You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)
Preamble
Make sure your hardware is compatible
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
Make sure yo
... show more
You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)
Preamble
Make sure your hardware is compatible
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux
If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).
Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS
Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.
When in doubt, search for documentation
Arch Wiki is one of the greatest knowledge bases about Linux. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same. Most distros also maintain their own knowledge base.
Understanding the Linux world
What is Linux?
Linux, in the strictest definition, is the kernel, ie. the core component that, among other things, orchestrates and handles all interactions between hardware and software, of a large family of operating systems that, by metonymy, are called "Linux". In general understanding, Linux is any one of these operating systems, called distros.
What is a distro?
A distro, short for "Software Distribution", is a cohesive ensemble of software, providing a full operating system, maintained by a single team. Generally, all of them tend to provide almost the same software and work in a very similar way, but there are major philosophical differences that may influence your choice.
What are the main differences between distros?
As said above, there are a lot of philosophical differences between distros that lead to practical differences. There are a lot of very different ways the same software can be distributed. - "Point Release" (OpenSUSE Leap) vs. "Rolling Release" (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed): Point release distros are like traditional software. They have numbered releases, and between each one no feature updates take place, only security updates and bug fixes. Rolling Release distros package and distribute software as soon as it's available upstream (the software developer's repos), meaning that there are no versions and no specific schedule. - "Stable" (Debian Stable) vs. "Bleeding edge" (Arch): Stable distros are generally point release, and focus on fixing bugs and security flaws at the expense of new features. Each version goes through a lenghty period of feature freeze, testing and bug fixing before release. Stability here not only means trouble-free operation, but more importantly consistent behavior over time. Things won't evolve, but things won't break. At least until the next release. Bleeding edge distros, which often follow the rolling release model (there are outliers like Fedora which are mostly bleeding edge yet have point releases), on the other hand, are permanently evolving. By constantly pushing the latest version of each software package, new features, new bugs, bug fixes, security updates and sometimes breaking changes are released continuously. Note that this is not a binary, there is a very large continuum between the stablest and the most bleeding edge distro. - "Community" (Fedora) vs. "Commercial" (RHEL): Despite the name, Community distros are not only maintained by volunteers, but can also be developed by some company's employees and can be sponsored by commercial entities. However, the main difference with Commercial distros is that they're not a product destined to be sold. Commercial distros like Red Hat's RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Pro are (supposed to be) fully maintained by their company's employees and target businesses with paid support, maintenance, fixes, deployment, training etc. - "x package manager" vs. "y package manager", "x package format" vs. "y package format": It doesn't matter. Seriously. apt, dnf or pacman, to name a few, all have the exact same purpose: install and update software on your system and manage dependencies. - "general purpose" (Linux Mint) vs. "niche" (Kali Linux): General purpose distros are just that: distros that can do pretty much anything. Some are truly general purpose (like Debian), and have no bias towards any potential use, be it for a server, a desktop/laptop PC, some IOT or embedded devices, containers etc., some have various flavors depending on intended use (like Fedora Workstation for desktops and Fedora Server for, you guessed it, servers) but are still considered general purpose. They aim for maximum hardware compatibility and broad use cases. At the opposite end, niche distros are created for very specific and unique use cases, like pentesting (Kali), gaming (Nobara), music production (AV Linux) etc. They tend to have a lot of specific tools preinstalled, nonstandard defaults or modified kernels that may or may not work properly outside of their inteded use case. - "team" (Any major distro) vs. "single maintainer" (Nobara): Pretty self explanatory. Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long. - "traditional" (Fedora Workstation) vs. "atomic" (Fedora Silverblue): In traditional distros, everything comes from a package. Every single component is individually installable, upgradeable, and deletable. Updating a package means deleting its previous version and replacing it with a new one. A power failure during an update lead to a partial upgrade and can make a system unbootable. Maybe a new package was bad and breaks something. Almost nothing prevents an unsuspecting user from destroying a core component. To mitigate risks and ensure a coherent system at each boot, atomic (also called transactional or immutable) distros, pioneered by Fedora Silverblue and Valve's SteamOS, were born. Like mobile phone OSes, the base system is a single image, that gets installed, alongside the current running version and without modifying it, and becomes active at the next reboot. As updates are isolated from one another, if the new version doesn't work the user can easily revert to a previous, functional version. Users are expected to install Flatpaks or use Distrobox, as installing (layering) packages is not as straightforward as with standard distros. - "OG" (Debian) vs. "derivative" (Ubuntu): Original distros are directly downstream of their components' source code repositories, and do most of the heavy lifting. Because of the tremendous amount of work it represents, only a few distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware or Fedora have the history, massive community and sometimes corporate financial backing to do this. Other distros reuse most packages from those original distros and add, replace or modify some of them for differenciation. For example, Debian is the parent of almost all deb-based distros like Ubuntu, which itself is the parent of distros like Mint or Pop!_OS.
What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?
All distros provide, install and maintain, among other things, the following components: - Boot and core system components (these are generally out-of-scope for beginners, unless you need to fix something, but you should at least know they exist): - A boot manager (GRUB, systemd_init, etc.): Boots the computer after the motherboard POSTs, lets you choose what to start - An init system (systemd, etc.): Starts everything needed to run the computer, including the kernel - A kernel (Linux): Has control over everything, main interface for software to discuss with hardware - Command-line environment, to interact with he computer in text mode: - A shell (bash, zsh, fish etc.): The main interface for command-line stuff - Command-line tools (GNU, etc.): Standard suite of command-line tools + default tools chosen by the distro maintainers - User-installable command-line tools and shells - Graphical stack for desktop/laptop computers: - Display servers (X11, Wayland compositors): Handle drawing stuff on screens - A Desktop environment (Plasma, Gnome, XFCE etc.): The main graphical interface you'll interact with everyday. - User-facing applications (browsers, text processors, drawing software etc.): Some are generally installed by default and/or are part of a desktop environment's suite of software, most are user-installable. - A package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, yast etc.): Installs, deletes, updates and manages dependencies of all software installed on the machine.
Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?
As a new user, this is basically the only thing you should concern yourself about: choosing a first Desktop environment. After all, it will be your main interface for the weeks/years to come. It's almost as important as choosing your first distro. These are a few common choices that cater to different tastes: - Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides its strongly opinionated developers' vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome's development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE. - KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is not yet a single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers and explains why there are so few distros with Plasma as the flagship DE. The KDE team is however evolving towards a more regular update cycle. - Cinnamon: Forked from Gnome 3 by the Linux Mint team who disliked the extreme change of user experience it introduced, Cinammon provides a very traditional, "windows-like", desktop-metaphor experience in a more modern software stack than the older DEs it takes inspiration from. Cinnamon still keeps a lot in common with Gnome by being simple and easy to use, yet heavily modifiable with themes, applets and extensions. - Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs. If your machine is super old, extremely underpowered and has less than a few Gb of RAM, don't expect miracles though. A single browser tab can easily dwarf the RAM usage and processing power of your entire system.
As for which one you should choose, this is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. FYI, you are not married to your distro's default desktop environment. It's just what comes preinstalled. You can install alternative DEs on any distro, no need to reinstall and/or distro-hop.
How do I install stuff on Linux?
Forget what you're used to do on Windows of MacOS: searching for your software in a seach engine, finding a big "Download" button on a random website and running an installer with administator privileges. Your package manager not only keeps you system up to date, but also lets you install any software that's available in your distro's repositories. You don't even need to know the command line, Gnome's Software or Plasma's Discover are nice graphical "App Stores" that let you find and install new software.
Flatpak are a great and more recent recent alternative to distro packages that's gaining a lot of traction, and is increasingly integrated by default to the aforementioned App Stores. It's basically a "universal" package manager system thet sits next to your system, that lets software developers directly distribute their own apps instead of offloading the packaging and distribution to distro maintainers.
Choosing a first distro
As discussed before, there is a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a decently large community of maintainers and contributors and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case. Choose a distro that implements well the DE of your choice.
What are great distros for beginners?
The following are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. Always read the installation documentation thoroughly before attempting anything, and follow any post-install requirements (for example, installing restricted-licence drivers on Fedora). - Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite being sponsored by Red Hat (who are getting a lot of justified hate for moving RHEL away from open-source), this is a great community distro for both beginners and very advanced users (including the Linus Torvalds). Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment, but also has a fantastic Plasma version. Keywords: Point Release, close to Bleeding Edge, Community, dnf/rpm, large maintainer team, traditional, original. - Linux Mint: Mint is an Ubuntu (or Debian for the LMDE variant) derivative for beginners and advanced users alike, that keeps Ubuntu's hardware support and ease of use while reverting its shenanigans and is Cinammon's flagship distro. Its main goal is to be a "just works" distro. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, Community, apt/deb, smallish maintainer team but lots of contributors, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu or Debian). - Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this is another Ubuntu derivative that removes Snaps in favor or Flatpaks. Its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. In a few months/years, it will be the flagship distro for the -promising but still in development- Cosmic DE. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, commercially-backed Community, apt/deb, employee's maintainer team, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu). - If you want something (advertised as) zero-maintenance, why not go the Atomic way? They are still very new and there isn't a lot of support yet because they do things very differently than regular distros, but if they wort OOTB on your system, they should work reliably forever. Sensible choices are uBlue's Aurora (Plasma), Bluefin (Gnome) or Bazzite (gaming-ready), which are basically identical to Fedora's atomic variants but include (among other things) restricted-licence codecs and QOL improvements by default, or OpenSUSE's Aeon (Gnome). Keywords: Point Release, Bleeding Edge, Community, rpm-ostree, large maintainer team, Atomic, sub-project (Fedora/OpenSUSE).
Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?
These are amongst the very best but should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed. - Debian Stable: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel quite outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as "Standard Linux" as can be. Debian almost made the cut to "beginner" distros because of its incredible reliability and massive amount of documentation available, but it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection. Keywords: Point Release, Stable as fuck, Community, apt/deb, large maintainer team, traditional, original. - Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux. The "Arch btw" meme of having to perform every single install step by hand has taken a hit since Arch has had a basic but functional installer for a few years now, which is honestly a good thing. I work in sofware. A software engineer who does every single tedious task manually instead of automating it is a shit software engineer. A software engineer who prides themself from doing every single tedious task manually should seriously reconsider their career choices. Arch's other main appeal is the Arch User Repository or AUR, a massive collection of user-created, automated install scripts for pretty much anything. Keywords: Rolling Release, Bleeding-edge, Community, pacman/pkg, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
Which distro should I avoid, period?
Ubuntu: despite having a huge mind-share as the beginner distro, Ubuntu suffers from it's parent company's policy to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really and a second-rate citizen compared to their Ubuntu Pro commercial product. Some of the worst takes in recent years have been pushing Snaps super agressively in order to get some "vendor-lock-in", proprietary walled-garden ecosystem with exclusive commercial apps, forcibly installing snaps even when explicitely asking for a .deb package through apt, baking ads and nags into major software or only delivering critical security patches to Pro customers. Fortunately, there are some great derivatives like Mint or Pop!_OS cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical.
Manjaro: Manjaro might seem appealing as a "user-friendlier" Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs Arch-style regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro. Manjaro also has a highly irregular update schedule that's weeks behind Arch, making using the AUR extremely dangerous, as it always expects a fully up-to-date Arch system.
