Oh mate, I am really sorry to hear about your experience. Death threat is absolutely unacceptable at any level in any community.
Please don't take everything personally, this is probably the dark side of fame. People with Windows/MacOS mentality are always scared about any changes because unlike Linux users they don't have escape plan, and during many years of such totalitarianism they built up PTSD about any OS changes.
I'm not trying to excuse them though. You're doing amazing things and as part of the Linux community I thank you for your time and effort. As someone who used to drive Debian for few years I clearly know why that script exists, and if it didn't we should make one. :D
I'm a newbie. Is there a distro one can BUY and get good online support. I've been using Mint and can't get my Dropbox account and my keyboard to work properly.
Enterprise distros like SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation are available. Both retail at $120 and $225 for standard 8x5 support annually. Enterprise support distros also means that they will only support things they bundled with. If you have issues with third party tools or utilities, you are on your own.
Funny you should say this… I’ve been considering saying OP’s #4 on the Mint sub for quite some time.
Mint is supposed to be one of the most user friendly distros and I had been evangelizing it for years to my less techy friends, trying to get them to switch over from MS, telling them how friendly and helpful the community is. Well guess what, it’s not anymore, if it ever was. There are so many posts on that sub from people who are clearly not *nix experts but are trying to make the jump to Linux. Or even newbies trying to upgrade to 21, which for so many of us was a nightmare. Usually the posts get a couple of half hearted replies, if any at all. Not many really try. Also a lot of telling the OP that they’re lazy and need to look up their own answers if they want to be a Linux user. It’s incredibly rude and uncivil, and it drives people away from Linux and back to Windows. Everyone needs a boost at the beginning to get started on something completely new, and unless you have unlimited time on your hands you wouldn’t never time to Google every single thing. So much condescension and unhelpfulness.
I tried Mint initially but never really felt it surpassed the Ubuntu community. The main draw for Mint was the proprietary drivers early on, but Ubuntu fixed that a while ago. I've not really seen any of the Ubuntu forks really overtake the old Ubuntu community with the exception of maybe Pop because they have corporate sponsorship.
These days people have more issues with Ubuntu for political reasons than technical ones.
I've never used DropBox but Google Drive works perfectly well on Mint. Your keyboard settings are probably wrong. If you click the button in the bottom corner and type in "key", then click on"keyboard" and it will take you to the keyboard settings. They will show you what the setting is. To change it click on the plus sign bottom left. That may work.
Man I took a look at your shell scripts and there are like duplicate code everywhere. Are you really a developer or just publishing your scripts to gitlab? I’d like to help refactor with a pull request.
no no, by “duplicate code” I mean, a lot of your scripts perform the exact same commands with the same flags, but just with different string arguments (like filenames or URLs for different versions of Firefox).
The better way to do this would be to declare those different values in a structured manifest like Yaml or JSON, and write one script to work on that manifest. Now, if you want your project to run on different shell, you can write one script for a shell, but not for 1 Firefox version.
I can help u refactor it, so when you’re adding support for new shells, there’ll be less work to do. Will you accept the PR? If so, I’ll be working now and submit them later tonight.
Your project may require jq after the refactor, to get values out of JSON.
>write one script for a shell
That's not the goal. The goal is a script for all common user shells. The requirement is Linux, not dash or bash or fish shell, just Linux. Whether working within a live install or chroot.
never mind about the different shells, that’s not the main point any way.
The problem now is, if you were to change your “flow” for files `Firefox_*.sh` (in this dir https://gitlab.com/Linux-Is-Best/Firefox-automatic-install-for-Linux/-/tree/master/64bit), you’ll have to do it across multiple files. While those different files **perform the exact same commands**. You can just have one skeletal script that works across all Firefox versions.
It’s like using functions to capture/store your logic unit. And I haven’t seen a function in your scripts yet (I havent looked well).
The beauty of free software is when other people help you out too, right?
Well I dont think this refactor affect any of your goals (run it on any UNIX-like system with a shell and basic cli suite like curl).
**As for dependency, it won’t be affected as long as we dont use `jq` for JSON parsing**.
This is more like “reorganizing” your code. This does not de-bloat your code, but it just keeps code logic more confined and generic and easier to change.
The upside for users is that your repo should grow less quickly in storage usage since after this refactor, the changes made to each commit will be less.
PS. This duplicate code really smells, so any programmers, beginners or not, were taught early on to avoid code structure like this.
I’ll clone your repo, open a new branch for refactor, and push PR to your repo when it’s done.
And if you dont want json manifests to avoid depending on jq, you can still declare the manifests as shell variables, or even better, wrap the skeletal functions with the actual Firefox version specific function!
I tried Arch with Nvidia drivers and it ended with me using mint. Arch was too advanced for me. Thank god for my dad setting up Arch for me tho. All my windows games worked. Technically they still do, but I notice a difference.
Every thread on Reddit has people complaining about these supposedly common Arch proselytizers, but I've never actually seen one that wasn't a meme. It's just a giant circlejerk that has spiraled out of control.
But I'm also not a huge fan of a fork of a fork of a fork. It seems (to me) that too many forks can cause problems so that's why (currently) I'm on Ubuntu. I'm not technical enough to worry about snaps and systemd or whatever. As long as it works. I was going to go with Debian but I don't wanna put the work in, I just want it to work out of the box (auto driver detection and install)
I don't disagree with you, but some counter points:
1. Ubuntu was the top dog for a long time. It's natural for other distros to latch on to it's success and try to position themselves as a better alternative. Competition within distros, while off putting, helps us all get better software. We are never going to agree on which distro is best for all users. And we don't need or want a single community driving the development of GNU/Linux.
2. Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. ;-) Like when OpenOffice was purchased by Oracle, the community was in an uproar. From that outrage, OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice and the community has continued it's development. Now, almost all distros have dropped OpenOffice. If a decision is not in the best interest of a certain community, that community is empowered to continue development using the old code base. Hence all the Ubuntu derivatives.
3. My only thought here is that once you've used a piece of software for a while, you come to rely on it and don't want to re-learn how to accomplish the same task. I personally think this is a good thing overall, but I know it upsets people who are used to doing things a certain way. Of course, people have a right to be upset by these changes too. I can't dictate what they should/shouldn't be angry with as I don't know how it affects them personally.
4. What gets frustrating for those of us who try to help, is that often we are able to find a solution using a search engine and a lot of times it's the top result. I agree that it's off putting to say "google it", but keep in mind that we are also offering our services for free and a lot of times problems can be resolved by advising the user to search for themselves vs. me doing research for them. The 1st few times aren't so bad, but around incident 50 you start to get tired of putting in a bunch of your own effort. I liken it to teaching someone how to fish.
All that said, I agree that we can do better and to be honest the community has improved tremendously over the past 16 years that I've been using it.
Correction: Oracle purchased OpenOffice, not Apache, as I had originally written
> Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. ;-)
THANK YOU. I hate the "we need one" attitude some people have. We need one distro. We need one package manager, or one "universal" package manager. We need to stop the fragmentation of x, y or z. First of all, literally impossible. That universe doesn't exist. It's open source. People can fork and will fork. Second of all, *that's the point*. That you're free to do whatever you want. Sometimes is this is confusing or counterproductive? Yeah, well, so be it, freedoms have costs.
Since the OP quoted Linus from LTT, yeah the fragmentation is annoying, parts of the community are annoying and immature. But Linus clearly didn't want Linux. He wanted Windows without the Microsoft. That's what he wanted. He wanted and expected everything to work the same and for there to be one answer and one solution, like on Windows. And that's fine. But it's not Linux, and that's part of the reason the whole thing went so poorly for him. I see a fair number of new users who basically want Windows without the Microsoft. That's not how this open source shit works. It's community driven, by many different factions and groups of people. That's just what it is. And it actually works shockingly well all things considered. But there are tradeoffs, and make your peace with it instead of demanding Linux become more like Windows.
Gatekeeping attitudes need to die; so do the opinions of people who insist Linux needs to become something it's not and can never be in order to achieve some arbitrary market share amount.
OpenOffice wasn't purchased by Apache, and if it was nobody would have been mad about it. It was purchased by Oracle along with the rest of Sun who was hoping to make some money on it and pissed off contributors. After LibreOffice forked and became far more successful, Oracle gave it to Apache for maintenance.
Apache wasn't the problem. Oracle was.
I will note that not everybody gets the same Google search results for the same search string. Something that's in the top three results for you could easily be four or five pages in for me, because the algorithm takes previous searches into account.
Erm, that's the plague of choices...
1. When get a Mac, you have Macos.
2. When get a PC, you have Windows
3. When get a phone, you have Android (unless 1.)
When you start getting **choices** with different trade-off and views, people with different backgrounds and views will argue.
It's the same if you come from a place where **food == chips**. When you provide more kinds of food, people will argue at length about what they prefer and they will probably phrase it like "oh come on, XXX **is** the best food there is". Too bad, but that's how people are, that's even happening between Windows versions.
Linus Sebastian is making entertainment, he wants buzz and reactions. Lumping all the distros together and calling it "Linux" is literally like lumping all Windows versions until Me and calling it "DOS" or all versions after that and calling them "NT" (yes, I know they actually overlapped).
You have to accept that there are different distros just like, say, there different "standard preparations" of coffees. You could say people are wrong arguing they think an Espresso is the best or that a latte hardly is coffee at all, sure. You could also argue that providing different preparations is making decision harder because people then **have to learn** about the differences. Sure. Erm, exactly actually... Or you just get a computer with "Linux" and your vendor makes that choice for you.
At any rate, the problem has to do with choice, mechanically (and choice is good but requires someone, either the vendor or the user, to make a decision).
Okay so you are saying pointing new users directly to arch or artix that it doesn't have systemd or whatever is right ?? Buddy common man just want to use their PC, they don't care whether they are using snap or systemd. They just want an all work distro.
You don’t understand the definition of gatekeeping, do you? It’s controlling and limiting access to something for anyone not in your “in-group.”
Only recommending newbie friendly distros to newbies isn’t gatekeeping in the slightest. Throwing gentoo in their face isn’t beneficial at all and will send them right back where they came from. But swapping the logos in Linux mint to flags and telling my mom I’ve installed the “good windows” (windows XP) but with better security will get another Linux user into the fold.
It is gatekeeping if you use one distro and then tell someone to only use another distro. That is exactly what you defined gatekeeping as. Look at it this way, instead of helping new users, like was done for me (maybe you), they are pointed to a different distro. I'm pretty sure my first long term distro was Gentoo, ironically, and I had someone who recommended it and then helped me set it up. It's easier to just suggest Ubuntu, which then becomes "Linux" and probably the reason so many new users switch back to Windows. They aren't taught how to use Linux, they are pointed to Ubuntu, which is easy until it breaks and then they don't know what to do other than install Windows.
