Syria after Assad: How the YPG's separatist dream finally died
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/42204864
Ali Bakir
24 January 2026 12:00 GMT
But the YPG’s inevitable clash with the state came this month, as the Syrian army, supported by allied Arab tribes, advanced quickly. The YPG’s rapid collapse was expected by those familiar with its history: the group, operating under a Kurdish banner, was never a genuine grassroots force. It lacked popular support even among most Kurds and was completely dependent on foreign political and military backing.Throughout the Syrian conflict, the group shifted its loyalty from the Assad regime to Iran, then Russia, then the United States and the European Union, and finally Israel. At no point since 2011 could it have held its ground against its opponents without massive funding, weapons and air support from the US and others.
Syria after Assad: How the YPG's separatist dream finally died
Ali Bakir
24 January 2026 12:00 GMTBut the YPG’s inevitable clash with the state came this month, as the Syrian army, supported by allied Arab tribes, advanced quickly. The YPG’s rapid collapse was expected by those familiar with its history: the group, operating under a Kurdish banner, was never a genuine grassroots force. It lacked popular support even among most Kurds and was completely dependent on foreign political and military backing.Throughout the Syrian conflict, the group shifted its loyalty from the Assad regime to Iran, then Russia, then the United States and the European Union, and finally Israel. At no point since 2011 could it have held its ground against its opponents without massive funding, weapons and air support from the US and others.
Syria after Assad: How the YPG's separatist dream finally died
The group's rapid downfall was driven by overconfidence in foreign support and an underestimation of the Syrian state's resolveMiddle East Eye
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Party backed by generals set for landslide in 'sham' Myanmar election
Polls in Myanmar have closed after a third and final stage of voting in what are widely viewed as sham elections.
Many popular parties are banned from standing and voting has not been possible in large areas of the country because of a five-year-long civil war.
The dominant party backed by the ruling military junta is expected to win a landslide victory.
The military has been fighting against both armed resistance groups which oppose the coup and ethnic armies that have their own militias.
It lost control of large parts of the country in a series of major setbacks, but clawed back territory this year enabled by support from China and Russia.
The civil war has killed thousands of people, displaced millions more, destroyed the economy and left a humanitarian vacuum.
Party backed by generals set for landslide in 'sham' Myanmar election
Many parties were banned and there was no voting in about half the country which is gripped by fear and civil war.Jonathan Head (BBC News)
Syrian Government Gains Ground in Northeast Syria After Arab Tribes Defect Against Kurdish SDF
C.P. Ward
Jan 22, 2026
The months-long standoff between the SDF and the Damascus government turned in the government’s favor on Sunday when Arab tribes in the provinces of Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zour—who had for years been close allies of the SDF in its fight against ISIS—defected to the government and turned their guns on their former comrades. In response, the SDF rapidly withdrew from these largely Arab provinces and established their line of defense further north in the Kurdish heartlands of Qamishli, Kobani, and Hasake.By Monday, it appeared that a deal had been reached between the two sides to end the killing and integrate the SDF fighters into the military on an “individual” basis. If put into effect, that deal would be a capitulation for the SDF, which had long demanded that its fighters integrate under the new Syrian Ministry of Defense as whole divisions, which would allow them some degree of autonomy from the government. In a stunning coup, Syria’s president, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, seemingly managed to unify Syria with a relatively small price in blood, and on his own terms.
Syrian Government Gains Ground in Northeast Syria After Arab Tribes Defect Against Kurdish SDF
As the Syrian president signed a fragile ceasefire in Damascus, on the ground in Deir Ez-Zour and Raqqa, sporadic fighting continues between the SDF and government forces backed by tribal groups.C.P. Ward (Drop Site News)
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Quick question about installing games with Wine
Do they have to be installed in the default .wine folder and c:\? I'd prefer to install big games using wine on another drive if possible as space is linited on my home drive.
Edit: Solved. All good to install anywhere, thanks!
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No, not at all. By default Wine should offer your whole Linux drive on Z:, so you can choose whatever location you want.
Heroic puts the games in ~/Games/Heroic/gamename but the .wine folder in ~/Games/Heroic/prefixes/gamename. Steam does something similar.
You should also consider using a helper like Lutris, Heroic or Bottles. They create a separate .wine folder for every game. That way it is easier to manage multiple conflicting libraries and Wine versions. If your home is on BTRFS or other deduplicating filesystem the additional space needed for multiple .wine folders is almost zero.
If you don't want to use a helper program you can still utilise multiple non-standard .wine locations with the WINEPREFIX environment variable.
Thanks for the write up, I was actually planning to launch using Heroic, just wasn’t sure if games through Wine needed the C:\ drive prefix.
It creates a virtual C:\ drive for the programs in the bottle. Externally it doesn't matter where it is as long as your launch script/application knows where it is.
TLDR: use a prefix manager instead of plain Wine
You can install them anywhere, but if you're using plain Wine, I'd suggest you instead go with something that will manage these locations for you.
Each Wine setup has what is called a "prefix", which in the simplest sense is just a folder that is setup like a Windows C:\ drive, and includes all the shared libraries and bits needed to run the game. When a program run is launched, it is locked into this prefix, so when it goes looking for files as it would on Windows, it's going to find a familiar folder structure, including installed dependencies like MS VC libraries and DirectX stuff.
Now...when you as a user are just using Wine directly, you'd generally be using the SAME prefix to install multiple games, which is hard to manage, and just clunky.
Prefix managers like Proton, Lutris, Bottles and even Heroic will make a new prefix for EACH program, making things like troubleshooting, switching runtimes, or invoking custom configs per program a LOT easier.
Yup. Same with any other as well. If you don't want to use Steam, I think a lot of people find Lutris and Heroic simple.and functional for all levels of user, and they also include the ability to run Steam Runtimes and Proton versions pretty simply too.
All of these launchers run Wine under the hood, and are a good abstraction on top of that entire stack. Just makes it super simple to manage.
Doug Ford thinks it's "fantastic" that we're equipping ICE
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.youtube.com
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Arming and equipping fascists is bad, even if the minority out-group of the day isn't us.
