Taking a break from Linux

I’d been running Manjaro KDE as my daily for just under four months and everything was going so well! I was even running the Nvidia drivers and didn’t have many hiccups. Until the update…

Of course, I’d been updating off and on during the four month trial with Manjaro. I only had one bad situation where I used the Nvidia-beta drivers from the AUR, instead of the “official” drivers from the Manjaro repo. I should have known better.

For whatever reason, the most recent update completely hosed my /boot/ partition. The issue I’m running into can be found on the Manjaro forum but it’s not a common issue at all. And the vast majority of folks who report the issue never get it resolved, so that’s fun.

What happens now?

It’s back to Windows-land for me. If you’ve been following my posts here, or my most recent video on YouTube, you’ll know I am working on a video series on Qt for a publisher. I’m doing the video series on Windows, so I already have a Windows partition setup and ready to go.

Just reinstall Linux!

No. I am burned out from install Linux and distro-hopping. Sure, its my fault for picking an unstable distro like Manjaro, but still. I’m not interested in troubleshooting or reinstalling/setting up another Linux distro right now.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never experienced no-boot issues on Ubuntu, Fedora, or even openSUSE. In fact, this is the first issue like this I’ve experienced in a long time, possibly in years.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll return to Linux eventually. Maybe I’ll make a video about it when I do.

Just stay on Windows!

Blegh. I already use Windows as my development environment at work and its awful. The only thing that makes it palatable is the Windows Subsystem for Linux, for obvious reasons.

I already went over the reasons as to why I dislike Windows in a recent video. tl;dr I’m a spoiled Linux user who is too elite for the likes of Windows.

Conclusion

Don’t take this post as a reason for why Linux sucks! I need(ed) a stable daily-driver workstation and while testing Manjaro, I fell in love with the tooling and the AUR. It was my own mistake for settling on a distro with an unstable base (Arch) without any form of automated QA or CI (OpenQA anyone?).

Also, this post isn’t meant to be a dig at Manjaro. Its a really great distro for Linux enthusiasts and power users who want the bones of Arch with a bit more stability and polish than a DIY Arch install. But if you are looking for something solid and stable, it’s probably not a good choice.