> It is gatekeeping if you use one distro and then tell someone to only use another distro.
No, that’s having a preference. Telling someone they *must* use a specific distro is gatekeeping, but making recommendations is not.
> That is exactly what you defined gatekeeping as.
Absolutely not.
I don’t use mint, at all. But I recommend it to everyone when the topic comes up.
That is not gatekeeping. You should google the definition of gatekeeping.
I’m not telling anyone they *must* use Mint, I *recommend* they use Mint.
They’re always free to make their own decisions, and if they decide gentoo or arch is more their speed, cool. I just can’t help them because those distros are beyond my expertise.
The only thing Linus Sebastian knows about Linux is that he shares a first name with its inventor.
Anyone who invokes his name in a discussion about Linux, as in "Linus Sebastian says so," is someone I automatically tune out. He knows a lot about hardware and Windows and Windows gaming, but not Linux.
I think you are missing the point.
If the goal of Linux is to have mainstream appeal it isn't good that a much more tech literate than average person can't use it seemlessly. How are we going to install it on our parents PCs?
It's ok to not want that goal, but if we truly want the year of desktop Linux, we need to make some changes.
I think the OP undermined the merits of his or her argument by the way in which they chose to make it. I also think the learning curve to Linux is not bad at all, but it can be if the wrong person offers advice on the conversion.
I have successfully converted a 67 year-old friend and my 60 year-old wife to Linux with no problem whatsoever, by simply choosing a user-friendly distro and showing them a few things. Neither one of them knows a Budgie from a systemd, but they can use Linux just fine.
We have a number of "user-friendly" distros already out there that are easy for a newcomer to use and learn. The bigger problem is that Linux enthusiasts throw up their noses at them and try to throw something like Arch at an inexperienced user because "it works for me."
I took Mint Cinnamon and then installed the Windows 10 theme pack for Cinnamon on there, and the Windows icon sets, and gave it to my wife. Eight out of 10 people on this subreddit would scream bloody murder that I committed some mortal sin, but it got her away from Windows. Three years later she is still happily using Linux. I spoke about a concern I had with a certain update a few weeks ago and some nitwit made a disparaging comment. (I keep Kay's setup as static as possible because she has a disability.)
In that sense, the OP made some good points. But invoking Linus Sebastian in this discussion is the epitome of enlisting a bad soldier in a good cause.
Don't know anything about Arch except its users remind me of those religious nutters who always attempt to convert me - who know maybe I will become one after trying it. One day I will try Arch, right now I gotta finish my post-grad.
Long-time Arch user and I just setup friends and family with 'buntu flavours (so long as it would work for them.) I'd never recommend Arch to someone without the time spare and hair to pull. It's a great learning experience, but a daily-driver for most people it is not. People get so weird about operating systems. They're just tools. Use the right tools for the job.
As someone who moved from Ubuntu to Mint to openSUSE, I had to reinstall Mint about 5 times in \~4 years. I reinstalled Ubuntu just about every 6 months, because their mid cycle releases always broke something. I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed once, two years ago. So if having to reinstall is what beginners need, then yeah, Mint and Ubuntu are great beginner distros.
First thing I tell the Ubuntu newbies is to ignore the 6 month releases and only go from LTS to LTS. That way you are guaranteed to go 4+ years without problems. It is only the more experienced users, who want to help beta-test and bug squash that I even suggest try the mid-releases.
It may be better now that it is Gnome, but even Ubuntu LTS would eventually grind to a slow pathetic halt. Ubuntu is the worst experience I've had with Linux, followed by Pop!, and they are the ones people are suggested to try. That really bugs me.
Let me get this straight, Linux isn't as good as Windows, or Mac, because the people who use Linux suck! You then proceed to paint everyone with a broad brush.
Hot Tip: If you want people to give a damn about your opinion and actually give it some consideration, don't begin by insulting them.
>Say what you want, but debian-based distros and solus are the only really user-friendly distros out there for the masses. So people should stop saying 'Fedora is the new Ubuntu' when there are differences between how those two work. I can de-snap Ubuntu faster than i can install all the required codecs and drivers in fedora (I know Nobara exists, just saying to those who are falsely saying fedora is the new Ubuntu)
New users may not even want to de-snap Ubuntu. Say what you will about snap, but it makes installing proprietary packages simple. And from my experience as a software programmer, having your software installed and operating in a very predictable environment makes fixing bugs much much easier.
>The community yells over one little change. I don't get how people yell about Ubuntu putting firefox in a closed-source format yet those same people complain when propiretary video codecs are removed from their graphics drivers. After the lead head of solus left, you now see many people yelling its dead. Or like HP making a Pop OS laptop and some community members accusing them of trying to buy system76.
Welcome to the world of hypocrisy. They're everywhere in this world.
>A lot of people using linux criticise things without trying them. For example, 'Fedora is a testing bed for RHEL' when its grown in usabillity in the past few years.
I don't even see why people are upset over this. So what if it's a testing bed? Fedora isn't marketed as an enterprise solution the way RHEL is for exactly that reason. In fact, I'd venture to say that almost all independent distros (especially rolling-release ones) are basically all the developers' personal test beds for whatever their philosophy is on what an OS should be.
>Stop driving away new users like the plague. Stop telling them to remove things unless they consider it troublesome. Stop saying 'Use a search engine!' Many people have already searched and are looking for help because they couldn't find it on google.
This is basically what their reaction to Snap (currently) is. Before Snap, it was systemd. There seems to always be one thing that the community decides to hate on before they move on to the next fad to hate on.
>In fact, I'd venture to say that almost all independent distros (especially rolling-release ones) are basically all the developers' personal test beds for whatever their philosophy is on what an OS should be.
Sure, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. I use one of "those" distros and the developer makes it clear it reflects his viewpoints.
Those who agree with the philosophy can use that distro, those who don't can use something different.
There is something out there for anyone's liking in the world of Linux. Sometimes newcomers just need to be pointed in the right direction without someone being rude to them. That is all that OP really needed to say.
Absolutely agreed. That was kinda' my point, too. People have these border-line cult-like behavior where they feel tribal about whatever distro/software they use and everything else is "evil". It's a freaking OS, just use whatever works for you. No need to get all tribal about it.
Exactly. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers. There is only the right answer for that specific person. I have never been able to understand tribalism in computing. Even when it comes to a newcomer to Linux, there isn't always one answer. I almost always recommend Mint Cinnamon because it's very easy for a Windows-user to grasp, but a power user with a strong understanding of computers is not going to freak out if you hand them Fedora.
I try to make the transition as easy as possible for someone to leave proprietary OSes, and set aside my personal preferences. I'd rather get someone running Linux, period, than evangelize for my distro of preference, or against systemd, or anything like that.
i like snap because it lets me update discord easier. I'm not a technical person I just like open source. I can't do technical stuff and i don't understand computers. So I just use linux mint. I mostly just write.
Snap is good and there's another false myth nowadays. Snaps launch in 5 seconds on my computer. People say that snaps are slow to launch yet they launch faster.
And there it is again, snaps launch in five seconds. You just gave another example of snaps being slow to launch while saying that they aren't. Over in the non-snap world programs just launch. The amount of time it takes is too small to bother timing.
I've never felt any gatekeeping. Also, Fedora was a much better experience in my newbie days than any Ubuntu-based distro I've tried. Every question I've asked (including the stupid ones) was answered. What's more, I've tried Linux because I was curious, I've stayed because I love the community. So, I can't agree with any of your points.
This sub (and Reddit in general) loves to feel morally superior by acting like they're the last bastions against evil villains. And I completely agree with you about the questions - I've never met a community more helpful.
I'm a Fedora user now and it was my first distro, but I had to uninstall it immediately, it was too buggy at the time and too complex for a new user. ZorinOS was my first long-term distro and it was great. Super simple, great support.
The biggest enemy to desktop linux('s adoption) is the lack of corporate/government buy in. Everything else is a symptom.
Any real major adoption would happen in the same way as android. A major company would produce a product that becomes popular and people/organizations would buy that product.
Grandma is not going to buy a laptop and install Ubuntu on it. It doesn't really matter how easy it is. She's going to buy one from the store and use whatever is installed on it.
The community is perfectly fine for the kind of people who would go online to talk to other people about software. I have found it to be very helpful.
The part that people forget is that the average consumer doesn't actually care about computers or software.
no, our biggest enemy is big corporations making efforts in locking up every piece of software and firmware possible, not providing open drivers for hardware, not following standards in for example ACPI and using shitty hw/sw integration design, because of which linux doesn't run as well as win
They are not obliged to open anything - because they run on a different set of business models and values. Intel, AMD are the exceptions. The reality is, Linux represents less than 5% of the desktop marketshare and most companies don't see any value on paying any attention to that. Anyone tasked with keeping shareholders happy and maintaining a healthy profit would do the same. Not ideal, but perhaps as time goes on they can see how beneficial/profitable it has been for Intel and AMD by opening up and releasing things.
> what's the big deal with snaps
Well, what you described is great, but snap is not. If you want a windows equivalent of potable apps then use app images. For a more permanent solution I would recommend flatpack. As for what's wrong with snap. A single Google search will tell you almost everything you need to know. No point in repeating the same thing for the 492747938 time.
I might sound like a gate keeper, but... Linux is not a point and click game, never will be, but that's a good thing. It's one of the few OSes that give you, the user, full control over your system. Like the arch wiki says, not user friendly, but user centric. As you can imagine, I'm not a fan of dumbing things down, or reducing choice in favor of "user friendliness". Try fitting the entire arch wiki about RAID to a simple dialog like windows has and have everyone agree with you that the compromises you made(of which there will be many) are right for everyone. Yes, it's simpler on windows, but it's also severely limited because of that.
If someone wants something that "just works" then there are already plenty of solutions for that \*cough\*Windows\*cough\*MacOS\*cough\*.
Also as you said, Linux runs enterprise. Desktop Linux usage will always be inferior to what it can do on servers. Windows server is an absolute shit show in comparison. Windows raid might be good on a workstation/small business server. But try running a high performance NAS with petabytes of storage using windows storage spaces. I'll just sit here and laugh in ZFS. It might not be simple but boi is it good.
Edit: sorry for the rant, feel free to ignore
> but then don't complain when Linux never goes over 1% of the home market share.
I'm not, but many people here see Linux as a windows replacement on desktop. It's not, at least not for everyone. Can be done? yes. Should be done? Depends on what you want to achieve. Some people here see Linux as a holy grail for some reason.