"First they came for the Americans, but I was not an American so I sold them the weapons they would later use against me."
Why? They clearly aren't fighting back.
Americans have an "oppress me daddy" mindset.
"why do the ones who are suffering simply decide not to suffer"
I recognize they are doing peaceful protests, and getting scattered by ICE with some tear gas, but I don't see many willing to actually fight.
Maybe it isn't a lack of empathy but watching their actions?
My claim that Americans desire a fascist state are somewhat justified. Watch any random video of 1st amendment auditors in the US. The common theme regardless of political leaning is the desire to punish the other. US citizens will call men with guns to deal with a guy just standing on the sidewalk with a phone camera. The US citizen has the desire to have the camera person punished for their perfectly legal, yet disliked, actions.
Lawsuits in the US also demonstrate the results of years of brainwashing the American public with "American exceptionalism" rhetoric. Someone slips on the sidewalk due to no negligence of another, but someone must be punished.
The police in the US as generally pretty terrible. They have a long history of planting evidence, harassing innocents, fishing for crimes for no reason, harming and killing innocent Americans. The cops are protected by the government with qualified immunity. If a cop happens to get punished and fired in one district, it's been shown time and time again they can move to the town next door and continue being a cop. If Americans cared, this action would stop. But a large number of them don't care because it doesn't happen to them OR they approve of the killing and beatings because that person was "the other".
This has been going on for decades and decades. All it takes is the majority of Americans to desire it to stop - yet it hasn't.
1/3 of the country voted for Trump because they knew who he was. 1/3 of the country couldn't give a shit to vote.
American exceptionalism and apathy are killing Americans and 2/3 of them either are for it or don't give a shit.
If you've got kids, you can't afford to take risks that could endanger them.
If you have rent or a mortgage, you can't take time off work to organize.
If you have a full-time job, you don't have the time or energy to protest.
If you have a cell phone, they'll be waiting at your home for you and put a bag over your head.
If you have a face, they'll identify you and make you disappear.
If you have skin, they'll target you. If you have a sexuality or a disability, they'll target you. If you have complaints, they'll target you.
This is a system built from the ground up to make revolution seem impossible. This is a system that undermined education and then took advantage of learning gaps with lies crafted to keep the people fighting each other instead of up.
Make enough people believe that voting won't change anything (because they did vote last time and look what happened). Make enough people mad and scared of out-groups and then offer them salvation. Keep doing that forever.
You're calling for violence against people who have been abused and who have given up because they've been made to feel like nothing they do matters, and that whatever life they've managed to scratch together will be destroyed in front of them.
You're calling for violence against people for not magically transforming into Rambo, when they've been consistently denied the resources and the training.
I believe that the majority of Americans do want it to stop. But they're trapped in a system that takes their agency away. It's a system that is not going to be stopped. Not by them. And that's by design.
Thank you for pointing out another reason why Americans won't fight back.
They've already given up.
Freedom isn't worth the risk to them.
Short term pleasure, long term own goal against ourselves too.
We don't want the US to go full Gilead. They're halfway there and look how much damage to us they're causing already.
What we want is to nudge that sick nation to better days, if nothing else for our own sake.
Reminder/invitation to contribute to OpenStreetMap
Some time ago I started replacing all services and apps that I use with FOSS altnernatives. Most of them were easy to replace but some corpo/big-tech apps had ecosystems too advanced to be conveniently replaced. For example, substituting Google Maps on Android (or I guess Apple Maps on iOS) was a bit of a struggle as the most popular FOSS alternative app was OsmAnd. First of all mad respect and huge kudos to OsmAnd team of contributors but for me the UX was overwhelming and too customizable which is probably a huge bonus to power users but IMO that makes it very unlikely to become a large scale alternative to Google maps. Probably other people realized that too and some 6-7 months ago CoMaps was released, a FOSS app that is also based on OpenStreetMap layer but this time with a simplistic and smooth UX/GUI.
In case somebody is not familiar with OpenStreetMap (OSM) - basically it is a non-profit org, but its heavily maintained by community members and anybody around the world is allowed to contribute and enrich map content. Even if org can theoretically get corrupt I think anybody can make a fork and continue with community contribution. Creating an account is easy, you could start contributing in like 3 minutes. A huge number of services and apps are basing their map layers on OpenStreetMap, such as CoMaps above.
The quality of OpenStreetMap/CoMaps/OsmAnd is as good as the contributions to it are - so the more people use it - the better and more content it will contain. I would like to invite everybody to give it a chance and use openstreetmap.org/ on desktop and CoMaps on mobile devices. You should have enough motivation to abandon Google or Apple products, but final piece of motivation is that eventually Google Maps will start censoring content (like Reddit or Instagram) or just share your location history to ICE or perform some other serious violation like that (like Microsoft did recently).
CoMaps has a really nice and simple interface where you can add missing places (business, community services, recreation areas etc) while OpenStreetMap on web browser allows to update anything you imagine (e.g. see a missing street? Add it. A new building was developed - just add it!). If everybody enriched only their local neighborhood with features on the map we could really build something beautiful. Existing layer probably already contains 90% of the stuff you'd ever search for as contributors really did a outstanding job throughout all these years. But that additional 10% makes a real difference for it turning into a much bigger scale tool, and this feels like the right time to kick that off.
It is important not to get demotivated that not many people maintain and contribute as your neighborhood might remain a lonely detailed places for years. OSM existed for a long time now and is very likely to keep existing for decades to come, everything that you update or create remains a legacy that stays forever saved in the map (unless somebody further updates it). Perhaps, in 20 years time people will be grateful. And to tidy up and make max out of your neighborhood you really need one weekend or so.
For example, in my local area I've started adding location marks of recycling bins, dumpsters, parking lots, playgrounds, pathways, building tunnels and monuments, but also I've added missing shops and updated working hours and websites for shops that existed.
Also #1, be responsible when making changes, don't overwrite other people's work unless it is an improvement. Double check everything that you add, and also if you don't have any experience with map editors or GIS software take a watch of some OSM editing tutorial.