Any single-maintainer or tiny team distros like Nobara or CachyOS. They might be fantastic distros made by exceptional people (I have mad respect for Nobara's maintainer Glorious Eggroll and his work on Proton-GE), they are most often derivatives so the heavy lifting is already done by their parent distro's maitainers, but there is too much risk involved. Sometimes life happens, sometimes people move on to other projects, and dozens of small distros get abandonned every year, leaving their users dead in the water. Trusting larger teams is a much safer bet in the long term.
Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons like Alpine Linux, Devuan or Artix. Don't get me wrong, not using any GNU tools or systemd is a cool technological feat and developing alternatives to the current consensus is how things evolve. However, these standard tools have a long history, hundreds if not thousands of maintainers and are used by millions, meaning there's a huge chance your specific issue is already solved. Refusing to use them should be reserved to very advanced users who perfectly understand what they're gaining and losing. As a beginner to intermediate level, it will at best make most of the documentation out there irrelevant, at worst make your life a miserable hell if you need to troubleshoot anything.
Philosophical questions, or "I've seen people arguing over the Internet and now I'm scared"
You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community or on the other website that starts with a "R", but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?
Shoud I learn the command line?
Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.
I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?
Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server. If it's possible, one of the best ways to breathe new life into an old machine is to add some RAM, as even lightweight modern sofware will struggle with less than a few Gb.
Should I be concerned about systemd?
No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical and ideological rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner.
Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?
Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GTX/RTX users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. X11 was born in a time when mainframes did most of the heavy lifting and windows were forwarded over a local network to dumb clients. X11 predates the Internet and has basically no security model. Wayland solves that by being a much simpler display protocol with a much smaller feature set adapted to modern computing and security. The only downside is that some very specific functionalities based on decades of X11 hacking and absolute lack of security can be lost.
I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?
No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.
Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?
Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent stable version and/or the one packaged by the developer themselves (which should often be the Flatpak anyway). Snaps however are kinda bad. They are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. Also, Canonical is very aggressive in pushing snaps to their users, even forcing them even when they want to install an apt package. If you don't care, have fun.
I need/want program "x", but it is only available on distro "y" and not on mine. I've been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?
No. Generally, most software is intallable from your distro's package manager and/or Flatpak. But sometimes, your distro doesn't package this program you need, or an inconsiderate developer only distributes a random .deb on their Github release page. Enter Distrobox. It is a very simple, easy to use command line tool that automates the creation of other Linux distros containers using Docker or Podman (basically, tiny, semi-independant Linuxes that live inside your regular Linux), and lets you "export" programs installed inside these containers to you main system so you can run them as easily and with almost the same performance as native programs. Some atomic distros like uBlue's variants even include it by default. That .deb we've talked about before? Spin a Debian container and dpkg install the shit out of it. Absolutely need the AUR? Spin an Arch container and go to town.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who helped improve this guide: @GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml, @tkn@startrek.website, @throwaway2@lemmy.today, @cerement@slrpnk.net, @kzhe@lemm.ee, @freijon@feddit.ch, @aarroyoc@lemuria.es, @SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org, @Plopp@lemmy.world, @bsergay@discuss.online ...and many others who chimed in in the comments ❤
"Help me choose my first distro" and other questions for beginners
You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide.
Preamble
Make sure your hardware is compatible
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux
If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).
Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS
Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.
What are the best resources out there?
Arch Wiki without a doubt. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same.
Okay, now to the most important questions
Which distro should I use?
There are a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there, but these can be broadly put into two main categories: general-purpose distros and niche-distros. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a large community of maintainers and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case.
Beginner distros
These are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. - Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite the community's rightful backlash against Red Hat, this is still a great distro for beginners and advanced users. Even Linus Torvalds himself favors Fedora as a daily driver. Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment. - Linux Mint: While I haven't used it myself, there is a lot of praise here for this Ubuntu derivative from beginners and advanced users alike. Its main goals are ease of use and being the flagship distro for the Cinnamon DE, which is very similar to Windows and may ease the transition for new users. - Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this Ubuntu derivative shares some of the issues with its infamous parent, but its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. - I do not recommend Ubuntu nor Manjaro: despite being marketed as "beginner friendly distros", and despite often running perfectly fine, these two have major issues in management, packaging policies or philosophy that might make your life as a beginner difficult. Ubuntu suffers from it's parent company's goal to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really, and there are some great derivatives like the ones cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical. Manjaro might seem appealing as a "beginner-friendly" Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro.
Advanced distros
So you've taken your first steps, you're starting to be really comfortable with Linux, and you want to get your hands dirty and really learn what's happening under the surface? These should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed. - Debian: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel a bit outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as "Standard Linux" as can be. - Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux.
Which Desktop Environment should I use?
This is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. - Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides the strongly opinionated developers' vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome's development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE. - KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is no single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers. - Cinnamon: If you want the most "windows-like" experience out of the box, Cinnamon is great. As I have no experience with it, I'll let the Mint users praise it in the comments :D - Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs.
Philosophical questions, or "I heard conflicting stuff over the Internet and now I'm scared"
You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community, but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?
Shoud I learn the command line?
Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.
I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from this era?
Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server.
Should I be concerned about systemd?
No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner. (Thanks @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/GravitySpoiled]GravitySpoiled[/url] for the precisions)
Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?
Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GeForce users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. Wayland solves that by being just a simple display protocol with a much smaller codebase, and offloading feature development to the compositors.
Should I look for a gaming-focused distro?
No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.
Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps?
Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent version. Snaps however are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. If you're fine with that, have fun. (Thanks @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/GravitySpoiled]GravitySpoiled[/url] for the precisions)
Should I follow The Way?
Yes. One does not speak unless one knows. You can take your helmet off in public tho.