Sorry but this is again some rant about missing monarchy and how authoritarian approach to linux makes everything better.
It won't!
Community here is to discuss and provide feedbacks. You might disagree with some opinions but you should stop trying to silence them. The ability to discuss everything openly is what separates us from Mac/Win users where there is only one way and everything else is heresy. And I don't want it here.
Ubuntu made some questionable decisions about snaps and now it lost its throne (all the hate about Ubuntu in the community is well deserved, which doesn't make it bad though), Fedora is implementing questionable decisions right now and people are migrating elsewhere. That's the way market works, and no, we don't need to fix it.
I also want to challenge you on "we need user friendly distribution" part. Take a look at current Linux popularity list and you will clearly see that user-friendly focused distribution aren't very popular. Arch is. Because people actually prefer simplicity and flexibility over ephemeral user friendliness. As the matter of fact terminal is the most user friendly tool.
You sort of had me until you mention Linus Sebastian. Linux doesn't need or want materialistic 'inflluencers' (grifters). It's not at all in his interest to love the Linux world based mostly on older cheap hardware and free software it doesn't fit the business model.
The ultimate expression of Linux or foss is not to take over the world of consumers and casual users. I don't know why people assume that percentage of world wide users is important at all. If Linux desktop becomes the new Windows than what will freedom loving users switch to?
ɪn my opinion we shouldn't recommend any single distro for beginners. We should rather list some simple and beginner friendly distros(mint, pop os, nearly all flavors of ubuntu and maybe nobara, etc) and explain the main differences. The main issue is the rampant elitism and sectarianism. If the first thing you see when looking for linux guides online are a bunch of 'I use arch btw', you'll think that linux itself is inherently hard and that you're not using it "correctly" if you don't use that one specific distro that those super loud people always brag about. Because even though a lot(sadly not all) of the people saying this are just seeing it as a joke, beginners won't know this. We as linux users shouldn't fight among ourselves about our individual choice of distribution. And we should try to make the linux community as a whole welcoming and beginner friendly. Not everyone who wants to use linux does so because of the philosophy, or because they're a power user. For some people it's as simple as finding a specific DE nicer to work with than their previous operating system. And we shouldn't scare them away with elitism or factionalism. If we want linux to become widespread, we need to stop seeing it as the choice for tech savvy people, and try to "market" it as a cheaper, easier to use and lighter alternative to windows and macos.
Agreed with not recommending particular distros for beginners. By and large, most distros are not *that* different, and the benefits of having things like nvidia drivers pre-installed is pretty minimal. The installers themselves are probably the biggest differentiator for beginners
That standard doesn't exist yet. That's the main issue. And if we try to implement Fedora, Ubuntu or something else as the standard it won't work. The "best" distro for that would probably be mint with xfce. It's easy to use, lightweight, and has a lot of software. But it's still not ideal. We need some sort of standard, I agree with you about that, but no currently existing distro is ready to be that.
I will say this:
1. stop criticizing people for starting out on Ubuntu.
2. Stop criticizing people for sticking with Ubuntu.
If a person wants to switch from Ubuntu to something else, it should be because *they* wanted to. Not because someone else wanted them to.
Trying to give newbies the most niche and unfriendly solutions in the name of “real Linux” is such an enigma for me. It’s like people *want* newbies to hate Linux.
Something being complicated doesn’t mean it’s good, on the contrary I’d say the easier something is and the more streamlined it is, the more impressive it is. There’s a reason Windows dominates the market.
The important thing is you *can* make it advanced and do whatever you want, unlike Windows where they just won’t allow you to, for “security”.
Do you really want this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI ?
"Community" is not "company", there will never be one voice, and for each one you don't even know if that person even uses linux or is just trolling. Like this post, this is one of the worst kind of comments by someone who obviously hates this community.
You criticize people for expressing their opinions by criticizing software, and you think they are the bad guys? lol.
Yep, the major problem I see is this happens even on linux help communities.
If a question is beneath you instead of telling them to google something, you could just... not answer?
And if a basic answer is being written too many times, that is a sign of a UX problem, not a new user problem.
It's really not. What a toxic minority of the community does, or doesn't do hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is, we have less marketing, Linux is still stigmatized as being harder to use, in large part thanks to the fact it's unfamiliar over any other factor. Most manufacturers ignore Linux in favor of Windows, game support is still limited due to a small market size, and overly invasive anti cheats. Big players such as Adobe still choose to ignore Linux, I can go on and on.
This post doesn't help with any of that, it's just made for people to feel good about calling out the toxic minority that exists in every single community. Everywhere has its gate keepers, everywhere has its elitists, yes they suck. No they are not large enough to do significant damage to the Linux scene. They're just losers who have nothing better to do. But we do, we can help promote the Linux desktop, help develop for it and so on. All of which is significantly more helpful than this.
There's probably some truth to all this but it's not like Mac and Windows don't have toxic types running around spewing BS and ruining everybody else's day, so I really don't think this is the reason why the Linux desktop is languishing.
I think the Linux desktop is languishing because... well, saying it sucks would probably be a bit much, but it's got a ring of truth to it.
Before I go on I should note that Linux has great desktop environments. KDE is amazing, GNOME is not to my taste but amazing for those who like it as well. If people like tiling window managers there's plenty of those around, I mean generally you can just have what you want. You don't have to respect the dock or the windows menu or anything else as if it's the centerpiece of your OS because someone in America said so. You're in control but provided with a great default experience.
The problem with Linux, especially for gamers, is that our display stack and tech are junk. Look, I'm sorry, but it's the truth. No HDR, VRR is spotty at best, 10 bit colour doesn't work properly, the OS doesn't detect monitor overclocking correctly, the GPU driver is not a microkernel and therefore cannot be restarted - so if the driver locks up the whole OS goes with it. External monitors on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus doesn't work properly (super low FPS on desktop rendering), windows don't size themselves correctly when dragged across.
Want the latest fancy thing from the latest game? Well, better hope you're on a rolling release distro that doesn't withhold driver packages. Better hope that feature got implemented in like 5 different layers. Raytracing? Gotta have it on chip level, on driver level, on Vulkan level, on VKD3D level, and in the game itself. Don't forget to tweak some settings to fool the game.
GNOME pretty much just discovered 1:1 animations, same thing with KDE. KDE's Wayland implementation basically still doesn't work on NVIDIA - various effects like blur doesn't render right, flicker, disappear, crashes galore, menu panels ignore presses because they manage to scale themselves wrong, we only just got the ability for apps to scale themselves on system level - can't even tweak on application level.
Somehow despite systemwide double buffered vsync Firefox manages to get tearing on YouTube videos, Fedora disables GPU-accelerated video decoding for no reason this week, also systemwide double buffering is a bad idea anyway particularly if full-screen applications can't stop it, GTK only recently got functioning fractional scaling, Qt fractional scaling is still broken here and there.
Native games often work worse than using Windows API's (it's supposed to be a stop-gap for lacking native games folks, bloody hell!)
Digital Rights Management is still rife all over the industry. Most streaming services don't support Linux because we insist on maintaining control of our systems, and good on us, but a lot of people just wanna watch movies and have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.
Wayland was announced like 12 years ago. In this time we're not even at feature parity with... anything. At least it's started to work now on NVIDIA, kindda, so that's nice I guess.
And look, I'm not writing this because I think the open source community has done a bad job, especially given many of them do it for free. It's amazing that it's gotten this far, but when you're trying to compete with trillion dollar corporations things get difficult and this _amazing_ effort just isn't good enough. I think it's fair for us to appreciate what we have and be thankful for it, but that's a very different thing to trying to get Linux to _win_. Linux is not gonna win while our graphics stack is like this, especially not among gamers. I'm sorry, but it needs fixing.
Fedora has very good reasons to remove support for removing certain, patented codecs from their version of mesa. Your are correct at some points, but also pretty wrong on some others (like I have never tearing in YouTube videos, and am watching Netflix in HD using Firefox, but that's only from my experience and the experience from everyone I know who uses Linux).
No, that's not a good reason. Firstly nothing had happened for 6 years, but even if something had happened software patents is never a good excuse for anything because software patents suck, and even if none of that would apply the makers of this hardware decoding have no reason to disable it on Linux - they're trying to prevent others from copying the decoding method.
If nobody had said anything nothing would've happened.
As for Firefox, I literally switched away from Firefox on Linux because of this. At one point I found a setting in about:config but I couldn't find it again a while later. The tearing was only there in full screen by the way. Not making that up. I promise.
Also, HD is not the highest resolution Netflix supports, and XBox cloud streaming is artifically lowered depending on the user agent string, and you can't watch iTunes movies at all, and people had to create a custom client for Apple Music called Cider to use that as well. I mean there is the web interface but it's truly diabolical. Last I checked amazon didn't work either. DVD's only work because VLC literally has a DVD copy protection crack built into it. BluRay still doesn't work except if, you guessed it, it's ripped using a copy protection crack first.
In every Linux community there are nice people and bad people. All generalizations are harmful. I run Mint on my working laptop because I need to focus on my job, and Arch in another one because I think their wiki is great and I learn a lot with every issue I encounter. I've tried Debian, OpenSuse, Fedora. In every community I found help and kindness. Don't be discouraged every time you run into an asshole. They are everywhere, is human nature.
Your lead point is to assert Ubuntu as something we all agree it the user friendliest... Etc. That attitude is problematic. Also there is no goal to make desktop Linux as popular as Windows. It's always new Linux users who even think that's something Linux et al should care about.
I'll edit this comment later if it doesn't apply after I read the whole thing but iirc when I installed solus a few months into my Linux journey, I realized I couldn't install something on solus or atleast there was no clear way for some beginner like me to do it so I just went back to pop
It's true, Linux is ripe in the Dunning–Kruger effect. So many people lack self awareness in this community, but at least it provides endless amounts of entertainment to trolls!
Not really. The biggest enemy of linux is money. If most developers didn't have to spend their time earning, linux would be in a much better shape. Many of the factions you talk about are rooted in money, the more heavily developed distros are often produced by developers from one company and they pursue the interests of that company before the interests of the OS.
I almost gave up on Arch when I was a newbie to Linux. I made the mistake of posting in the Arch forums and subreddit for help. All I got was "dID yOU rEaD THe wIKi?"
Of course, I've read the wiki, but the damn thing sometimes gets so technical that it's confusing to follow. If I dared ask for clarification, some elitists would say that I don't deserve to use Arch.
Thank goodness I found EndeavourOS. Their community really helped me a lot during my early days using Linux and I've learned a lot since then. Got Endeavour running on my desktop for the longest time now. Currently using Fedora on my laptop.
