My 3 day journey of distro hopping

Okay this ain't an article to talk much but. You know just for documenting things. Here we go. Maybe somebody will find this helpful.

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2 min read

It all started with my desire to learn some Flutter (will talk about it separetly). But as a windows user from childhood. I started the installation process. But for the every possible attempt I got that one f*cking error :

Running Gradle task 'assembleDebug'...

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* Where:
Settings file 'C:\Users\Ali\StudioProjects\untitled\android\settings.gradle' line: 26

* What went wrong:
Plugin [id: 'com.android.application', version: '7.3.0', apply: false] was not found in any of the following sources:

- Gradle Core Plugins (plugin is not in 'org.gradle' namespace)
- Included Builds (None of the included builds contain this plugin)
- Plugin Repositories (could not resolve plugin artifact 'com.android.application:com.android.application.gradle.plugin:7.3.0')
  Searched in the following repositories:
    Google
    MavenRepo
    Gradle Central Plugin Repository

Now I tried everything I could think of Re-installing, trying with/without android studio, with Java-17/Java-21, manually installing gradle, trying in WSL (there I got the issue of adb and device access) and so on but things didn't changed. I was just pissed as hell. I had literally wasted my 2 days. Then I decided to go out of my way and dual boot my laptop. I went ahead with Linux Mint as recommended for beginners. But I installed the latest 21.1 and many people have complained about the heaviness of the cinnamon 21.1 but I found them post installation.

The issues didn't stopped there, the major issues that I faced are :

  1. Issue of freezing after suspension. Had to force restart everytime.

  2. Scaling issues in fractional mode and without mode, I cannot have different scaling in different screens.

  3. Sluggish considering lightweightness of Linux. Now I had 2 two choices : continue with issues and just train your mind or do something. I chose the second and started looking for better Distro. I landed with Kubuntu and Manjaro. I settled with Manjaro because I thought both Mint and Kubuntu are Ubuntu based distros so may be the issues are with Ubuntu itself. So took the call of Manjaro. And boy it is a hell lot better than Mint (in my experience). Felt snappier and more polished at some instances.

But there are some issues with Manjaro are :

  1. Packages are not directly availabe for things like say Google Chrome and you've to take alternative paths.

  2. Power management destroys the stability at many instances. But overall I would say the freezing error handling was far more mature in Manjaro. Wait till I face some major issues in this as well or may be a long term review some day.

Peace โœŒ๐Ÿป . P.S. flutter worked on both the distros right away on the first attempt.

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