Also #2, I most likely omitted some other useful FOSS tools, and it doesn't matter which one you decide to use as long as it is based on OpenStreetMap or any other community driven layer.
Also #3, tell all your friends and family to do the same.
Yeah, this might not be the most important thing to cure the world at this moment but developing community-driven mindset where everybody takes a small or big part in it is the way to go. Cheers!
EDIT: Amazing input in the comments, I'll try to summarize additional suggestions provided by other people. Thank you for pointing out URL errors in my post too.
Very useful suggestion by illusionist:
We need more wikipedia images and content, there is still a lot to improve on maps just by contributing to wikipedia. Osmand added custom buttons and now you can enable wikipedia connections with one click which is great
Related lemmy communities:
- !osm@feddit.uk
- !CoMaps@sopuli.xyz
- !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
- !osmand@lemmy.ml
List of alternative and open-source maps:
- On Android: alternativeto.net/software/osm…
- OpenStreetMap curated list of iOS apps that use it (wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Co…) + one additional map missing on the list: Mapply
- Send official OpenStreetMap as a shortcut to desktop and use web-view instead of an app (works on any OS)
- CartesApp (Only in French for now)
- Cardinal Maps (GitHub)
List of tools for contribution & content management:
- StreetComplete
- Vespucci
- CoMaps for simplistic POI edits
- Official OpenStreetMap website
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.OpenStreetMap
There is no open source car navigation app which is bad. Magic earth is great but not open source. Tomtom is good but not open source.
Osmand is awesome for power users. Comaps is good for causal users.
We need more wikipedia images and content, there is still a lot to improve on maps just by contributing to wikipedia. Osmand added custom buttons and now you can enable wikipedia connections with one click which is great.
There are no menus for restaurants, no pictures, no other stuff. The situation is not really improving for years. Osm is great for a base map but it lacks so much information that it could replace google maps.
Here maps is trash and apple maps is apple, i.e. not better than google
I tried relying solely on osm and I failed simply because you can't just have a look where cool restaurants or bars are. I use osmand for everything except exploring such random stuff in random cities. Osmand is better for toilets, benches and nieche info.
Magic earth is great
~~is~~ was
1 Star rating in the play store since december update
And even before that, it had wrong POI all the time and didn't update osm data to stay up to date.
I tried every open source app I could find, but none of the open source ones have live traffic, which makes them completely useless for where I live. I honestly don't understand why we can't opt-in crowdsource that.
It still is, it is even better than ever for me. Sorry to hear that it's not working for you. I feel the pain.
I use it for car navigation, nothing else. It works like a charm in Germany.
It has no real-time-traffic-info though
I think this is a planned feature, actually
There are ongoing discussions regarding this on their github.
Some parts of the world have traffic data freely available, in other parts you may need to pay for it. For example, see the list compiled by GraphHopper here:
github.com/graphhopper/open-tr…
On the CoMaps github there are privacy concerns being brought up with live traffic data collection. Some want extra privacy where no telemetry is ever collected. Some want to be able to provide an API key for traffic data. Some want an opt-in feature with a focus on privacy protections.
For example, geofencing to protect home locations, stripping out data near the starting location and end destination of any trip, stripping out IP information, only counting average speeds on certain tiles of the map, etc.
In the end I'm hoping for CoMaps to pull through with a live traffic option that also has strong privacy protections in place.
GitHub - graphhopper/open-traffic-collection: Collection of open data resources for traffic information
Collection of open data resources for traffic information - graphhopper/open-traffic-collectionGitHub
StreetComplete | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
OpenStreetMap surveyor appf-droid.org
+1.
Very easy to use app. I've been contributing to OSM more because of it.
I agree!
I've not been able to map much with the weather lately, but last April I was pretty proud to see this ranking on my 7 day activity:
edit: the picture did not turn out how i expected. it's hard to see, but I managed to be #2 in the US. It's not a competition, I know, but I have not achieved much in life so this felt pretty cool.
Streetcomplete is deliberately a tool for quick and easy editing. You can add notes there, and desktop users can fix them for you in an editor with more features. You can add images to notes to describe the problem. You can subscribe to new notes in an area with an rss reader, so I check new notes every few days in my city, solve them if they contain enough information.
If you want more powerful editing options on mobile you can use Vespucci.
As developer of mapcomplete.org/ - I cannot allow contributors to edit geometries. If I did, I'd have to show all geometries in the vinicinity, which would make it way more confusing for a non-technical user.
Even then, geometry cannot always be exactly determined (e.g. shops in a mall). And some communities even agree to never use geometries for some types of POI!
MapComplete - editable, thematic maps with OpenStreetMap
MapComplete is a platform to visualize OpenStreetMap on a specific topic and to easily contribute data back to it.mapcomplete.org
I think there's something to your point of view, however, these apps do get more people contributing precisely because they remove some of the friction to add and correct information.
In my case, I just add or correct things on streetcomplete, and then add or correct polygons on my computer at osm when I can.
I still prefer mobile users adding features, even if they are of an unusual object type; effectively being another type of fixme to desktop users. But instead of another desktop user integrating these elements, I rather have mobile users on the desktop as well; as to integrate their mobile changes when at home. If you’re sightseeing, these applications are very helpful, for creating/editing POIs and effectively sketching out non-POI features; but the latter does require some work to integrate them.
Quoting another comment of mine. Your use of the tool is something I'm advocating for, really; I recognize it's usefulness, but am not treating it as a substitute for desktop editors.
Related lemmy communities:
- !osm@feddit.uk
- !CoMaps@sopuli.xyz
- !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
- !osmand@lemmy.ml
Yes you can, but OsmAnd is not a beginner friendly app. It's a poweruser's app.
For those new to the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, I recommend CoMaps for navigation and StreetComplete for contributions. CoMaps can also contribute, for example by adding or updating POIs.