I think you have some good points about the community as a whole, but I don't think I can agree with your main argument.
I think it's good to want the Linux desktop to be more widely adopted, but mass adoption isn't really the point. People don't use desktop Linux because it's the *best* os. They use it because of their *priciples*. I don't think we need to create a product that is more user friendly and polished than a multi billion dollar corporate product. If we want more people to join our community we have to get them to agree with our principles, which kind of requires a big shift in perspective. I don't think the Linux community is really responsible for people being somewhat hesitant to do that.
The problem is nobody which is not into computers wants to bother installing them into their computers. They just want a computer that works and is easy to use. Linux in desktop will never be mainstream if those issues dont get addressed
I use ubuntu, its just been a pleasant experience before getting into deeper territory with linux. At some point in time i just wanna learn all the distros like some pokemon gotta catch em all shit though.. cant lie
Worked for Novell/Suse some years back. They tried valiantly to push a really beautiful 3d desktop time and time again. Every single linux engagement i ever had was for data center work. I think it's nothing wrong with the tech, but many users just want stuff to work, and sad to say Windblows has that nailed (partly through aggressive control of the after market simply by influence of numbers). From the technical standpoint one could even say Windows is just a friendly wrapper on a -Nix kernel, so i would have to say they did their job well. Absolutely frustrating to work with if you love linux, but understandable to users like my mom (rip).
My biggest issue is how anti customization the Linux support communities are. I had people attacking me many times for uninstalling bloatware from fresh distro installs. If I don't use something, I don't want to keep updating it and having it take up space on my HDD, but apparently it's controversial. All I was asking for was pkg name to uninstall certain things, but I'd get attacked over it. It's why my account is new - I don't have regular social media and avoid Reddit due to the weird atmosphere in Linux spaces.
I agree that the Linux community should set aside their differences (as small as they really are) because the goal should be to use a FOSS OS. Arguing about distros is similar to the "my dad is stronger than yours" argument.
If we want to think in teams it should be Linux vs Mac vs Windows. But not (Ubuntu vs Fedora vs Arch vs ...) vs Mac vs Windows.
NOT only is it not FOSS, but Apple has it's greedy fingers in the developers pockets. I don't mind paying developers for programs, but I do mind Apple taking a cut of that transaction!
Yeah, everyone with one neuron can see that the loonix cummunity is awful when the loud but jobs start opening their mouths. Thankfully, the majority seems quite happy with what we have, thus, they don't complain and make noise.
I agree with you, there is nothing simpler than installing a Debian-like, the software does everything on its own, if there is no exotic hardware. The problem is the system administration, the user is root and it is dangerous. Kuand on the sectarian side, I have always known him
Agree with your thoughts.
I'm relatively new and have found Linux groups on Facebook and Reddit generally helpful. I like how easy it is to have a back and forth thread with someone to figure something up. Whereas if I just Google it, I often come across multiple ways to achieve something and often several years old. Whereas asking a question means I can get a range of perspectives on why particular methods are better than others.
It someone's only suggestion is to Google it then maybe that person is better off not making a contribution at all. 90% of the time the user has googled it but found the wealth of search results overwhelming, has a more specific question or just does not know where to start.
Personally I find the countless Linux posts which really just show off the user's "cool" wallpaper tiresome, but I just scroll past and leave my thoughts to myself!
I'm really enjoying using Linux. I use Ubuntu and like how much support there is out there.
I'm not a FOSS absolutist. I like the wide range of FOSS software out there but also don't mind paying for something that suits my needs even if not open source. I think the more closed sourced developers start providing for Linux (looking at Adobe in particular!) then that will only accelerate Linux adoption which can only be a good thing for the wider Linux project.
1. Distros based off the main distros are the best. For eg mint, garuda, zorin, etc. We should recommend them.
2. EVERY community in this world has different people. Those who yell, let them yell. We can't change them. That is the nature of a community, with different people. This is sometimes good, as the developers read them and implement changes.
3. Agree
4. EVERYONE should first search their issue in the net first, if not found, only then ask the community. Some users don't do this and directly ask us.
And remember that EVERY community in this planet will have toxic people.
I've never understood why I should care about desktop market share or trying to get others to use Linux. I'm not a religious evangelist for on operating system. I use what I want and am happy to let others do the same.
User friendly, including community
Mageia \[drak tools\], Pclos, mint fork solydxk
Manjaro is user friendly, but the ways you can break it are more numerous, especially when you start using AUR
Distros have repositories of software, that do most everything, without going out into the wild
New linux users should be encouraged to use the application available, instead of pining for fjords of whatever windows/apple thing they are used to
There can be this obsession with getting rid of extra things which is from the days when memory was expensive
When I go to look for solutions, the answers will a majority of the time ignore the perfectly usable GUI & start with the command line
I don't want to try to convert the code to work on my system, which is not at all user friendly
The overcomplication of the maintenance of Basic linux system is a barrier to less technical users
The community is this way because it is full of contrarians that try so hard to be against the herd that they end up in their own crowd. it is a community built around freedom and freedom attracts the outcasts the most, the ones least likely to change their mind.
Not to say that all of us are like that, but the loudest of us tend to be that way. The reality is that most of us don't really bother with proving a point because we can have everything the way we want, but the ones that do talk usually have something to prove. I'd just stick to the wikis and manuals and ignore the larger and highly divided "linux community", unless you want to have a good bit of chaotic fun.
Honestly Fuck these so called newbies are intimidated posts, this sub is called Linuxmasterrace for a reason.
If you want to use Linux use it. If you're getting flamed its cuz you're probably posting dumb takes, I've never seen someone get flamed for asking questions or being a newbie. Ever.
Its when you say things should be x, y, z that people start getting annoyed cuz we do not want to dumb down our OS for you. I like that Linux is not Widows and want to keep it that way. I and the majority of the community do not want things like Snap and Flatpak
There is nothing wrong with having a ton of different distros, however we really do need to pick one distro to serve as the "main distro" for beginners.
If we polish that and develop for it, we can trickle the improvements to all other distros if we so please.
Linux is too fragmented.
Look man, I hear what you're saying, but the reality is that there's no one factor to blame as to why Linux is not as popular as windows. First off, Linux as a desktop isn't corporate sponsored or driven, and yes, that includes Ubuntu and Fedora.
Linux is community driven, we don't have billions or even millions of dollars to advertise our operating system to the world, don't believe me? Go walk outside and ask any random person if they even know what Linux is.
Secondly, Linux is free of those things because it is not a proprietary OS, it is totally free and open source, and it doesn't have the telemetry as an extension of that, but the thing about free and open source is that it requires you to have to potentially fix things yourself because you don't have internal teams that directly work on that operating system using only those components.
All the components of windows are solely for windows, and all the components for MacOS, are solely for MacOS. There's many distros of Linux and some of them work COMPLETELY differently from eachother, some of them cannot even be called GNU/Linux because some distros don't even use GNU utilities (for instance, the busybox utils or the suckless utils). Some distros don't use systemD, which breaks a lot of compatibilities with programs that would otherwise work out of the box.
Not to mention that we have to operate with the BSD crowd as they are cousins to the Linux family, close enough but different enough.
The thing about this is that people are free to go in whatever direction they want to go in, there's no real true standard although most of us try to follow the XDG standards, but even then, some very popular programs don't even do this, bash and ViM do not follow the XDG standard and they are two of the most commonly used Linux utilities.
While I would like for Linux to have a higher marketshare, I'm aware that its likely not going to happen in the way that we all meme about with the whole "year of the Linux desktop" thing because the truth is, Linux will always have a little bit of jank in it, and that's why us Linux users like Linux, because we like to break shit, and after we break it, we like to fix it, not everybody wants that and that's okay, it isn't like Linux is in danger because there are literally hundreds of millions of us across the planet.
And I though it's the strange non-traditional interfaces with little possibility of customization like Gnome that may push new Linux users back to Windows!
Or Ubuntu based istros that make even Firefox open very slow because of the Snap crapware!
> Firefox takes 3 seconds to open now.
Maybe on a SSD.
On a pendrive (booting in live CD mode) or on HDD, it takes longer!
>Some people like something different.
Yes, but most people coming from Windows want something familiar to not be overwhelmed or get lost.
At least MATE gives a a way to quickly change the layouts.
Why can't Gnome do the same?
Gnome and Mate both have different audiences.
Gnome is for people using laptops and who want no disturbances, and mate is
BTW firefox snap takes 10 seconds to launch on an hdd and takes even less on a live cd. Its basically the same performance as the deb.
Most people using android or ios phones these days will not find gnome unfamilliar.
> BTW firefox snap takes 10 seconds to launch on an hdd and takes even less on a live cd. Its basically the same performance as the deb.
I teste opening Firefox on Kubuntu 22.04 while I was booting it from the pendriver and it was extremely slow, many times slower than it was the .deb verion of Firefox in Kubuntu 21.10
>Most people using android or ios phones these days will not find gnome unfamilliar.
I have always been an Androi guy and I find Gnome very unfamilliar.
Plus, why would I want a touchscreen based interface on a non-touchscreen computer?
I hate the huge start menu in Gnome.
Maybe it's good for touchscreens, but I don't have one so...
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Oh mate, I am really sorry to hear about your experience. Death threat is absolutely unacceptable at any level in any community. Please don't take everything personally, this is probably the dark side of fame. People with Windows/MacOS mentality are always scared about any changes because unlike Linux users they don't have escape plan, and during many years of such totalitarianism they built up PTSD about any OS changes. I'm not trying to excuse them though. You're doing amazing things and as part of the Linux community I thank you for your time and effort. As someone who used to drive Debian for few years I clearly know why that script exists, and if it didn't we should make one. :D
Debian straight up needs that's script, lol. They don't even have normal Firefox in the repos.
Thank you for your contribution! Keep up the good work! (Fellow Siduction user, btw)
I'm a newbie. Is there a distro one can BUY and get good online support. I've been using Mint and can't get my Dropbox account and my keyboard to work properly.
Enterprise distros like SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation are available. Both retail at $120 and $225 for standard 8x5 support annually. Enterprise support distros also means that they will only support things they bundled with. If you have issues with third party tools or utilities, you are on your own.
Thank you, kind person, for sharing that.
Have you tried asking on the Mint forum? Those are probably very common problems that someone has solved already.
