entirely the fault of the apt package manager in that case.

Read the manual intervention notes from Arch that could be important. And do the update. That’s normal and nothing to worrry about, if you know what you are doing.

I don’t think this is true. The package manager is there for a reason to prevent that. If you have more updates to install at a time, then the chances are the same as if you would have installed the problematic update one at a time. Just read the manual intervention information from Arch and see if there is something to do, then it won’t bork. If people don’t know what they are doing and do not read the additional information (that is required to do so on Arch), well yes, then you could end up borking your machine. But not because so many updates are installed at a time. The package manager and operating system and their maintainer designed it in a way that you can install ton of updates at a time without borking. This is fine.

Sure, and that’s exactly what you want if you are on a rolling release, isn’t it? If you neglect the rolling release for a month, what did you expect would happen? Also if you have more apps and packages, the more updates will come out. Rolling releases are for people who maintain the system and care about the updates.

So you neglected the operating systems maintained regularly, despite it being a rolling release? I assume you didn’t read the manual intervention instructions that are posted regularly too. I don’t understand people using a rolling release and then not caring about the maintenance. Off course it won’t end very well.

Because you get updates and have an up to date system?

This has nothing to do with immutable desktops.

You mean YouTube? I’m not aware of that.

This means the stars lost their original meaning of just expressing what you like, as it is tied to monetization. Imagine how wild it would be if YouTube did this with likes of videos…

It only shows up when you use the dropdown menu to filter for Linux only. Then you also will see Freedesktop SDK (Flatpak). For whatever reason Flatpak and SteamOS Holo are ignored if you look at all operating systems instead Linux only. If you compare the numbers, they are not added to Archlinux or anything else.

Where is this stated?? If that was the case, the difference to other distros would be much higher. SteamOS is usually listed separately as HoloISO: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux

The survey is just accepting to send some auto collected data. There is no “real survey” involved.

Does Archlinux include SteamOS? Why isn’t SteamOS not listed, but several versions of Ubuntu is listed separately? Wasn’t SteamOS making up about half the Steam users using Linux? I would like to see multiple ways and options to enable and disable for Linux grouping, and longer lists. It may be enough for MacOS or Windows, but not for Linux.

I am curious too. You tested two different versions, one beta and the other current nightly (different content). It’s okay for a quick test, but you can actually have a much closer test. Both nightly and only one day difference:

• bz2: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/2024/11/2024-11-26-20-51-18-mozilla-central/firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
• xz: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/2024/11/2024-11-27-09-56-17-mozilla-central/firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz

I run this quick test multiple times and on average these are typical results (don’t forget to delete the unpacked folder between each runs):

$ time tar xjf firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

real    0m5,784s
user    0m5,700s
sys     0m0,371s

$ time tar xJf firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz

real    0m1,699s
user    0m1,621s
sys     0m0,315s

Most normal users do not do this. But there might be special packages with special setups, like scripts downloading and installing from Mozillas download links. Or package creators themselves might use it. Or maybe you are a developer, in which case such direct downloads would be helpful for testing and comparing stuff. I also assume most people do not care or notice any difference with this change. Still its an improvement without much drawback and thats always good, even if its only a few people benefiting of it.

Does your Antivirus or Firewall prevents it from accessing the internet maybe?

Definitely VirtualBox in my opinion. I used it before. Recently switched to libvirt with virt-manager (Qemu+Kvm), but this is really a bit more advanced and need more understanding and setup. VirtualBox is much easier and simple.

Snapshot feature of VB is fantastic (not to any reader, snapshot is not an screenshot, rather a temporary image point of the entire system you can revert back anytime like a backup). Binding and accessing directories from your host system is also relatively easy, if I remember right. It’s been a while since I used VirtualBox.

It might be because they were developing Azure. And they also include Linux distributions in Windows too, so it makes sense for Microsoft to work on it. Microsoft is one of the few top paying Platinum members in the Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

Microsoft doing Microsoft things, such as working on the Linux Kernel.

Nice overview and conclusion right at the top. Last edited 19. Nov, so its pretty active. I’m glad its not named “Are We H.264 AVC Yet?”. :D