Feel free to help correct, expand, or simplify this guide :)
I'm well aware that both elementaryOS and its Pantheon DE were innovative and made major strides for user-friendliness a couple of years back. Hence, they rightfully earned a spot among the newbie-friendly distros. However, I might be wrong, but it feels as if they haven't been able to keep momentum. And therefore lost their significance.
If you think I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me; I would love to be educated on how elementaryOS has kept relevance (if they actually have).
I agree that Alpine Linux shouldn't be recommended to newbies but I don't like the explanation. Distros like Alpine Linux are good for the whole Linux ecosystem, as they avoid monoculture and bring diversity to the software, which in turn they foster competition. Like a biological ecosystem, betting everything into one particular specie is a recipe for disaster. Some examples: Glibc has found many bugs because musl did things differently, and it turned out that glibc was not following the standard (also musl had bugs on its own), GCC was stuck until Clang came out and developers started to prefer Clang,...
Very good write up overall. I'll start by admitting that I didn't read all of it. But from the parts that I did read, I have some small comments. I think that Debian Stable is a great beginner distro, since it's essentially unbreakable. With something like KDE Plasma as a DE, it's perfect for noobs. EndeavourOS is another great one. Maybe not for beginners, but for semi-advanced usecases.
Also, I'm not sure about suggesting the Atomic family of dostros to newcomers. It might be my relative unfamiliarity with them, but I don't think immutable distro are a good place to start. They're definitely great to try when you're familiar with Linux, but they're still kind of fringe. It's hard to get support using those.
but I don’t think immutable distro are a good place to start.
FWIW, the first distro I used and subsequently daily-drove^[1]^ was Fedora Silverblue over two years ago. The try-hard in me immediately started off (or at least tried) applying the hardening outlined in Madaidan's article. After banging my head for a week, I started actually using the system and it has been a very smooth ride ever since. The uBlue images are straight up better when it comes to the OOTB-experience without even mentioning the associated 'managed'^[2]^ aspect that comes with it. Therefore, I believe that they're perfectly suitable. They're not for everyone, but no distro is anyways.
I forgot to mention how simultaneously I quit Windows cold turkey as well.
The uBlue images are able to 'prevent' breakages that would otherwise affect everyone.
I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I'm just thinking they're still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you'll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what's what.
That's also a reason I'd recommend something like Debian (although I've actually never even used it myself) because there's so much compatible info out there. I would recommend OpenSUSE, even Tumbleweed, but there's just not as much help or there to find as there is for Debian. But even with that said, OpenSUSEs snapshots and the way they're configured out of the box is an absolute godsend and game changer for newcomers.
I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I’m just thinking they’re still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you’ll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what’s what.
I definitely agree. But, I think it's sufficient to communicate to new uBlue users that they should check uBlue's own documentation first. And, if they didn't find the answer there, that they should ask on discourse or on Discord.
I only addressed this for new uBlue users as I don't think other immutable distros are sufficiently newbie-friendly yet.
I'm doing an experiment right now. I'm giving my previous laptop to my dad to replace his very old, very close to death MacBook Air. I've installed Bluefin, rebased to the Stable branch and keeping everything else stock.
Totally agree with that. I'm just wondering how many people read things like welcome screens etc where such info usually is presented.
They should have all necessary software installed and configured for people to easily get to things like those you mentioned. And have a clear help section in the OS, preferably with sections for different large topics and what not, that links to forum sections or similar. Steer them right before they even hit the web sort of.
I'm also curious to find out how effective welcome screens are.
I suppose the most effective would be if the user is told how to act whenever they're about to commit a 'mistake'; after which they're friendly reminded what they should do instead 😅. But I believe that's a gargantuan effort to effectively gameify the distro 😂. Cool idea though; hopefully some iteration is already in the works.
OpenSUSEs snapshots and the way they're configured out of the box is an absolute godsend and gangbanger for newcomers.
I have a general idea of how to set this sort of thing up in almost any distro now, but this is absolutely one of the ideas that swept me off my feet with OpenSUSE. I like a lot of distros but keep coming back to that wild little tumbleweed chameleon/geeko. :D
It's huge. I've been using ~10 distros sporadically over the past 25 years, and I never ever felt like I could depend on my systems running Linux. Because one simple mistake by either me or an update could render the computer unusable because I didn't (and still don't) know how to fix it. And that was always something that finally happened that made me revert to Windows full time. Tumbleweed is the first distro ever where I feel like I'm standing on solid ground instead of on a house of cards that I can't put back together, because of the snapshots. It gives me confidence and I feel like I finally can use Linux while slowly learning it at my own pace. Absolutely love it.
Also, I see that I have a typo to fix in my previous comment lol.
First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.
Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine: - I absolutely love Fedora. But if it's named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain't the case. Hence, at least mentioning
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First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.
Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine: - I absolutely love Fedora. But if it's named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain't the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise. - I'm fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it's too early to be recommended. - I'm personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead. ~~(I'm a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.)~~ However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification. - Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I'd refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.
I pondered a lot including a bit about rpmfusion in Fedora's paragraph, but I elected not to because there is already too much stuff here :D
As a 20-years Debian user who switched to Fedora a couple years ago on my main laptop, I would say confidently that Debian is the distro I'm the most comfortable with. I love Debian. But, there are a couple things that prevent me from recommending it as a very first distro: - The base system is very barebones and you're required to manually install vital things like proprietary drivers (I think it's a bit more painless now with the nonfree installer but I haven't installed a fresh Debian in a few years). For me, having a fully functional Debian laptop is not hard work but requires a bit of knowledge beforehand. - A lot of people want the latest and shiniest, and with Debian might be tempted to switch to Testing or Sid which is a very bad idea for a daily driver.