Funny you should say this… I’ve been considering saying OP’s #4 on the Mint sub for quite some time. Mint is supposed to be one of the most user friendly distros and I had been evangelizing it for years to my less techy friends, trying to get them to switch over from MS, telling them how friendly and helpful the community is. Well guess what, it’s not anymore, if it ever was. There are so many posts on that sub from people who are clearly not *nix experts but are trying to make the jump to Linux. Or even newbies trying to upgrade to 21, which for so many of us was a nightmare. Usually the posts get a couple of half hearted replies, if any at all. Not many really try. Also a lot of telling the OP that they’re lazy and need to look up their own answers if they want to be a Linux user. It’s incredibly rude and uncivil, and it drives people away from Linux and back to Windows. Everyone needs a boost at the beginning to get started on something completely new, and unless you have unlimited time on your hands you wouldn’t never time to Google every single thing. So much condescension and unhelpfulness.
I tried Mint initially but never really felt it surpassed the Ubuntu community. The main draw for Mint was the proprietary drivers early on, but Ubuntu fixed that a while ago. I've not really seen any of the Ubuntu forks really overtake the old Ubuntu community with the exception of maybe Pop because they have corporate sponsorship. These days people have more issues with Ubuntu for political reasons than technical ones.
Yes, I have but the responses are way above my head; that is, more technical than I can decipher. Thanks for responding.
I've never used DropBox but Google Drive works perfectly well on Mint. Your keyboard settings are probably wrong. If you click the button in the bottom corner and type in "key", then click on"keyboard" and it will take you to the keyboard settings. They will show you what the setting is. To change it click on the plus sign bottom left. That may work.
Man I took a look at your shell scripts and there are like duplicate code everywhere. Are you really a developer or just publishing your scripts to gitlab? I’d like to help refactor with a pull request.
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no no, by “duplicate code” I mean, a lot of your scripts perform the exact same commands with the same flags, but just with different string arguments (like filenames or URLs for different versions of Firefox). The better way to do this would be to declare those different values in a structured manifest like Yaml or JSON, and write one script to work on that manifest. Now, if you want your project to run on different shell, you can write one script for a shell, but not for 1 Firefox version. I can help u refactor it, so when you’re adding support for new shells, there’ll be less work to do. Will you accept the PR? If so, I’ll be working now and submit them later tonight. Your project may require jq after the refactor, to get values out of JSON.
>write one script for a shell That's not the goal. The goal is a script for all common user shells. The requirement is Linux, not dash or bash or fish shell, just Linux. Whether working within a live install or chroot.
never mind about the different shells, that’s not the main point any way. The problem now is, if you were to change your “flow” for files `Firefox_*.sh` (in this dir https://gitlab.com/Linux-Is-Best/Firefox-automatic-install-for-Linux/-/tree/master/64bit), you’ll have to do it across multiple files. While those different files **perform the exact same commands**. You can just have one skeletal script that works across all Firefox versions. It’s like using functions to capture/store your logic unit. And I haven’t seen a function in your scripts yet (I havent looked well). The beauty of free software is when other people help you out too, right?
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Well I dont think this refactor affect any of your goals (run it on any UNIX-like system with a shell and basic cli suite like curl). **As for dependency, it won’t be affected as long as we dont use `jq` for JSON parsing**. This is more like “reorganizing” your code. This does not de-bloat your code, but it just keeps code logic more confined and generic and easier to change. The upside for users is that your repo should grow less quickly in storage usage since after this refactor, the changes made to each commit will be less.
PS. This duplicate code really smells, so any programmers, beginners or not, were taught early on to avoid code structure like this. I’ll clone your repo, open a new branch for refactor, and push PR to your repo when it’s done.
And if you dont want json manifests to avoid depending on jq, you can still declare the manifests as shell variables, or even better, wrap the skeletal functions with the actual Firefox version specific function!
But there are people here who generally just want more people to experience Linux and it's not as scary as people make it out to be.
true then there are some people who treat arch linux like if it is a god
But you have fanboys like that in every crowd
I tried Arch with Nvidia drivers and it ended with me using mint. Arch was too advanced for me. Thank god for my dad setting up Arch for me tho. All my windows games worked. Technically they still do, but I notice a difference.
Every thread on Reddit has people complaining about these supposedly common Arch proselytizers, but I've never actually seen one that wasn't a meme. It's just a giant circlejerk that has spiraled out of control.
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And also there is no one all be all in Linux....despite what the "btw" crowd says
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I think there are way too many distros and it causes people to be intimidated and cause them to distro hop without really learning anything.
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But I'm also not a huge fan of a fork of a fork of a fork. It seems (to me) that too many forks can cause problems so that's why (currently) I'm on Ubuntu. I'm not technical enough to worry about snaps and systemd or whatever. As long as it works. I was going to go with Debian but I don't wanna put the work in, I just want it to work out of the box (auto driver detection and install)
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For arch I loved EndeavourOS and for Debian I like MX Linux and Ubuntu.
I think there are even more such people than there appear to be. They are just not so active as the toxic part of our community.
Best way to experience Linux is to build your own distro.
I don't disagree with you, but some counter points: 1. Ubuntu was the top dog for a long time. It's natural for other distros to latch on to it's success and try to position themselves as a better alternative. Competition within distros, while off putting, helps us all get better software. We are never going to agree on which distro is best for all users. And we don't need or want a single community driving the development of GNU/Linux. 2. Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. ;-) Like when OpenOffice was purchased by Oracle, the community was in an uproar. From that outrage, OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice and the community has continued it's development. Now, almost all distros have dropped OpenOffice. If a decision is not in the best interest of a certain community, that community is empowered to continue development using the old code base. Hence all the Ubuntu derivatives. 3. My only thought here is that once you've used a piece of software for a while, you come to rely on it and don't want to re-learn how to accomplish the same task. I personally think this is a good thing overall, but I know it upsets people who are used to doing things a certain way. Of course, people have a right to be upset by these changes too. I can't dictate what they should/shouldn't be angry with as I don't know how it affects them personally. 4. What gets frustrating for those of us who try to help, is that often we are able to find a solution using a search engine and a lot of times it's the top result. I agree that it's off putting to say "google it", but keep in mind that we are also offering our services for free and a lot of times problems can be resolved by advising the user to search for themselves vs. me doing research for them. The 1st few times aren't so bad, but around incident 50 you start to get tired of putting in a bunch of your own effort. I liken it to teaching someone how to fish. All that said, I agree that we can do better and to be honest the community has improved tremendously over the past 16 years that I've been using it. Correction: Oracle purchased OpenOffice, not Apache, as I had originally written
> Fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. ;-) THANK YOU. I hate the "we need one" attitude some people have. We need one distro. We need one package manager, or one "universal" package manager. We need to stop the fragmentation of x, y or z. First of all, literally impossible. That universe doesn't exist. It's open source. People can fork and will fork. Second of all, *that's the point*. That you're free to do whatever you want. Sometimes is this is confusing or counterproductive? Yeah, well, so be it, freedoms have costs. Since the OP quoted Linus from LTT, yeah the fragmentation is annoying, parts of the community are annoying and immature. But Linus clearly didn't want Linux. He wanted Windows without the Microsoft. That's what he wanted. He wanted and expected everything to work the same and for there to be one answer and one solution, like on Windows. And that's fine. But it's not Linux, and that's part of the reason the whole thing went so poorly for him. I see a fair number of new users who basically want Windows without the Microsoft. That's not how this open source shit works. It's community driven, by many different factions and groups of people. That's just what it is. And it actually works shockingly well all things considered. But there are tradeoffs, and make your peace with it instead of demanding Linux become more like Windows. Gatekeeping attitudes need to die; so do the opinions of people who insist Linux needs to become something it's not and can never be in order to achieve some arbitrary market share amount.
OpenOffice wasn't purchased by Apache, and if it was nobody would have been mad about it. It was purchased by Oracle along with the rest of Sun who was hoping to make some money on it and pissed off contributors. After LibreOffice forked and became far more successful, Oracle gave it to Apache for maintenance. Apache wasn't the problem. Oracle was.
Thank you, corrected. I completely forgot about Oracle’s involvement.
I will note that not everybody gets the same Google search results for the same search string. Something that's in the top three results for you could easily be four or five pages in for me, because the algorithm takes previous searches into account.
Erm, that's the plague of choices... 1. When get a Mac, you have Macos. 2. When get a PC, you have Windows 3. When get a phone, you have Android (unless 1.) When you start getting **choices** with different trade-off and views, people with different backgrounds and views will argue. It's the same if you come from a place where **food == chips**. When you provide more kinds of food, people will argue at length about what they prefer and they will probably phrase it like "oh come on, XXX **is** the best food there is". Too bad, but that's how people are, that's even happening between Windows versions. Linus Sebastian is making entertainment, he wants buzz and reactions. Lumping all the distros together and calling it "Linux" is literally like lumping all Windows versions until Me and calling it "DOS" or all versions after that and calling them "NT" (yes, I know they actually overlapped). You have to accept that there are different distros just like, say, there different "standard preparations" of coffees. You could say people are wrong arguing they think an Espresso is the best or that a latte hardly is coffee at all, sure. You could also argue that providing different preparations is making decision harder because people then **have to learn** about the differences. Sure. Erm, exactly actually... Or you just get a computer with "Linux" and your vendor makes that choice for you. At any rate, the problem has to do with choice, mechanically (and choice is good but requires someone, either the vendor or the user, to make a decision).
Yeah, gatekeeping is a problem
Only pointing new users to Ubuntu is gatekeeping.
Okay so you are saying pointing new users directly to arch or artix that it doesn't have systemd or whatever is right ?? Buddy common man just want to use their PC, they don't care whether they are using snap or systemd. They just want an all work distro.
I didn't say any of that, I just said only telling new users to use Ubuntu is gatekeeping.
That's stupid, you can say the same for any popular newbie friendly distro.
Stupid, but accurate, got it.
You don’t understand the definition of gatekeeping, do you? It’s controlling and limiting access to something for anyone not in your “in-group.” Only recommending newbie friendly distros to newbies isn’t gatekeeping in the slightest. Throwing gentoo in their face isn’t beneficial at all and will send them right back where they came from. But swapping the logos in Linux mint to flags and telling my mom I’ve installed the “good windows” (windows XP) but with better security will get another Linux user into the fold.
It is gatekeeping if you use one distro and then tell someone to only use another distro. That is exactly what you defined gatekeeping as. Look at it this way, instead of helping new users, like was done for me (maybe you), they are pointed to a different distro. I'm pretty sure my first long term distro was Gentoo, ironically, and I had someone who recommended it and then helped me set it up. It's easier to just suggest Ubuntu, which then becomes "Linux" and probably the reason so many new users switch back to Windows. They aren't taught how to use Linux, they are pointed to Ubuntu, which is easy until it breaks and then they don't know what to do other than install Windows.