Hike, Bike, Drive Offline – Navigate with Privacy
Discover more of your journey - Powered by the communitywww.comaps.app
I personally quite like OsmAnd's granular control, but understand how others might experience this as being overwhelming; which big-tech's restrictive... I mean "modern" user-experience (UX) might be to blame for. There are however quite some alternatives to pick from, if you wanted a more minimalist approach to UX; which OsmAnd could also provide by default (while allowing advanced users to toggle additional "expert" settings).
What makes Google "Maps" superior to OSM-based maps, is not its inferior "map", but rather the navigational aspect: businesses and other 'points of interests' (POIs) registering their location to Google, public transit data being supplied to it (allowing for planning), traffic statistics (through creepy location tracking, even in the background unless opted out), etc.; and bundles all into a single, undeniably convenient application.
I would argue OSM data is primarily mass imports, from other permissive or open (government) databases; which are strongly dependent on region. For The Netherlands: BAG (basic registration of addresses and buildings) and BGT (basic registration of large-scale topography), make up a large portion of the data presented (which are either directly imported or used as a reference). Although, relative to real-world changes they might temporarily lack behind, and users add details based on satellite imagery.
Regarding satellite imagery: editors don't always have up-to-date imagery, leading to some users undoing changes others have made. In The Netherlands, the government provides relatively recent satellite imagery: which can be imported into the alternative JOSM editor as an WMTS layer. And you may also want to check the comments of the last change: in OSM's own iD editor you can click the "last modified ..." link, all the way at the bottom of the "Edit object" tab, for the selected object.
Another thing I would really recommend, is checking how other mappers have added certain features. Which is sometimes easier to understand than OSM's documentation; which doesn't always correspond to practice (possibly dependent on region). A very useful tool for this is Overpass Turbo, which you can use to search for certain elements, to see how others have implemented these.
I know this might all feel a little overwhelming, but I wish I had known these things earlier in my mapping journey. I started doing it because I noticed things missing, that I knew existed as a mailman. Just starting with smaller changes to get my feet wet, and gradually working my way to larger changes. As long as you don't start taring up large roads (including their often many relationships), you'll be just fine; and might even become hooked (as it can be quite satisfying, having created another beautiful part).
BGTviewer - de Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie op de kaart
BGTviewer.nl is hét startpunt voor de Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie, de gestandaardiseerde manier om de topografie van Nederland vast te leggen en openbaar te maken.bgtviewer.nl
traffic statistics (through creepy location tracking, even in the background unless opted out)
yes it's definitely creepy when Google does it, but it provides invaluable data to other users - advance warnings of tailbacks whilst driving, and accurate ETA for public transport when using bus or train. Would be great if a privacy-respecting way to do this could be found for OSM & its ilk.
You have to add layers here to make them show up in iD: github.com/osmlab/editor-layer…
For JOSM you have to add it to this page: josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Map…
OSM is a community project, someone have to the the PR, It won't show up automagically without human intervention.
Are you sure its license is compatible? E.g. The website says I can't view it because I'm not in the Netherlands. There are a lot of frequent editors from there, it's strange they haven't added it yet.
GitHub - osmlab/editor-layer-index: A unified layer index for OSM editors.
A unified layer index for OSM editors. Contribute to osmlab/editor-layer-index development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
OSM is a community project, someone have to the the PR, It won’t show up automagically without human intervention.
Is this referring to the "mass imports" part, you would argue are done in batches by many contributors? If so, then yes, mass import might give the wrong idea, I agree. But even if imported by many over time, the result is still a mass import from these open databases (minus a few addresses maybe, drawn in by hand; or roads not yet aligned with BGT, in case of The Netherlands).
Are you sure its license is compatible? E.g. The website says I can’t view it because I’m not in the Netherlands. There are a lot of frequent editors from there, it’s strange they haven’t added it yet.
I can't find the forum post regarding this, but I'm quite sure the conclusion was it being compatible; despite viewing being restricted to Dutch citizens (because it's a service provided by The Netherlands). It's a quite common source here, especially for recent changes (which other imagery just doesn't provide). And they are providing WMTS directly, so if they wanted to restrict usage for georeferencing, I don't understand why they'd do that.
I was replying about the imagery only, a PR to the layer index.
Adding the imagery to the index and making it the default is the solution to the problem of users undoing changes. Most new users just hit edit on osm.org and start to work with what they have. If you present them the correct imagery they will use that.
On the layer index you can mark an imagery as 'best', and it will show up as the default layer for its country
editor-layer-index/schema.json at gh-pages · osmlab/editor-layer-index
A unified layer index for OSM editors. Contribute to osmlab/editor-layer-index development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I'm proud to say that the OSM map for my neighborhood has been more up to date than Google since I've moved here.
I've been trying to do the same for Panoramax, but that's so much more work than just updating some details about a new/closed shop. Especially since I'm self-hosting it and I don't feel confident enough in my server admin abilities to pull other people into this.
In either case: you can reach out to the panoramax-devs here: app.element.io/#/room/#panoram…
It's always interesting to hear back from users, even if those are small usecases
panoramax.cx40.ca/
I haven't uploaded everything I have there yet. I'm still in the middle of figuring out how to automate the process so I can just connect my camera to the computer and have a udev rule automatically pull and upload relevant photos.
Is there any reason I should reach out to the devs? I don't see what either party has to gain from this interaction.
My Panoramax: The free alternative to photo-mapping territories
Panoramax is a digital resource for sharing and using field photos. Anyone can take photographs of places visible from public roads and contribute them to the Panoramax database.panoramax.cx40.ca
s at the end
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.OpenStreetMap
Every Door | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Mobile OpenStreetMap editor for POI & micromappingf-droid.org
MapComplete - editable, thematic maps with OpenStreetMap
MapComplete is a platform to visualize OpenStreetMap on a specific topic and to easily contribute data back to it.mapcomplete.org
Ive used OsmAnd+ for years & I still find it confusing to find specific settings! Thankfully OsmAnd settings can be backed up & exported/imported.
That said, several times in new cities in both in my home country & abroad late in the day, it's found us places to eat, toilets, late night supermarkets etc etc. I was grateful to the mappers & I vowed to do the same in my home city suburb to help any fellow visitors who find themselves here. I kept my word & mapped it extensively though I'll not reveal where.