Regarding what you mentioned on Debian; ultimately, you're a lot more experienced than I am with it. But, IIUC, Debian 12 should have done a great job at easing (new) users into its ecosystem. Not sure if it's sufficient though.
Yeah I think the recent nonfree images should take care of the most pressing driver issues (last time I installed Debian, I had to separately download and put on a second USB stick the drivers for my WiFi card just to be able to proceed with the installer). I don't know if you still need to manually install proprietary blobs for the CPU or the GPU post-install tho. If not, that would mean modern Debian is indeed very close to OOTB functionality.
How is a noob supposed to read and understand any of that?
Even my friends to which I have explained the general philosophy and utility of Linux (some of which are intrigued and somewhat open to switching) would look at me as if I were insane were I to send them this "guide"
Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker and I work in IT :D
I however believe that it's more useful in the long run to use correct terminology (with a small explanation if necessary) rather than "dumbing it down", as it makes finding pertinent information quicker/easier.
Wow, basically everything you wrote about Manjaro was wrong:
It doesn't need constant maintenance, and it doesn't break. The whole point of it is to be a stable variation of Arch.
It doesn't have a highly irregular update schedule, it's quite regular — every two weeks. There are also updates for outstanding security issues which can come faster (as needed). Occasionally very large updates can take longer in order to weed out all the issues, such as the recent example with Plasma 6 — those are announced in advance.
AUR doesn't "expect" anything, it's a dumping ground where anybody can put anything. I successfully run about 100 AUR packages on Manjaro without any issues, but nobody can guarantee anything when it comes to AUR. It's officially unsupported on Arch and every Arch-based distro. If you want to call it dangerous that's fine (if a bit hyperbolic) but don't blame that on Manjaro, it just shows that you don't understand how AUR works.
FWIW I ran my gaming rig on Manjaro for a couple of years.
It doesn't need constant maintenance, and it doesn't break. The whole point of it is to be a stable variation of Arch.
It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement. It doesn't break if you follow these maintenance steps when relevant to your install. It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly. It might be "stable" as in "crash-free", but it is not "stable" stable. And as I said, after running it for 2 years, I'm not convinced it's that crash-free either. I remember an era (I think 5.9-ish kernel series) that crashed all the time.
It doesn't have a highly irregular update schedule, it's quite regular — every two weeks
Okay, almost-semi-regular then.
AUR doesn't "expect" anything, it's a dumping ground where anybody can put anything.
True, AUR is not sentient. AUR creators, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly Arch users who builds their scripts targeting an up-to-date Arch system.
It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement.
If you're talking about "Known issues and workarounds" those aren't caused by Manjaro, they're issues that crop up with various packages. The forum attempts to crowdsource fixes as part of Manjaro's mission to make it easier on its users.
It's a great resource and it can be used by people on any Arch-related distro (and potentially other distros as well). I wish more distros would do this.
It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly.
Well it's still a rolling distro with Arch heritage. It's as stable as you can make Arch. Which is quite stable in the sense that a Manjaro install won't stop working out of the blue (I can attest to that personally, going on the 5th year as a daily driver). And they've gone and added Timeshift snapshots as default so if you mess something up you can simply restore a snapshot, which takes care of user-related tinkering
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It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement.
If you're talking about "Known issues and workarounds" those aren't caused by Manjaro, they're issues that crop up with various packages. The forum attempts to crowdsource fixes as part of Manjaro's mission to make it easier on its users.
It's a great resource and it can be used by people on any Arch-related distro (and potentially other distros as well). I wish more distros would do this.
It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly.
Well it's still a rolling distro with Arch heritage. It's as stable as you can make Arch. Which is quite stable in the sense that a Manjaro install won't stop working out of the blue (I can attest to that personally, going on the 5th year as a daily driver). And they've gone and added Timeshift snapshots as default so if you mess something up you can simply restore a snapshot, which takes care of user-related tinkering as well.
Okay, almost-semi-regular then.
Not sure I understand your point about the updates (or the "almost-semi" thing). What does it matter if updates come after 13 or 17 days? Is it important to you to be exactly 14 or what?
AUR creators, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly Arch users who builds their scripts targeting an up-to-date Arch system.
10% of AUR packages are abandoned. Another 20% have never been updated after the initial release. Only 35% have been updated within the last year.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. AUR "packages" are recipes that either compile packages from source or download binary releases. Both methods are very resilient and don't care about delays of a couple of weeks.
While you can in theory run into an AUR package that was just updated to require something that was just added to Arch the chances are extremely small. It's hardly a common problem.
Distro best added to the "Power-user distros to avoid" list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).
I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn't the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn't appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that's been broken by automation that didn't quite work as expected. Anyway, I'd suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.
Never understood why Arch got the reputation it has tbh, I've been using Arch-based distros since forever (and since being more or less a beginner in understanding how Linux and Unix-like systems work in general) and never found it hard since it was so well-documented and all the knowledge I needed was spoonfed to me by the wiki. Gentoo should have that reputation. Gentoo uses so many confusing concepts that no other distro seems to use lol
I don't know man. As someone who's been using PCs for decades with occasionally dabbling with stuff on Linux shells, I've tried to install Arch on my laptop a couple months ago and I kept running into one problem after another while trying to follow the Arch wiki installation guide. Maybe if the guide had a single set of instructions that would work majority of the times, instead of branching into options, and only cursory mention of critical stuff that should not be left out mentioned in footnotes, it'd be easier to install. After the second attempt that took a full evening I just gave up.