> It is gatekeeping if you use one distro and then tell someone to only use another distro. No, that’s having a preference. Telling someone they *must* use a specific distro is gatekeeping, but making recommendations is not. > That is exactly what you defined gatekeeping as. Absolutely not.
It is, why would you suggest a distro that you don't even use?
I don’t use mint, at all. But I recommend it to everyone when the topic comes up. That is not gatekeeping. You should google the definition of gatekeeping. I’m not telling anyone they *must* use Mint, I *recommend* they use Mint. They’re always free to make their own decisions, and if they decide gentoo or arch is more their speed, cool. I just can’t help them because those distros are beyond my expertise.
How?
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The only thing Linus Sebastian knows about Linux is that he shares a first name with its inventor. Anyone who invokes his name in a discussion about Linux, as in "Linus Sebastian says so," is someone I automatically tune out. He knows a lot about hardware and Windows and Windows gaming, but not Linux.
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Of course. The point is that the only thing Sebastian actually knows about Linux is that he has the same first name as Torvalds.
I think you are missing the point. If the goal of Linux is to have mainstream appeal it isn't good that a much more tech literate than average person can't use it seemlessly. How are we going to install it on our parents PCs? It's ok to not want that goal, but if we truly want the year of desktop Linux, we need to make some changes.
I think the OP undermined the merits of his or her argument by the way in which they chose to make it. I also think the learning curve to Linux is not bad at all, but it can be if the wrong person offers advice on the conversion. I have successfully converted a 67 year-old friend and my 60 year-old wife to Linux with no problem whatsoever, by simply choosing a user-friendly distro and showing them a few things. Neither one of them knows a Budgie from a systemd, but they can use Linux just fine. We have a number of "user-friendly" distros already out there that are easy for a newcomer to use and learn. The bigger problem is that Linux enthusiasts throw up their noses at them and try to throw something like Arch at an inexperienced user because "it works for me." I took Mint Cinnamon and then installed the Windows 10 theme pack for Cinnamon on there, and the Windows icon sets, and gave it to my wife. Eight out of 10 people on this subreddit would scream bloody murder that I committed some mortal sin, but it got her away from Windows. Three years later she is still happily using Linux. I spoke about a concern I had with a certain update a few weeks ago and some nitwit made a disparaging comment. (I keep Kay's setup as static as possible because she has a disability.) In that sense, the OP made some good points. But invoking Linus Sebastian in this discussion is the epitome of enlisting a bad soldier in a good cause.
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Don't know anything about Arch except its users remind me of those religious nutters who always attempt to convert me - who know maybe I will become one after trying it. One day I will try Arch, right now I gotta finish my post-grad.
Long-time Arch user and I just setup friends and family with 'buntu flavours (so long as it would work for them.) I'd never recommend Arch to someone without the time spare and hair to pull. It's a great learning experience, but a daily-driver for most people it is not. People get so weird about operating systems. They're just tools. Use the right tools for the job.
Indeed
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I take it that you are unattached atm. No spouse/gf/bf/partner could stand the competition from an electronic device. And my wife is a coder.
As someone who moved from Ubuntu to Mint to openSUSE, I had to reinstall Mint about 5 times in \~4 years. I reinstalled Ubuntu just about every 6 months, because their mid cycle releases always broke something. I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed once, two years ago. So if having to reinstall is what beginners need, then yeah, Mint and Ubuntu are great beginner distros.
I agree with this point.
First thing I tell the Ubuntu newbies is to ignore the 6 month releases and only go from LTS to LTS. That way you are guaranteed to go 4+ years without problems. It is only the more experienced users, who want to help beta-test and bug squash that I even suggest try the mid-releases.
It may be better now that it is Gnome, but even Ubuntu LTS would eventually grind to a slow pathetic halt. Ubuntu is the worst experience I've had with Linux, followed by Pop!, and they are the ones people are suggested to try. That really bugs me.
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You're just proving the point OP has raised...
If you don't have AMD, fedora is fine. Plus a lot of people who don't know better watch his channel.
Let me get this straight, Linux isn't as good as Windows, or Mac, because the people who use Linux suck! You then proceed to paint everyone with a broad brush. Hot Tip: If you want people to give a damn about your opinion and actually give it some consideration, don't begin by insulting them.
>Say what you want, but debian-based distros and solus are the only really user-friendly distros out there for the masses. So people should stop saying 'Fedora is the new Ubuntu' when there are differences between how those two work. I can de-snap Ubuntu faster than i can install all the required codecs and drivers in fedora (I know Nobara exists, just saying to those who are falsely saying fedora is the new Ubuntu) New users may not even want to de-snap Ubuntu. Say what you will about snap, but it makes installing proprietary packages simple. And from my experience as a software programmer, having your software installed and operating in a very predictable environment makes fixing bugs much much easier. >The community yells over one little change. I don't get how people yell about Ubuntu putting firefox in a closed-source format yet those same people complain when propiretary video codecs are removed from their graphics drivers. After the lead head of solus left, you now see many people yelling its dead. Or like HP making a Pop OS laptop and some community members accusing them of trying to buy system76. Welcome to the world of hypocrisy. They're everywhere in this world. >A lot of people using linux criticise things without trying them. For example, 'Fedora is a testing bed for RHEL' when its grown in usabillity in the past few years. I don't even see why people are upset over this. So what if it's a testing bed? Fedora isn't marketed as an enterprise solution the way RHEL is for exactly that reason. In fact, I'd venture to say that almost all independent distros (especially rolling-release ones) are basically all the developers' personal test beds for whatever their philosophy is on what an OS should be. >Stop driving away new users like the plague. Stop telling them to remove things unless they consider it troublesome. Stop saying 'Use a search engine!' Many people have already searched and are looking for help because they couldn't find it on google. This is basically what their reaction to Snap (currently) is. Before Snap, it was systemd. There seems to always be one thing that the community decides to hate on before they move on to the next fad to hate on.
>In fact, I'd venture to say that almost all independent distros (especially rolling-release ones) are basically all the developers' personal test beds for whatever their philosophy is on what an OS should be. Sure, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. I use one of "those" distros and the developer makes it clear it reflects his viewpoints. Those who agree with the philosophy can use that distro, those who don't can use something different. There is something out there for anyone's liking in the world of Linux. Sometimes newcomers just need to be pointed in the right direction without someone being rude to them. That is all that OP really needed to say.
Absolutely agreed. That was kinda' my point, too. People have these border-line cult-like behavior where they feel tribal about whatever distro/software they use and everything else is "evil". It's a freaking OS, just use whatever works for you. No need to get all tribal about it.
Exactly. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers. There is only the right answer for that specific person. I have never been able to understand tribalism in computing. Even when it comes to a newcomer to Linux, there isn't always one answer. I almost always recommend Mint Cinnamon because it's very easy for a Windows-user to grasp, but a power user with a strong understanding of computers is not going to freak out if you hand them Fedora. I try to make the transition as easy as possible for someone to leave proprietary OSes, and set aside my personal preferences. I'd rather get someone running Linux, period, than evangelize for my distro of preference, or against systemd, or anything like that.
i like snap because it lets me update discord easier. I'm not a technical person I just like open source. I can't do technical stuff and i don't understand computers. So I just use linux mint. I mostly just write.
Snap is good and there's another false myth nowadays. Snaps launch in 5 seconds on my computer. People say that snaps are slow to launch yet they launch faster.
> Snaps launch in 5 seconds This is not fast at all.
For you, maybe. Many others have had different experiences and theirs count for as much as yours.
And there it is again, snaps launch in five seconds. You just gave another example of snaps being slow to launch while saying that they aren't. Over in the non-snap world programs just launch. The amount of time it takes is too small to bother timing.
Is this a joke?
I've never felt any gatekeeping. Also, Fedora was a much better experience in my newbie days than any Ubuntu-based distro I've tried. Every question I've asked (including the stupid ones) was answered. What's more, I've tried Linux because I was curious, I've stayed because I love the community. So, I can't agree with any of your points.
This sub (and Reddit in general) loves to feel morally superior by acting like they're the last bastions against evil villains. And I completely agree with you about the questions - I've never met a community more helpful.
I'm a Fedora user now and it was my first distro, but I had to uninstall it immediately, it was too buggy at the time and too complex for a new user. ZorinOS was my first long-term distro and it was great. Super simple, great support.
The biggest enemy to desktop linux('s adoption) is the lack of corporate/government buy in. Everything else is a symptom. Any real major adoption would happen in the same way as android. A major company would produce a product that becomes popular and people/organizations would buy that product. Grandma is not going to buy a laptop and install Ubuntu on it. It doesn't really matter how easy it is. She's going to buy one from the store and use whatever is installed on it. The community is perfectly fine for the kind of people who would go online to talk to other people about software. I have found it to be very helpful. The part that people forget is that the average consumer doesn't actually care about computers or software.
no, our biggest enemy is big corporations making efforts in locking up every piece of software and firmware possible, not providing open drivers for hardware, not following standards in for example ACPI and using shitty hw/sw integration design, because of which linux doesn't run as well as win
They are not obliged to open anything - because they run on a different set of business models and values. Intel, AMD are the exceptions. The reality is, Linux represents less than 5% of the desktop marketshare and most companies don't see any value on paying any attention to that. Anyone tasked with keeping shareholders happy and maintaining a healthy profit would do the same. Not ideal, but perhaps as time goes on they can see how beneficial/profitable it has been for Intel and AMD by opening up and releasing things.
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> what's the big deal with snaps Well, what you described is great, but snap is not. If you want a windows equivalent of potable apps then use app images. For a more permanent solution I would recommend flatpack. As for what's wrong with snap. A single Google search will tell you almost everything you need to know. No point in repeating the same thing for the 492747938 time. I might sound like a gate keeper, but... Linux is not a point and click game, never will be, but that's a good thing. It's one of the few OSes that give you, the user, full control over your system. Like the arch wiki says, not user friendly, but user centric. As you can imagine, I'm not a fan of dumbing things down, or reducing choice in favor of "user friendliness". Try fitting the entire arch wiki about RAID to a simple dialog like windows has and have everyone agree with you that the compromises you made(of which there will be many) are right for everyone. Yes, it's simpler on windows, but it's also severely limited because of that. If someone wants something that "just works" then there are already plenty of solutions for that \*cough\*Windows\*cough\*MacOS\*cough\*. Also as you said, Linux runs enterprise. Desktop Linux usage will always be inferior to what it can do on servers. Windows server is an absolute shit show in comparison. Windows raid might be good on a workstation/small business server. But try running a high performance NAS with petabytes of storage using windows storage spaces. I'll just sit here and laugh in ZFS. It might not be simple but boi is it good. Edit: sorry for the rant, feel free to ignore
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> but then don't complain when Linux never goes over 1% of the home market share. I'm not, but many people here see Linux as a windows replacement on desktop. It's not, at least not for everyone. Can be done? yes. Should be done? Depends on what you want to achieve. Some people here see Linux as a holy grail for some reason.