Several months ago we visited a European capital for a city break, the public transit navigation in OsmAnd was fantastic. The offline wiki articles are amazing when visiting new places.
Top tip: utilise the "Quick Action" shortcut button. Add fuel, parking, parking location, wiki & "show nearest POI". You can toggle them on/off in an instant when needed
I zoomed in to my local area and typed pizza in the search box. A place with Pizza in the name was at the center of my screen. The search took me to a city in another continent called Pizza.
Contributions from users are wasted if the final UX is so poorly designed.
The quality of the search depends on which app you use and how it prioritizes search results, right? I know this is a bit of a tired argument, bit since CoMaps is open-source, you could submit a patch, or at least a bug report.
I've encountered the same behaviour on Google Maps on occasion, too.
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.OpenStreetMap
Osmand uses a different search engine. It also searches only in the downloaded data, unless you select "Online search".
More info in the docs: osmand.net/docs/user/search/
OSM is a database, it can't search. Osm.org just displays an independent search engine called Nominatim, but it could be anything else
Honestly the search quality is the largest adoption hurdle, not the content quality. There are other issues too, but that one is the most universal.
I say this as a long time user of OsmAnd. Maybe other apps do a better job.
Am I the only one who noticed the 6-7 reference? 👀
Clever
Also - is there an OpenStreetView?
There's magic earth. I used it until they locked Android auto behind a subscription. A shame since it was quite good and I was happy to provide data.
Not open source though.
Fluid tile v5.0 - New engine for your tiling system
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/42136317
Hi, I have good news for those who use a tilling system. I have been working these month on a new system for Fluid tile with the aim of making it easier to maintain and more reliable when moving your windowsDuring the rewrite, I had to discard some user options that increased the possibility of a error. These options did not add any real value, and I preferred to prioritize reliability of the script
Features
Shortcuts
- Fluid tile | Toggle window to blocklist: Disables the window that is active or has focus so that it does not interact with Fluid tile. If the application name was already included in the block list in the user configuration, the list will take precedence over this shortcut.
- Sequence:
Meta+F
- Fluid tile | Change tile layout: Change the layout of the tiles and rearrange the windows
- Sequence:
Meta+Alt+F
You can change them in the system settings
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Breaking changes
WindowExtendTileChangedDelaynow by default is300, change in your user settings with this value
- More info: codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Now, windows will always expand when possible, the UI cannot be disabled, and whenever you move a window to a tile that already has windows, they will always be swapped
These variables will stop working:
WindowsOrderMoveWindowsExtendOpenWindowsExtendCloseWindowsExtendMoveWindowsExtendMinimizeWindowsExtendResizeUIEnableI recommend you take a look at the wiki where it will clarify your doubts
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…One more thing, this time the news isn't so good
Since my laptop keyboard broke (for whatever reason, neovim doesn't work well without a keyboard /s), I don't have the money to repair it right now, and I have to study for my firefighter exams, there will be fewer updates to the script in the coming months
I encourage you to try it out and let me know what you think. If you find any errors, you can report them in the repository
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Have a nice day!
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Divided and conquered
The 1% is laughing at us. Always has been? Yes.
Always will be? No. Nothing lasts forever.
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Gimp 3.0.8 is officially released 🥳
This might be the final release in the GIMP 3.0 series
Gimp 3.2 will include new link and vector layers, new brushes, and significant user interface improvements. Gimp 3.2 is designed to punch Adobe in the face
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I use gimp to edit (clean up) my scanned watercolor paintings. Yes, gimp is good enough now for what I used to do with photoshop: adjustment layers, more sane ui. Only thing that was missing is a very obscure feature that photoshop has, to merge multiple scanned pages of a very large photo. I now use vuescan for that (the free version does not add a watermark when using that particular feature, unlike its scans!). And then I edit in gimp, or RapidRAW (a new, lightroom-like app, that's easier to use than darktable). So I'm set.
This is how I do it:
- Scan with the official EpsonScan2 app form flatpak as TIFF (unfortunately their .deb file coredumps on Linux Mint). The XSane app unfortunately is too buggy.
- Then I merge the various scans to a single scan (if my painting was too large and needed several passes), with the free version of VueScan. There is one other foss app that can do that, but it's so convoluted that it's not even funny. Vuescan does it with a single click and it doesn't add a watermark, curiously enough!
- Then I edit either in Gimp to fix the wrong scanned colors (this epson scanner moves oranges to red a bit), or fix mistakes (that's common now even for traditional illustrators). If it's only colors I need to fix and not change actual parts of the painting, I might just use RapidRAW.
- Then I export at 1024px high for web usage, as a jpg 90% quality. I then archive the TIFFs and XCF files.
Not quite. It’s $33/year subscription, $100 to buy it outright ($200 for pro).
If it was a one time $33 I would have purchased it a decade or two ago.
It does.
I had to isolate part of a frame from a 70s Italian cartoon to make a giant vinyl sticker and it worked amazingly. Cleaned up the image and pulled it right from the background. I was also able to desaturate the colours well too.
Absolutely. Been using GIMP for years, and I have zero need to switch to bloated, Windows-only, monthly-subscription garbage.
DaVinci Resolve, too. The improvements on Resolve 20 are amazing.
Windows-only,
There are new attempts of patching WINE to make modern Photoshop run on Linux. It's not fully there, but looks promising: phoronix.com/news/Wine-Staging…
Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches For Enabling Recent Adobe Photoshop Versions On Linux
Following yesterday's release of Wine 11.1 for kicking off the new post-11.0 development cycle, Wine-Staging 11.1 is now available for this experimental/testing version of Wine that present is around 254 patches over the upstream Wine state.www.phoronix.com
As a Linux user and sysadmin: I fully agree. Death to Adobe.
As someone who lives in our current corporate hellscape: unfortunately Adobe software is one of if not the biggest software hurdle preventing Linux adoption for a lot of people. Getting their suite working, even if it's only older versions, would be a huge boon for us.