I'm sorry to hear—that's surprising to me tbh, the Arch and Arch-based distros ive installed have all worked out of the box for me, with the only issues being related to hardware not working well with Linux ie not distro-specific (I used to have Ubuntu on the same machine for instance which had the same issues with the nvidia gpu and 1st gen ryzen cpu). But if you've had trouble thats fair enough, use whatever works well for you
Very good write up. If I not agree with all, I probably agree with most that is in here. On the DE section, I think we should help drive the beginner choice. In the recent past, KDE and Gnome were the early adopters of Wayland and the ones introducing the new features. They are also the choice of most distros. Therefore, I'd recommend one of those two.
I'd open a new section worth of scrutinies, dedicated about security. I believe it may worth advising that as a criteria of selection is recommended to not use distros that freezes regular releases for more than 1 year in desktop installations. Like is explained here. At least in your first distro selection. Advise about restricting privileged access with SELinux or AppArmor. Perhaps, also add a note about secure boot as well and some guide of how to harden your installation, Madaidans, Privacy Tweaks, PrivSec and PrivacyGuides.
There are a number of procedures you can follow to make your Linux desktop system more secure, some more advanced than others. We cover some general techniques here.
Firewalls
A firewall may be used to secure connections to your system.
I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?
I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.
From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else
You definitely can.
is this fairly straightforward to do?
It ain't bad. However, I would opt for a distro that defaults to the preferred DE. In this case, similarly to Linux Mint, the distro would have to be beginner-friendly, popular, polished and stable^[2]^. So, IMO, that would be: - GNOME^[3]^; Pop!_OS or Zorin OS - KDE Plasma; Tuxedo OS - Xfce; MX Linux
Note that there are many other DEs. However, the above mentioned DEs (together with Cinnamon) are the most polished and popular. And while there are many other distros through which you might 'consume' said DEs, the distros mentioned above are the ones I (personally) like to recommend.
At least relatively speaking.
Stable is used here in the context of meant to be used without updating for 'extended' time; except for security updates.
While both default to GNOME, they differ pretty significantly in how they're setup and the associated envisioned workflow.
Reading this feels like reading those famous math textbooks, which are for people who are already well-versed in the field yet kept being shoved into undergraduate courses.
I don't agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it's Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That's also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there's a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it's worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)
I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for "very advanced users". It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you're replacing, what you're replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide d
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I don't agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it's Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That's also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there's a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it's worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)
I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for "very advanced users". It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you're replacing, what you're replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide documentation is not as important as whatever your reason for wanting to use a different init system, or a different C library, or whatever. Tbh, personally, I use runit right now and find it a lot easier to use than systemd. It's very simple—services are just executables and symlinks. I'd have to check documentation and look at examples to make a systemd service, but to make a runit service I just have to create a directory with an executable in it, and to enable it I just make a symlink. The benefit of systemd is how widely used it is so you're more likely to find someone with the same problem as you, not because it's inherently easier to use.
understand what it is you're replacing, what you're replacing it with, and how to use the replacement
then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.
A beginner should avoid these things, once you are far enough along to understand why you might want to replace one of these things, and form your own opinion on it, then go right ahead. But you're no longer a beginner at that point.
then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.
I don't agree, but how people define "advanced"/"beginner" is mostly arbitrary I guess. I wouldn't say that qualifies as advanced, maybe intermediate at best, but I think it's entirely possible to understand eg the basic differences between init systems without ever touching Linux before in your life.
Lacking features doesn't make a package manager good. Arch just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you when you install a package. Debian lets you choose how minimal or bloated, stable or bleeding edge you want your system to be.
Thank you. Fantastic write-up. Saved for future use.
I generally agree with these assessments. One point I would like to add some nuance to, though. This might not be the most popular take, but saying that Ubuntu should be avoided at all cost is a bit extreme. IMO.
If I may, here some counter-arguments to the criticisms of Ubuntu:
It is easy to use and accessible. It has a user-friendly interface and is installed with ease, making it an excellent choice for beginners. The large user base and extensive documentation also provide a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and learning.
Snap packages are convenient as they bundle all dependencies. Flatpaks do something similar, of course. But just because Canonical controls Snap and it is closed source doesn't automatically make it evil.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to wide
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Thank you. Fantastic write-up. Saved for future use.
I generally agree with these assessments. One point I would like to add some nuance to, though. This might not be the most popular take, but saying that Ubuntu should be avoided at all cost is a bit extreme. IMO.
If I may, here some counter-arguments to the criticisms of Ubuntu:
It is easy to use and accessible. It has a user-friendly interface and is installed with ease, making it an excellent choice for beginners. The large user base and extensive documentation also provide a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and learning.
Snap packages are convenient as they bundle all dependencies. Flatpaks do something similar, of course. But just because Canonical controls Snap and it is closed source doesn't automatically make it evil.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux. Ubuntu has a large and active community that can be incredibly helpful to new users. The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don't currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently. Their work also makes the work of distros like Mint, Elementary and Pop! OS easier.
Ultimately, the choice of Linux distribution depends on individual needs and preferences - even for beginners. Although I am not a Ubuntu fan, I wanted to provide a counterpoint with this post. Ubuntu certainly has its flaws, but are we really doing the world of Linux a favour by promoting complete avoidance and thus damaging Ubuntu?
Anyway, just my opinion. I know some of you will disagree with me, perhaps passionately and strongly. Some will agree. That is fine. My hope is that the Linux world remains as diverse as possible, with plenty of options for everyone, and enough resources for fast, high quality development.
I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it's neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I'd even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.
I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.
What's bad about Ubuntu is that the "free" version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).
The community s
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I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it's neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I'd even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.
I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.
What's bad about Ubuntu is that the "free" version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).
The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don't currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently.
Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.
There are two reasons switching to, or even trying out Linux is difficult and often ends in failure: too many choices or too much information. This (great) write up is an example of the latter. Those among us, the would be tutors of Linux, actually read the whole thing before hopping down to the comments, or offer our opinion. Be honest.
