Yeah a bit too close to look into this, but good luck!

While it’s still early days, you might want to take a look at EuroOffice, a OnlyOffice fork to avoid their sketchiness and supported by a great number of organizations.

I just need a nice Linux distro where I don’t have to spend any time coding to install software… I don’t want to type in code to install things but I also don’t want to move to Windows 11.

Most modern Linux have optional GUIs for package management — software packaged by your distro mantainers — often integrated with flathub — a website for downloading and installing distro agnostic software, with limited access to system resources, like android’s permissions — and system management.

Generally we prefer to type in “code” as it is very straightforward and faster as well. For Windows, you go to system settings, install updates, wait a while, and reboot to install updates. This only updates Windows itself and some of their software, i.e. drivers, office, etc.

For linux it depends on the distro, but for Debian/Ubuntu based ones it goes something like this in a terminal emulator:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
flatpak update

Each line is executed independently, and roughly translating them in order of appearance:

• sudo means do the following command with administrator privileges;
• apt is Debian’s package manager tool;
• apt update is an apt command that checks if there any new packages for either your system or installed software;
• apt upgrade is also an apt command to install these latest packages;
• flatpak is a tool to manage distro agnostic packages, commonly from flathub;
• flatpak update checks and install new versions of the installed packages.

While the explanation is a bit long winded, these commands runs in seconds to a few minutes, depending on how long it has been since the last update. It might be necessary to reboot afterwards, specially if you have nvidia graphics, for example. But it updates all the software you obtained through them, without the song and dance of going to each vendor’s website or third parties. They vetoed all of them in your stead.

Mind you, while flatpak apps from flathub may have unstrusted software — which also have a limited access to the system — your distro has higher concern for safety than Windows by not making you download an random executable from a website.

Everyone has their reasons for choosing the distro that they choose.

That’s fine I suppose, though there are other distros more fitting if latest version isn’t of concern.

And that isn’t a hassle. You sign up to it when you install Arch. If you aren’t willing to do that thing that takes a shorter time (loading up the Arch homepage) than actually issuing the upgrade command 😄, then yeah, Arch isn’t for you. Let’s concede that much, I suppose.

I didn’t need to do that, I just used a RSS feed reader directly from the Arch news. Now, for an regular user, it would be a learning experience to actually be aware of possible manual interventions, especially since Arch makes upgrading a breeze, it’s not a thing in other distros.

Right, again, that’s you creating maintenance for yourself. AUR is considered separate from the distro itself. I stand by my main point. 😁

Actually, installing from the AUR is what helped me at the time, since the official software package was deprecated — removed from the main arch repository —, and I didn’t have time to repackage it myself. The deprecated package without a viable official replacement is what created a need to do system maintenance. And installing from the AUR was fine as long as you read the PKGBUILD, at least at the time. Regardless if either installing from the AUR, repackaging or downgrading the software were the solutions, it created friction with the end user. Which is fine for this particular distro, but for others in stable releases, it would be a major flaw.

If you upgrade often, you’re more likely to run into buggy releases. Just upgrade less often and reduce your likelihood of installing buggy latest releases. Just like Debian and other such distros do. You’re in charge on Arch.

While it’s true you can do that, then why choose Arch in the first place? One of the key elements in the philosophy for Arch is: Modernity, i.e. to always have the latest version to be the stable version, aka the rolling release model. You can choose not to upgrade, but it can be a immense footgun. There’s a reason it’s harder to upgrade between release versions in distros like Debian.

Besides being a stable release doesn’t guarantee no bugs either, only that they don’t change. Meaning as long as the bugs are minor or can be bypassed, it’s still considered stable.

This is only one way of mitigating risk that you can do, but I do concede that Arch does not take every precaution that other distros do to ensure that broken packages are not released. They do however follow up with news posts if there’s an issue, with info about what to do. This is an awesome thing.

No doubt, but you do have to keep track of this. People non familiar with it may find their systems temporarily borked if they don’t. One good mention for those of interest is their incredible documentation, it can also be used as a reference for other distros too.

But still, I haven’t had an issue in over a decade, upgrading packages probably once a week or so.

There’s no “maintenance” other than what you create for yourself. This Arch = “maintenance” (whatever that entails in everyone’s mind) nonsense has got to be put to bed.

In over a decade using Arch, I have encountered bugs or changes when upgrading packages, following a similar upgrade cadence. I also used packages that have been deprecated from the official repository, and then maintaned by users in the AUR. These are things that break the users experience and require maintenance. Regardless if it’s a bug or not, or if it happens once or twice a year, the user has to pay close attention.

There seems to be a misunderstanding in the definition of “stable” for distros. Arch is solid, it’ll rarely break, when it breaks it’ll be mostly due to the users own interest in fiddling with the system in the first place. But Arch follows the rolling-release model, with incremental updates which may require manual intervention — again, happens on very rare occasions — it differs from the stable release model, where distros like Debian have small changes, more guided towards security rather than having the newest software.

So by definition I wouldn’t say Arch is stable, even if it’s not the common usage, it’s best to describe that it requires system management and maintenance, but it’s not brittle, unlike Windows.

Yep, though I have a bug in my use case from a older version, and I still didn’t have the time to try the new stable version. I also translated the Docker compose for the project and extensions into .container files. In the newer version it seems they managed to remove a sidecar container.

So far, it runs on a VPS with a 4-core and 8GB of RAM. On a first run, after upgrading, it needed swap as the system started freezing and the OOM killer stopped the program, zram was enough in my case.

Besides the main container — and the sidecar — I used the Collabora container, LDAP for user management, Keycloak for auth, full Tika for OCR search — modified for my language — and Radicale. Mind you, most probably want the main container and the online office container, be it EuroOffice, Collabora or OnlyOffice.

Here is the memory usage and CPU usage on standby from podman stats:

NAME                       MEM USAGE / LIMIT  CPU %
systemd-tika               175MB / 8.054GB    0.68%
caddy                      43.35MB / 8.054GB  0.24%
systemd-ldap               67.08MB / 8.054GB  0.01%
radicale                   2.425MB / 8.054GB  0.00%
syncthing                  29.97MB / 8.054GB  0.21%
systemd-keycloak-postgres  41.12MB / 8.054GB  0.06%
systemd-keycloak           663.4MB / 8.054GB  0.75%
systemd-collabora          42.02MB / 8.054GB  0.27%
systemd-opencloud          883.4MB / 8.054GB  7.31%
systemd-collaboration      57.71MB / 8.054GB  0.31%

Besides ideology, preferences, bot filtering, or content, there’s also the matter of blocking things like CSAM, gore, etc. Lemmy proposes to not only factor in user preferences but also to properly curate the content via its moderators.

Yes