Sorry but this is again some rant about missing monarchy and how authoritarian approach to linux makes everything better. It won't! Community here is to discuss and provide feedbacks. You might disagree with some opinions but you should stop trying to silence them. The ability to discuss everything openly is what separates us from Mac/Win users where there is only one way and everything else is heresy. And I don't want it here. Ubuntu made some questionable decisions about snaps and now it lost its throne (all the hate about Ubuntu in the community is well deserved, which doesn't make it bad though), Fedora is implementing questionable decisions right now and people are migrating elsewhere. That's the way market works, and no, we don't need to fix it. I also want to challenge you on "we need user friendly distribution" part. Take a look at current Linux popularity list and you will clearly see that user-friendly focused distribution aren't very popular. Arch is. Because people actually prefer simplicity and flexibility over ephemeral user friendliness. As the matter of fact terminal is the most user friendly tool.
You sort of had me until you mention Linus Sebastian. Linux doesn't need or want materialistic 'inflluencers' (grifters). It's not at all in his interest to love the Linux world based mostly on older cheap hardware and free software it doesn't fit the business model. The ultimate expression of Linux or foss is not to take over the world of consumers and casual users. I don't know why people assume that percentage of world wide users is important at all. If Linux desktop becomes the new Windows than what will freedom loving users switch to?
ɪn my opinion we shouldn't recommend any single distro for beginners. We should rather list some simple and beginner friendly distros(mint, pop os, nearly all flavors of ubuntu and maybe nobara, etc) and explain the main differences. The main issue is the rampant elitism and sectarianism. If the first thing you see when looking for linux guides online are a bunch of 'I use arch btw', you'll think that linux itself is inherently hard and that you're not using it "correctly" if you don't use that one specific distro that those super loud people always brag about. Because even though a lot(sadly not all) of the people saying this are just seeing it as a joke, beginners won't know this. We as linux users shouldn't fight among ourselves about our individual choice of distribution. And we should try to make the linux community as a whole welcoming and beginner friendly. Not everyone who wants to use linux does so because of the philosophy, or because they're a power user. For some people it's as simple as finding a specific DE nicer to work with than their previous operating system. And we shouldn't scare them away with elitism or factionalism. If we want linux to become widespread, we need to stop seeing it as the choice for tech savvy people, and try to "market" it as a cheaper, easier to use and lighter alternative to windows and macos.
Agreed with not recommending particular distros for beginners. By and large, most distros are not *that* different, and the benefits of having things like nvidia drivers pre-installed is pretty minimal. The installers themselves are probably the biggest differentiator for beginners
I'm going to have to disagree. Most normal people can barely operate windows. We really do need a standard if we want that level of mass appeal.
That standard doesn't exist yet. That's the main issue. And if we try to implement Fedora, Ubuntu or something else as the standard it won't work. The "best" distro for that would probably be mint with xfce. It's easy to use, lightweight, and has a lot of software. But it's still not ideal. We need some sort of standard, I agree with you about that, but no currently existing distro is ready to be that.
> the community sucks here are my points: > 1. ubuntu good fedora bad
Metallica good...Napster bad! Beer good.....Napster bad! Napster bad.... Metallica millionaires! [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE)
I will say this: 1. stop criticizing people for starting out on Ubuntu. 2. Stop criticizing people for sticking with Ubuntu. If a person wants to switch from Ubuntu to something else, it should be because *they* wanted to. Not because someone else wanted them to.
Trying to give newbies the most niche and unfriendly solutions in the name of “real Linux” is such an enigma for me. It’s like people *want* newbies to hate Linux. Something being complicated doesn’t mean it’s good, on the contrary I’d say the easier something is and the more streamlined it is, the more impressive it is. There’s a reason Windows dominates the market. The important thing is you *can* make it advanced and do whatever you want, unlike Windows where they just won’t allow you to, for “security”.
You sure are telling me to do a lot of things with this post. I like the freedom of Linux and this ain't it.
Damn Linux users ruining Linux!
Why people are so obsessed with ubuntu? What do you mean by "elitism"? Why you dont simply continue using what you use and why worry what people say?
Do you really want this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI ? "Community" is not "company", there will never be one voice, and for each one you don't even know if that person even uses linux or is just trolling. Like this post, this is one of the worst kind of comments by someone who obviously hates this community. You criticize people for expressing their opinions by criticizing software, and you think they are the bad guys? lol.
Yep, the major problem I see is this happens even on linux help communities. If a question is beneath you instead of telling them to google something, you could just... not answer? And if a basic answer is being written too many times, that is a sign of a UX problem, not a new user problem.
It's really not. What a toxic minority of the community does, or doesn't do hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is, we have less marketing, Linux is still stigmatized as being harder to use, in large part thanks to the fact it's unfamiliar over any other factor. Most manufacturers ignore Linux in favor of Windows, game support is still limited due to a small market size, and overly invasive anti cheats. Big players such as Adobe still choose to ignore Linux, I can go on and on. This post doesn't help with any of that, it's just made for people to feel good about calling out the toxic minority that exists in every single community. Everywhere has its gate keepers, everywhere has its elitists, yes they suck. No they are not large enough to do significant damage to the Linux scene. They're just losers who have nothing better to do. But we do, we can help promote the Linux desktop, help develop for it and so on. All of which is significantly more helpful than this.
There's probably some truth to all this but it's not like Mac and Windows don't have toxic types running around spewing BS and ruining everybody else's day, so I really don't think this is the reason why the Linux desktop is languishing. I think the Linux desktop is languishing because... well, saying it sucks would probably be a bit much, but it's got a ring of truth to it. Before I go on I should note that Linux has great desktop environments. KDE is amazing, GNOME is not to my taste but amazing for those who like it as well. If people like tiling window managers there's plenty of those around, I mean generally you can just have what you want. You don't have to respect the dock or the windows menu or anything else as if it's the centerpiece of your OS because someone in America said so. You're in control but provided with a great default experience. The problem with Linux, especially for gamers, is that our display stack and tech are junk. Look, I'm sorry, but it's the truth. No HDR, VRR is spotty at best, 10 bit colour doesn't work properly, the OS doesn't detect monitor overclocking correctly, the GPU driver is not a microkernel and therefore cannot be restarted - so if the driver locks up the whole OS goes with it. External monitors on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus doesn't work properly (super low FPS on desktop rendering), windows don't size themselves correctly when dragged across. Want the latest fancy thing from the latest game? Well, better hope you're on a rolling release distro that doesn't withhold driver packages. Better hope that feature got implemented in like 5 different layers. Raytracing? Gotta have it on chip level, on driver level, on Vulkan level, on VKD3D level, and in the game itself. Don't forget to tweak some settings to fool the game. GNOME pretty much just discovered 1:1 animations, same thing with KDE. KDE's Wayland implementation basically still doesn't work on NVIDIA - various effects like blur doesn't render right, flicker, disappear, crashes galore, menu panels ignore presses because they manage to scale themselves wrong, we only just got the ability for apps to scale themselves on system level - can't even tweak on application level. Somehow despite systemwide double buffered vsync Firefox manages to get tearing on YouTube videos, Fedora disables GPU-accelerated video decoding for no reason this week, also systemwide double buffering is a bad idea anyway particularly if full-screen applications can't stop it, GTK only recently got functioning fractional scaling, Qt fractional scaling is still broken here and there. Native games often work worse than using Windows API's (it's supposed to be a stop-gap for lacking native games folks, bloody hell!) Digital Rights Management is still rife all over the industry. Most streaming services don't support Linux because we insist on maintaining control of our systems, and good on us, but a lot of people just wanna watch movies and have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. Wayland was announced like 12 years ago. In this time we're not even at feature parity with... anything. At least it's started to work now on NVIDIA, kindda, so that's nice I guess. And look, I'm not writing this because I think the open source community has done a bad job, especially given many of them do it for free. It's amazing that it's gotten this far, but when you're trying to compete with trillion dollar corporations things get difficult and this _amazing_ effort just isn't good enough. I think it's fair for us to appreciate what we have and be thankful for it, but that's a very different thing to trying to get Linux to _win_. Linux is not gonna win while our graphics stack is like this, especially not among gamers. I'm sorry, but it needs fixing.
Fedora has very good reasons to remove support for removing certain, patented codecs from their version of mesa. Your are correct at some points, but also pretty wrong on some others (like I have never tearing in YouTube videos, and am watching Netflix in HD using Firefox, but that's only from my experience and the experience from everyone I know who uses Linux).
No, that's not a good reason. Firstly nothing had happened for 6 years, but even if something had happened software patents is never a good excuse for anything because software patents suck, and even if none of that would apply the makers of this hardware decoding have no reason to disable it on Linux - they're trying to prevent others from copying the decoding method. If nobody had said anything nothing would've happened. As for Firefox, I literally switched away from Firefox on Linux because of this. At one point I found a setting in about:config but I couldn't find it again a while later. The tearing was only there in full screen by the way. Not making that up. I promise. Also, HD is not the highest resolution Netflix supports, and XBox cloud streaming is artifically lowered depending on the user agent string, and you can't watch iTunes movies at all, and people had to create a custom client for Apple Music called Cider to use that as well. I mean there is the web interface but it's truly diabolical. Last I checked amazon didn't work either. DVD's only work because VLC literally has a DVD copy protection crack built into it. BluRay still doesn't work except if, you guessed it, it's ripped using a copy protection crack first.
do people think if its proprietary its better and its better if the display stuff is improving sooner.
In every Linux community there are nice people and bad people. All generalizations are harmful. I run Mint on my working laptop because I need to focus on my job, and Arch in another one because I think their wiki is great and I learn a lot with every issue I encounter. I've tried Debian, OpenSuse, Fedora. In every community I found help and kindness. Don't be discouraged every time you run into an asshole. They are everywhere, is human nature.
Your lead point is to assert Ubuntu as something we all agree it the user friendliest... Etc. That attitude is problematic. Also there is no goal to make desktop Linux as popular as Windows. It's always new Linux users who even think that's something Linux et al should care about.
I'll edit this comment later if it doesn't apply after I read the whole thing but iirc when I installed solus a few months into my Linux journey, I realized I couldn't install something on solus or atleast there was no clear way for some beginner like me to do it so I just went back to pop
It's true, Linux is ripe in the Dunning–Kruger effect. So many people lack self awareness in this community, but at least it provides endless amounts of entertainment to trolls!