We are all passionate about FOSS. Not just because it's neato, but because we recognize that it improves the quality of life of anyone who uses it, and (hopefully) society at large.
Rather than providing many choices with a sink or swim mentality, or write a novel Herman Melville would envy, my suggestion is to become mentors rather tutors. What's the difference?
Haha I dunno I thought it was a pretty good primer for people seeking it out, and people in this community are super helpful and mentor-like in my experience.
I wouldn't even call myself a beginner anymore, but I read the whole thing. :)
Oh yea folks on lemmy are super helpful. And some of them are mentors. To me there are two qualities of a good mentor: time and patience. They will take a student and work with them for however long it takes. They know the student won't get it immediately, so they wait. They recast the question. They will provide personalized examples. They spend enough time with a single student for that student to mature as much as they can while the two are together. Think Mr. Miyagi from the karate kid.
Just as with the other two, there are drawbacks. Mentorship takes time. I'm from the standpoint that if we spend that time, and I mentor 2 people, and you mentor two people, and they mentor two people, we reach critical mass and we start reaching the normies who want, but don't have another way. I'm not as wise as Mr. Miyagi and I'm quite snarky with my opinions 🙃
Recommending Fedora and especially its atomic spins without much documentation to a new user?
To be clear; while OP does mention "Fedora Silverblue" to introduce and contrast atomic distros to traditional ones, they only explicitly recommend uBlue images.
And while it's by no means as exhaustive as the ArchWiki or Gentoo Wiki, uBlue's documentation isn't a slouch either; I've seen far worse. If possible, could you name what's crucially missing?
Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that's not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.
User-friendly articles
How is uBlue's documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.
forums
Naive in a post-Discord world.
User-friendly ~~articles an~~d answers ~~on forums~~ to absolutely all more or less common issues
Based on what do you imply that uBlue's discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.
It's very important for a new user imo. We shouldn't overwhelm them with choices and technical documentation.
Assumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.
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Thank you for the reply!
Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that's not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.
User-friendly articles
How is uBlue's documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.
forums
Naive in a post-Discord world.
User-friendly ~~articles an~~d answers ~~on forums~~ to absolutely all more or less common issues
Based on what do you imply that uBlue's discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.
It's very important for a new user imo. We shouldn't overwhelm them with choices and technical documentation.
Assumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.
choices
What choices?
If you don't believe me
I believe there's definitely some truth in your earlier made statements.
check some content creators. They all agree that we should just give them a popular distro like Mint or Ubuntu and let them progress as fast as they can.
Even if that's true, I think it's hilarious to appeal to their consensus 😂.
I feel like Manjaro is so much worse than Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu but you seem to be at the level of hate. Ubuntu has a nice layout and everything works out of the box. The problem is snap but that can be explained.
"Hate" is a strong word. I don't hate Ubuntu. It's just irrelevant.
It's not alone anymore in the realm of "easy to install and use", and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.
Exactly. Both Manjaro and Ubuntu have had a certain history of "silly misguided shenanigans" that sorta damage trust. You just never know when the next stunt might be pulled.
I personally didn't have too many problems with Manjaro on my gaming laptop, but have since moved to EndeavourOS, which I'm enjoying very much. :D
Same here :) switch from a 2 day Manjaro testing into EndeavourOS without the hassel of native Arch install.
Manjaro looks like a really good distro from the outside, but heard a few strange things about that specific distro I didn't like at all. Also they messed with the boot up logo, add their personal bookmarks in new firefox install...
Had a really strange feeling about that non-authorized intrusive installation. I'm no expert so I won't rant over Manjaro, but my moto says to always follow your guts !
Your reply is much appreciated! Even though I am saddened by the content. And apologies for the upcoming long reply. I thank you in advance for reading through it all.
Imo
Thank you for weakening it with "Imo"! To clarify; it seemed as if the "authority" in "appeal to authority" was conflated with content creators. If this wasn't an appeal to authority in the first place, then please feel free to dismiss my earlier stated sentence.
Normally, I would have asked for clarification in order to prevent possible miscommunication. Unfortunately, after our first serious attempt at reconciling our differences failed miserably, I have instead chosen for a more direct approach in hopes of making it more accessible. It's also more prone to being misunderstood as confrontational, aggressive et cetera. But, if even my super sweet approach in the earlier mentioned conversation failed, I don't see why I should make it less accessible for all involved
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Your reply is much appreciated! Even though I am saddened by the content. And apologies for the upcoming long reply. I thank you in advance for reading through it all.
Imo
Thank you for weakening it with "Imo"! To clarify; it seemed as if the "authority" in "appeal to authority" was conflated with content creators. If this wasn't an appeal to authority in the first place, then please feel free to dismiss my earlier stated sentence.
Normally, I would have asked for clarification in order to prevent possible miscommunication. Unfortunately, after our first serious attempt at reconciling our differences failed miserably, I have instead chosen for a more direct approach in hopes of making it more accessible. It's also more prone to being misunderstood as confrontational, aggressive et cetera. But, if even my super sweet approach in the earlier mentioned conversation failed, I don't see why I should make it less accessible for all involved parties if it doesn't benefit either of us.
this shows your aggressive inability to accept opinions different to yours
I may as well accuse you of doing the same. But..., I don't. But somehow I'm perceived as the villain. I simply fail to understand.