I never had this issue since I use GIMP decades ago. But I know in older GIMP versions (and I mean up to relatively recent versions) loading can take very long if you have ton of fonts. I don't know how long it has been since you tried it out. There was attempts to asynchronously load fonts and other optimizations to make it start up fast. At least for me GIMP starts... let me test it again... in less than a second. Having a fast drive plays definitely a role here too.
And it depends what method you used to install. If it was Snap on Ubuntu in example, well that is on Snap most probably.
I use GIMP since 2.8 version, which is ages ago. Used it to edit my photography, to create price tags for my local shop, create web banners, memes... lot of memes, editing pixel graphics, and more.
To be honest it was not a good experience editing photography, especially as it didn't have some standard features like layer effects. And the missing standard features like shape tools and such is also a big deal for me. Also for printing the price tags the color space was a problem too, as it didn't support CMYK. I also wish there was a simple "record and playback macros" functionality, which I saw in Photoshop years ago.
All in all these points and many other are addressed or are being addressed right now. GIMP is still not as good as Photoshop and there are pain points. But it is improving and already has improved ton of a lot.
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Intrinsically stretchable 2D MoS2 transistors
Intrinsically stretchable 2D MoS2 transistors - Nature Communications
Intrinsically stretchable electronic devices are interesting for wearable electronics, soft robotics, and stretchable display applications.Nature
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I decided I needed to go outside the standard process and post publicly about the “typo” on LinkedIn.
Days later, I heard that the journal would publish a correction.
I was told the authors had submitted the correction before my post, but it had been misplaced and forgotten.
I believe the journal’s new editor found this news to be as incredible as I did. He quickly published an erratum.
I also submitted my replication to the Journal of Management Scientific Reports (JOMSR). This upstart publication was started in 2022 by a small group of courageous scholars who wanted to provide an outlet for replication studies like mine. I was impressed by their thorough reviews and tough guidance.
In spring 2025, JOMSR published my replication study.
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‘Repatriate the gold’: German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults
‘Repatriate the gold’: German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults
Shift in relations and unpredictability of Donald Trump make it ‘risky to store so much gold in the US’, say expertsKate Connolly (The Guardian)
IQuest Coder - State-of-the-Art Open-Source Code LLM
IQuest Coder - State-of-the-Art Open-Source Code LLM
Advanced code intelligence models achieving leading results on SWE-Bench, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench.IQuest Coder Team (IQuestLab)
The secret sauce here is how the model was trained. Typically, coding models are trained on static snapshots of code from GitHub and other public sources. They basically learn what good code looks like at a single point in time. IQuest did something totally different. They trained their model using entire commit history of repositories.
This approach added a temporal component to training, allowing the model to learn how code actually changes from one commit to the next. It saw how entire projects evolve over months and even years. It learned the patterns in how developers refactor and improve code, and the real world workflows of how software gets built. Instead of just learning what good code looks like, it learned how code evolves.
Coding is inherently an iterative process where you make an attempt at a solution, and then iterate on it. As you gain a deeper understanding of the problem, you end up building on top of existing patterns and evolving the codebase over time. IQuest model gets how that works because it was trained on that entire process.
How to see thumbnails over mtp (kde)
This was talked about before, but the settings location that was mentioned to enable thumbnails on remote files and stuff has changed. I have a mount of my android system over mtp, and I cannot see any of the thumbnails, making it impossible for me to sort my stuff, some into hard drives and etc.
How do i enable seeing mtp thumbnails in kde, is there issues with just mtp thumbnails in dolphin or what alternative file manager or image veiwer I can use so i can see the thumbnails and relocate the images.
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Can you use Linux today without the terminal?
I have used Arch for >13 years (btw) and use the terminal every single session. I also work with Linux servers daily, so I tried the other families with DEs (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux/Fedora).
I'm comfortable (and prefer) doing everything with CLI tools. For me, it's a bit difficult to convert my Windows friends, as they all see me as some kind of hackerman.
What's the landscape like nowadays, in terms of terminal requirements?
Bonus question: Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages? Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch's amazing AUR?
Hell you can use Arch without the terminal if you really wanted to. CachyOS for example uses Octopi which is one of the few Arch Package Manager GUI's that support both Pacman and AUR. so in that case you may never really need to touch the terminal and Octopi is preinstalled with CachyOS.
Other than that Fedora KDE or Bazzite are good options. But yeah there are few Distros where you really don't need to use the Terminal if you don't want to.
I cannot vouch for every distro and every use case out there, but for me, yes you can daily drive without having anything to do with terminal. Some distros have worked a lot ensuring this.
I would recommend to start with Linux Mint.
basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions
That's 99% of what most people do.
Last time I set up Mint the only thing I needed the terminal for was to disable a setting on Java 8 that prevented it from launching on Xfce.
I didn't need to use the terminal to do that, though. It just didn't feel right editing a system config file with a GUI text editor.
turns off SteamDeck sorry, what's a "terminal"? Isn't it at the airport?
Jokes aside... yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that's fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It's not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.
So... finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.
Yes.
After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.
Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.
The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.
Don't be scared of the terminal
i use the terminal for work, and some utilities i prefer over gui ones.
if my line of work didn't require it, i don't think it would be mandatory for me.
My intention wasn't to misinterpret your post; I genuinely thought you were asking for help using flatpaks without the terminal on your Xubuntu setup. As for the topic of this thread, as a Bluefin user, I'd argue that we're coming very close of being able to daily drive Linux without ever opening the terminal at all.
(also, the Flathub instructions page you've linked on your post do mention installing gnome-software)
Ive only used the terminal on my laptop for installing programs i could've installed from a gui, and for updating. Which i could've done on a gui.
So i think so? Manjaro btw
I've been using exclusively Linux for about two years now.
I only ever use the terminal when I need to fix something, usually by searching for a fix and trying it out. I know more about its use now but just enough to hurt myself.
I think it gives me strong UI opinions though. What works better for me. There is still a lot of choice in that.
I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.
I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.
As a Rust dev, you can use your terminal entirely without GUI with a multiplexer like tmux, Neovim as your editor, a shit ton of anime CLIs that you can use, and so on.