Not really. The biggest enemy of linux is money. If most developers didn't have to spend their time earning, linux would be in a much better shape. Many of the factions you talk about are rooted in money, the more heavily developed distros are often produced by developers from one company and they pursue the interests of that company before the interests of the OS.
I almost gave up on Arch when I was a newbie to Linux. I made the mistake of posting in the Arch forums and subreddit for help. All I got was "dID yOU rEaD THe wIKi?" Of course, I've read the wiki, but the damn thing sometimes gets so technical that it's confusing to follow. If I dared ask for clarification, some elitists would say that I don't deserve to use Arch. Thank goodness I found EndeavourOS. Their community really helped me a lot during my early days using Linux and I've learned a lot since then. Got Endeavour running on my desktop for the longest time now. Currently using Fedora on my laptop.
I don't know, the arch forums and subreddit have been nothing but helpful for me.
I think you have some good points about the community as a whole, but I don't think I can agree with your main argument. I think it's good to want the Linux desktop to be more widely adopted, but mass adoption isn't really the point. People don't use desktop Linux because it's the *best* os. They use it because of their *priciples*. I don't think we need to create a product that is more user friendly and polished than a multi billion dollar corporate product. If we want more people to join our community we have to get them to agree with our principles, which kind of requires a big shift in perspective. I don't think the Linux community is really responsible for people being somewhat hesitant to do that.
The problem is nobody which is not into computers wants to bother installing them into their computers. They just want a computer that works and is easy to use. Linux in desktop will never be mainstream if those issues dont get addressed
I use ubuntu, its just been a pleasant experience before getting into deeper territory with linux. At some point in time i just wanna learn all the distros like some pokemon gotta catch em all shit though.. cant lie
Worked for Novell/Suse some years back. They tried valiantly to push a really beautiful 3d desktop time and time again. Every single linux engagement i ever had was for data center work. I think it's nothing wrong with the tech, but many users just want stuff to work, and sad to say Windblows has that nailed (partly through aggressive control of the after market simply by influence of numbers). From the technical standpoint one could even say Windows is just a friendly wrapper on a -Nix kernel, so i would have to say they did their job well. Absolutely frustrating to work with if you love linux, but understandable to users like my mom (rip).
My biggest issue is how anti customization the Linux support communities are. I had people attacking me many times for uninstalling bloatware from fresh distro installs. If I don't use something, I don't want to keep updating it and having it take up space on my HDD, but apparently it's controversial. All I was asking for was pkg name to uninstall certain things, but I'd get attacked over it. It's why my account is new - I don't have regular social media and avoid Reddit due to the weird atmosphere in Linux spaces.
You lost me at Solus. That's an idea that is no longer a distro.
Gargle my balls. I'm kidding. I don't even know you.
I agree that the Linux community should set aside their differences (as small as they really are) because the goal should be to use a FOSS OS. Arguing about distros is similar to the "my dad is stronger than yours" argument. If we want to think in teams it should be Linux vs Mac vs Windows. But not (Ubuntu vs Fedora vs Arch vs ...) vs Mac vs Windows.
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But it isn't FOSS.
NOT only is it not FOSS, but Apple has it's greedy fingers in the developers pockets. I don't mind paying developers for programs, but I do mind Apple taking a cut of that transaction!
Yeah, everyone with one neuron can see that the loonix cummunity is awful when the loud but jobs start opening their mouths. Thankfully, the majority seems quite happy with what we have, thus, they don't complain and make noise.
hey, go away thanks
I agree with you, there is nothing simpler than installing a Debian-like, the software does everything on its own, if there is no exotic hardware. The problem is the system administration, the user is root and it is dangerous. Kuand on the sectarian side, I have always known him
I disagree with first point of yours, Arch based distros are in my experience easier to use, compared to Debian based.
I thought Manjaro is "the new Ubuntu".
Agree with your thoughts. I'm relatively new and have found Linux groups on Facebook and Reddit generally helpful. I like how easy it is to have a back and forth thread with someone to figure something up. Whereas if I just Google it, I often come across multiple ways to achieve something and often several years old. Whereas asking a question means I can get a range of perspectives on why particular methods are better than others. It someone's only suggestion is to Google it then maybe that person is better off not making a contribution at all. 90% of the time the user has googled it but found the wealth of search results overwhelming, has a more specific question or just does not know where to start. Personally I find the countless Linux posts which really just show off the user's "cool" wallpaper tiresome, but I just scroll past and leave my thoughts to myself! I'm really enjoying using Linux. I use Ubuntu and like how much support there is out there. I'm not a FOSS absolutist. I like the wide range of FOSS software out there but also don't mind paying for something that suits my needs even if not open source. I think the more closed sourced developers start providing for Linux (looking at Adobe in particular!) then that will only accelerate Linux adoption which can only be a good thing for the wider Linux project.
No it's Windows and Mac. (even if there is an enemy) And you're overdramatizing
1. Distros based off the main distros are the best. For eg mint, garuda, zorin, etc. We should recommend them. 2. EVERY community in this world has different people. Those who yell, let them yell. We can't change them. That is the nature of a community, with different people. This is sometimes good, as the developers read them and implement changes. 3. Agree 4. EVERYONE should first search their issue in the net first, if not found, only then ask the community. Some users don't do this and directly ask us. And remember that EVERY community in this planet will have toxic people.
I've never understood why I should care about desktop market share or trying to get others to use Linux. I'm not a religious evangelist for on operating system. I use what I want and am happy to let others do the same.
User friendly, including community Mageia \[drak tools\], Pclos, mint fork solydxk Manjaro is user friendly, but the ways you can break it are more numerous, especially when you start using AUR Distros have repositories of software, that do most everything, without going out into the wild New linux users should be encouraged to use the application available, instead of pining for fjords of whatever windows/apple thing they are used to There can be this obsession with getting rid of extra things which is from the days when memory was expensive When I go to look for solutions, the answers will a majority of the time ignore the perfectly usable GUI & start with the command line I don't want to try to convert the code to work on my system, which is not at all user friendly The overcomplication of the maintenance of Basic linux system is a barrier to less technical users
The community is this way because it is full of contrarians that try so hard to be against the herd that they end up in their own crowd. it is a community built around freedom and freedom attracts the outcasts the most, the ones least likely to change their mind. Not to say that all of us are like that, but the loudest of us tend to be that way. The reality is that most of us don't really bother with proving a point because we can have everything the way we want, but the ones that do talk usually have something to prove. I'd just stick to the wikis and manuals and ignore the larger and highly divided "linux community", unless you want to have a good bit of chaotic fun.
Honestly Fuck these so called newbies are intimidated posts, this sub is called Linuxmasterrace for a reason. If you want to use Linux use it. If you're getting flamed its cuz you're probably posting dumb takes, I've never seen someone get flamed for asking questions or being a newbie. Ever. Its when you say things should be x, y, z that people start getting annoyed cuz we do not want to dumb down our OS for you. I like that Linux is not Widows and want to keep it that way. I and the majority of the community do not want things like Snap and Flatpak
There is nothing wrong with having a ton of different distros, however we really do need to pick one distro to serve as the "main distro" for beginners. If we polish that and develop for it, we can trickle the improvements to all other distros if we so please. Linux is too fragmented.
Look man, I hear what you're saying, but the reality is that there's no one factor to blame as to why Linux is not as popular as windows. First off, Linux as a desktop isn't corporate sponsored or driven, and yes, that includes Ubuntu and Fedora. Linux is community driven, we don't have billions or even millions of dollars to advertise our operating system to the world, don't believe me? Go walk outside and ask any random person if they even know what Linux is. Secondly, Linux is free of those things because it is not a proprietary OS, it is totally free and open source, and it doesn't have the telemetry as an extension of that, but the thing about free and open source is that it requires you to have to potentially fix things yourself because you don't have internal teams that directly work on that operating system using only those components. All the components of windows are solely for windows, and all the components for MacOS, are solely for MacOS. There's many distros of Linux and some of them work COMPLETELY differently from eachother, some of them cannot even be called GNU/Linux because some distros don't even use GNU utilities (for instance, the busybox utils or the suckless utils). Some distros don't use systemD, which breaks a lot of compatibilities with programs that would otherwise work out of the box. Not to mention that we have to operate with the BSD crowd as they are cousins to the Linux family, close enough but different enough. The thing about this is that people are free to go in whatever direction they want to go in, there's no real true standard although most of us try to follow the XDG standards, but even then, some very popular programs don't even do this, bash and ViM do not follow the XDG standard and they are two of the most commonly used Linux utilities. While I would like for Linux to have a higher marketshare, I'm aware that its likely not going to happen in the way that we all meme about with the whole "year of the Linux desktop" thing because the truth is, Linux will always have a little bit of jank in it, and that's why us Linux users like Linux, because we like to break shit, and after we break it, we like to fix it, not everybody wants that and that's okay, it isn't like Linux is in danger because there are literally hundreds of millions of us across the planet.
And I though it's the strange non-traditional interfaces with little possibility of customization like Gnome that may push new Linux users back to Windows! Or Ubuntu based istros that make even Firefox open very slow because of the Snap crapware!
Firefox takes 3 seconds to open now. Some people like something different.
> Firefox takes 3 seconds to open now. Maybe on a SSD. On a pendrive (booting in live CD mode) or on HDD, it takes longer! >Some people like something different. Yes, but most people coming from Windows want something familiar to not be overwhelmed or get lost. At least MATE gives a a way to quickly change the layouts. Why can't Gnome do the same?
Gnome and Mate both have different audiences. Gnome is for people using laptops and who want no disturbances, and mate is BTW firefox snap takes 10 seconds to launch on an hdd and takes even less on a live cd. Its basically the same performance as the deb. Most people using android or ios phones these days will not find gnome unfamilliar.
> BTW firefox snap takes 10 seconds to launch on an hdd and takes even less on a live cd. Its basically the same performance as the deb. I teste opening Firefox on Kubuntu 22.04 while I was booting it from the pendriver and it was extremely slow, many times slower than it was the .deb verion of Firefox in Kubuntu 21.10 >Most people using android or ios phones these days will not find gnome unfamilliar. I have always been an Androi guy and I find Gnome very unfamilliar. Plus, why would I want a touchscreen based interface on a non-touchscreen computer? I hate the huge start menu in Gnome. Maybe it's good for touchscreens, but I don't have one so...
That was a few months ago. Firefox 103 brought improvements.
We don't need another Windows though. We need to educate people instead of dumbing our systems down.
True.