Bonus question: [...] Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch's amazing AUR?
Nixpkgs and Homebrew are the first ones that come from my head.
Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR
I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch's amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who's friends think they're hackerman), it's really unparalleled. (😢)
To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄
I was using Mint for a while with my 10 year old PC build that was crashing all the time then I upgraded my system and Mint didn't have support for my newer video card so I moved to Nobara.
I haven't had to use the terminal at all since. I run the update system program every few days but I'm sure it could be automated without needing a password but I like seeing what is being updated so I keep it manual.
It has much more support for games than Mint seems to have had. I could use the terminal if I wanted to but it hasn't been needed which is how I want it, available but unnecessary.
Windows refugee here. I installed Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my main machine four months ago and I am still ironing out issues. Eg CUPS was asking me to login all the time and didn't accept my credentials. After some days researching I discovered I had to log in as root. Then, I discovered I didn't have root credentials for some reason. I had to create them and then add my local user to a group! Just to be able to use my home printer.
Or suddenly my clock was 62 minutes off. I discovered the NTP service was never set up properly and I had to install chrony.
I don't see how I could have avoided using the terminal. These are only a couple of examples. No deal-breakers and on this occasion I had the time and determination to resolve them. I could have easily given up.
Just a heads up, you should just need the group set up
That is crazy that you weren't added to it by default, though.
I was also surprised - you used to be able to modify a user's group membership through the System Settings GUI. That's a huge missing piece that you can't do that anymore
Generally you can use use the GUI with things like Nobara Linux.
But most software install instructions are all "copy and paste these commands".
If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.
There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any "regular", non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).
Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.
Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don't realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.
Any you recommend for gaming? Ive had an issue getting steam games to launch, and I have heard cod will be a no-go, but that's not a big deal to me.
I play emulators mostly because I miss when buying stuff meant owning it.
Without knowing what game you were having issues with I can't provide much help. I would first recommend checking protondb.com/ to see the games status and if other people are running into issues. Most of the fixes are as simple as just switching what proton version you are using. (if someone recommends using a GloriousEggroll (GE) version of Proton then look into the app proton-up-qt, on your software center).
But I will admit many solutions on protondb are much more "involved".
As far as non-steam suggestions. I would start with heroic games launcher. I have had a very easy time with playing games through HGL, either EpicGames or GoG.
Outside of that, lutris is good. If you go to their website then there are one click installs for a bunch of games. This is mostly how I play things like battle.net games.
Then on the technical side of things is bottles. But that is the much more "build it yourself" option.
"User-friendly" and "updated" sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I've had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde's softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.
Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.
All modern OS's require the terminal at some point (except iOS).
To your bonus question: portage
I don’t want to learn CLI.
But...like, why? It is less effort than it was to type out the entirety of your post. I will never understand.
Just for the record, these are not the same questions you asked in your first post. But to answer them: nothing is different about this. But at some people don't want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it. And there's a difference between "learn how to use a new vacuum cleaner" (to give a particularly obvious example) and "learn how to use a completely new paradigm that is different from everything you have used before and doesn't have a clear starting point". (And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.)
Mind you, I'm not talking about myself, having used CLIs since the 80s, but just because I know how to do something doesn't mean it should be a fun activity for everyone.
But at some people don’t want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it.
That is impossible, then. I don't know what else to say to it. You can't use something without first learning how to use it. Life is learning new things, forever. We don't know how to do anything without learning first, and in the age of the web learning something has never been easier.
And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.
If I wanted to do something, then I'd figure it out. I do this all the time in my work. I don't know how every tool works, I don't know how every environment fits together. I still don't see how this is an argument for "I do not want to learn."
I still don’t see how this is an argument for “I do not want to learn.”
Because this is just one thing that you clearly know how to do and probably enjoy.
I don't know how many of the following things you are good at and enjoy, but the same argument applies to all of them: cooking, knitting, repairing a car, welding, growing crops. All of these are desirable and apply to things that most of us use regularly. But you just cannot expect everyone to learn them all in order to enjoy the products they could create or enhance by them. It is not problematic to say you just want to use something and not learn everything that is necessary to create or master it.
If you cannot see that this is true of a CLI, then I have run out of ways to try to explain it to you.
Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don't look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.
For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity.
For lots of things I do, there isn't a CLI anyway.
I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.
Good usability is about adapting the software to the person. Not the person to the software.
For a lot of what I do there is no text command. And for many, the CLI is an unfamiliar interface. So it's a productivity disadvantage to switch over to a CLI just for a single command when the rest of the time you are in a GUI.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.
I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It's muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.
And then there's the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there's options that you just kinda have to know. There's -h or --help, then there's the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it'll be faster to just search online.
All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there's a line showing 'ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]'. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they're actually doing as they're using the GUI
Its the age-old "new good, old bad!" Thinking of unintelligent people. Theyre unable to realize when something is just good.
Like a non-javascript web page. My friends think I'm on the dark web if I send them something that isnt off of corponet with shiny beveled buttons with shadows and shading.
Not saying the opposite either; guis are fine if theyre well designed and use words instead of meaningless symbols. But a lot of them arent well designed.
Also, for dyslexic people the terminal is a big challenge, near impossible.
That is technically true, but
Install GNOME Software Flatpak pluginThe GNOME Software plugin makes it possible to install apps without needing the command line. To install, run:
sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
I hope you can see the problem with that.
It did read that page, it just didn't register because it's more command line stuff.
Been using Fedora Workstation as my daily driver on my main gaming rig (and casual work machine) for over 7 years now; in the early days, yes CLI was necessary but I actually can't remember the last time I needed the CLI to configure anything on that machine. I use it to ssh into my homelab and that's it.
I also installed Fedora on a Pixlebook Go Chromebook (I am using to type this now) a year or so ago, I use this machine for casual web browsing, and playing games via GeForce Now (Excellent btw), and beyond the slightly complex effort to get Fedora stable on it at the start, I have not touched the terminal since then, and that includes a couple of upgrades from F41 to F43.
Honestly the main distro's are more than ready for the 'grandma' test, from about six months ago my eldest daughter (21) is rocking Fedora on her ageing laptop which I installed for her when she complained that it was 'getting slow' on Windows, she is an artist, has zero interest or knowledge of computers and has not come back since for any issue, she uses it daily.
I'm torn on this discussion. Full disclosure, I don't really understand GUIs and get confused with icons and such. I'm a command-line person and have been for decades. I'll use image editors and IDEs and so on but they often leave me frustrated.
That said, I totally get that other people are not the same, and that's completely valid. If a regular task can only be done from the command line then there's an opportunity to fill in the missing piece, the GUI. It's not a waste of time, even if the GUI is "less efficient" - it's what a lot of people find comfortable.
Where I fall on the other side is the rise of ChatGPT and its friends. People are overwhelmingly positive about typing their problems into a text box, but when the response is "paste this into a terminal window and press enter" they bail out. They're happier to go through a dozen screenshots showing them where to click through menus to get to the option visually, even if they have to try multiple times because the GUI changes with the direction of the wind and the terminal stays consistent.
Yes. I agree these chatbots are another text interface like a CLI. So to me that's again a barrier to usability when I wish to refer to graphical or linked logical items on my screen that don't have any text description. I don't work in a purely text world, where usually there are no CLI commands for what im doing.
Its likely these people find a chat bot easier as they don't need to memorise a command plus modifiers exactly letter perfect. Where one mistype can fail, or worse. Two big issues people have with a CLI. And the chatbot output is made readable too. Where on a CLI it's hard to know if something worked, not being familiar with the terminology it spits out.
I hate llms, but honestly some sort of local one that wasn't trained on the orphan crushing machine thats integrated into the terminal could really help people. But I dont think it needs to be an llm. Just a cleverly coded lookup program like fish or tldr. Something where I can type "audio" and get settings for audio to show up with brief explanations so I can troubleshoot.
I myself forget commands a lot and have a notepad file (that I made an alias for so I can open it super fast from terminal) . But most peolle find this batshit insane that youd have to do that in 2026 and i get made fun of a lot. I myself like the simplicity.
> i get made fun of a lot.
Yes. They don't understand you need a way that works for you. We are all different. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Nope. Every Linux distribution I’ve used has needed access to command line at some point. If anything goes awry people will always give you steps how to fix it from command line.
Now I’m not saying all this couldn’t be done graphically, but you very rarely find steps that way.
I use Fedora Workstation. I do use the terminal, each morning I install my updates by typing "sudo dnf upgrade" and enter the password. When that is done I type "syncthing" to start that service. The rest of the day I don't touch the terminal.
I could install the updates through the "software store" but terminal is faster and no reboot is required, afaik.
Once in a while I do update an app which is almost as easy. Download the rpm file (typically there is a link in the app that needs updating) open terminal, cd Downloads, ls, sudo dnf install "package name", password, exit.
For context, I started on Linux last April. Previous "laptop" was an android tablet with a physical keyboard and mouse. I did buy a used Thinkpad and install Fedora myself which was very easy.
My 75 year old father, who isn't a techie, can handle this. Your Window buds should be able to as well.
I'd say 90% of usage can be done without the terminal especially if you just use Linux to browse the web or check email or other things that are mundane.
Anything past that, there is a good chance you'll have to use the terminal. That said, I think its easier than ever with lots of people making the switch and asking questions on Lemmy or other forums.
Fellow Windows-to-Bazzite migrant here
I had to use the terminal to address some Nvidia driver weirdness, but aside from that, I really don't use it much if at all.
The terminal feels to me like it did on Windows - a useful tool to troubleshoot things - rather than a necessity.
This is also coming from someone who isn't uncomfortable using a CLI, but just prefers GUI for my day-to-day tasks.
It depends.
A 2-5 year-old laptop, you want to web browse, maybe watch some videos, use google docs or open office, you probably never need a terminal
If it's a really new laptop or you want to get the most out of video drivers and push it harder, you'll probably need to be ready for some light terminal crap. Gets a little janky if you have a dual-video-card setup. Nothing hard to handle, but if you're not looking to have to handle anything...
I think the numnber of available packages is better on the Debian side. Mint or Kubuntu run newer hotter stuff, debian runs older more stable stuff.
So I am a new Linux user (Bazzite) and what I have experienced so far is that for my daily driver use I don't need the terminal at all. But the moment I want to do anything even slightly more complex, or even just to use a program I want that is not in bazaar, all the user documentation gives me terminal commands.
So while I am sure it is possible, in reality the terminal still remains prominent and it feels really important to know to use it.
there's three thing I use the terminal for:
Updating my apps and systems
Running development apps
Quick and easy edits or file movements
I choose to use terminal because I can update my software without requiring a restart (I used Debian btw); for some reason, GNOME's Software app cannot do this without restarting. I also prefer terminal-based text-editing for coding and scripting.
Depending on use-case, you can absolutely just use the distro without ever touching the terminal. It requires extra work to sift through all the online advice and docs that center around CLI commands though. The Average Windows User won't be digging that deep in their system to customize the shit out of it like an Arch user, so they won't need to touch the stuff that can only be accessed via command line. The Above Average Windows User will already be comfortable with the command prompt anyway.
Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages?
All of them? Why would a distro choose to be hostile to its users? (/s)
I assume you mean "beginner friendly"? In that case, I would stick to Debian: more stability than windows, harder to break than Arch, and lighter-weight than Fedora.
Those are the only 3 I've daily driven in the past couple of years, and that's my takeaways. I can't give informed input on any of the popular derivatives, except Ubuntu which I did use for awhile (back in 2014-2016): it was more prone to breaking shit than Debian, less beginner-friendly too (fuck Snaps, and fuck your Pro subscription data-harvesting up-selling bullshit).
The military is babying F-35s to hide their true cost to taxpayers
The military is babying F-35s to hide their true cost to taxpayers
Fewer sorties and flight hours kick maintenance down the road, hiding performance issues and taking valuable flight time away from pilotsMike Fredenburg (Responsible Statecraft)
Mrkawfee
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