On Lemmy, I engage for one reason, and for one reason only; to arrive at a mutual understanding. This manifests itself in multiple ways: - I'm interested in the communities output on a certain query and engage with them through a post I create. - I'm introduced to a new concept through a post/comment -> Search engines don't yield anything useful -> I ask a question in hopes of learning something new -> And hopefully that engagement yields new information for me; I'm primarily on the receiving end of 'profit' - Someone poses something that I don't agree with or don't understand -> I engage in hopes of my understanding being proven wrong; as that results in the most new information; hence most profit -> Most often, it's somewhere in between; I might get a new perspective on something, but not too crazy. At times, though, the person I was engaging with had some notions that were not entirely backed up; hence, we both end up learning a thing or two - Misinformation or fake news or misunderstanding or whatever known false fact is shared -> I engage in hopes of combating false notions. No profit; but you gotta do what you gotta do - Question is asked, I happen to know an answer that might be helpful -> I contribute. No profit; but contributions are required to foster a nice community
To be clear; I love to accept valid criticism. Especially, if they provide me with new insights and polish my own ideas/notions. Heck, I've even been complimented on how I engage with them in one of our first interactions. And, if you've noticed, this very conversation below our current post is not very different. I just ask you to back up your claims so that I may learn from them. I want to accept them; new knowledge/insights/profit et cetera. But I can't simply accept your claims on the basis of nothing. That doesn't make any sense. That's not how epistemology works.
even if they are obviously more true.
If they're "obviously more true", then it should have been obviously easy to prove their truth. But, I've yet to receive a proof, even after I've explicitly asked you. Or, conversely, proof my falsehood. That's basically the problem at hand: you're less sensitive to back up your claims; even when pressed to do so. Instead, you choose to do whatever you did (or tried) in your most recent reply.
Or, I don't know, ask me how I'm so sure of my own convictions/judgements/ideas. But, and that's very curious; I don't recall you ever asking me a question. Isn't that the most obvious indication that I'm actively trying to engage with your ideas and your output? While you seem to be completely devoid of that. And, somehow, I've become the one that's regarded as possessing "aggressive inability to accept opinions different to yours, even if they are obviously more true.". Sorry, I simply can't take this serious 😅.
At this point I'm asking you to stop stalking me and making fun of me
Fam, you got some hate-boner towards Fedora, 'immutable' distros and especially their intersection; Fedora Atomic. Either educate yourself on them and act accordingly, or simply stop spreading misinformation. Either way, you'll never hear from me again. Related point; simply don't spread misinformation. Period.
making fun of me
I fail to see how I am even making fun of you. If you perceive 'pressing to back up claims' as making fun of you, then... I simply don't know what to say.
Thanks to this guide I've stopped banging my head against the wall trying to install Arch on a laptop and just ended up putting Mint on it. Nearly everything works out of the box, and Cinnamon seems to be close enough to what a Windows user would expect, and then some, seeing how customizable it is.
I'll bang my head against the wall again once I've familiarized myself with it.
My opinion doesn't mean much since it's been forever since I tried any other distro but I'm surprised Debian isn't on the beginners list.
it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection
I'm not really sure what this means? It might be more accurate to say it's not the best distro if you'd like to tinker with your desktop experience.
Notably, nothing on the beginners list ought to be run as a headless server, but debian is perfect for that job. The reason I've become so enamoured with debian over the years is that I can use it on my desktop and on servers and it's the same system - everything is exactly where I'm used to it being.
Not sure if it's the devs to blame when there's statements like:
Kurtz therefore has the possibly unique and almost-certainly-unwanted distinction of having presided over two major global outage events caused by bad software updates.
So, I'm guessing it's the business that's not supporting good dev->test->release practices.
But, I agree with your point; their overall software quality is terrible.
Difference between open source software and closed source software:
CrowdStrike bad coding make Linux crashes -> sysadmin has control over the system and can rapidly fix the issue by disabling CrowdStrike module -> downtime is limited
CrowdStrike bad coding make Windows crashes -> sysadmin has limited control over the system and rely on Windows/CrowdStrike people to fix the issue -> the demand is too high cause the issue happened with many computers around the world at the same time -> huge downtime while few people on Microsoft and/or CrowdStrike fix the issue one by one manually
Sysadmin here. Wtf are you talking about? All we did was "rapidly fix the issue by disabling Crowdstrike module." Or really, just the one bad file. We were back online before most people even woke up.
What do you think Crowdstrike can do from their end to stop a boot loop?
A busted kernel module/driver/plug-in/whatever that triggers a bootloop is going to require intervention on any platform no matter whether the code happens to be published somewhere out on the internet or not. On top of that, Windows allows you to control/remove 3rd party kernel drivers just like on Linux, which is exactly what many of us have been stuck doing on endless devices for the last three days.
I fully advocate for open-source software and use it where I can, but I also think we should do that by talking about its actual advantages instead of just making up nonsense that will make experienced sysadmins spit out their coffee.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The fix is to boot into safe or recovery mode, delete a file, reboot. That's it.
The reason it takes so long is because millions of PCs are affected, which usually are administered remotely. So sysadmins have to drive to multiple places, while their usual workloads wait. On top of that, you need the encryption recovery keys for each PC to boot into safe mode. Those are often stored centrally on a server - which may also be encrypted and affected. Or on an Azure file share, which had an outage at the same time. Maybe some of the recovery keys are missing. Then you have to reinstall the PC and re-configure every application that was running on it. And when all of that is over, the admins have to get back on top of all the tasks that were sidelined, which may take weeks.
I know the project name clearly states `x` in it.
But then also is it possible to have a proper Wayland support using nsxiv on xwayland if fine, but few key maps fails to work and was looking forward to `nsiv` as this will make it the image viewer o…
Here is ROME 24.07, the rolling release model up-to-date install images. It basically carries all the features already included in the Release Candidate with the packages updated to the latest…
Mandriva was a Linux distribution that went out of business years ago. OpenMandriva is one of the projects that rose from its ashes with some of the same personnel and code base. It is an independent (not a fork) and community run distribution that, I think, does quite a lot with very limited resources.
This is the official OpenMandriva website. There you can find documentation, all needed links for our services and getting the distribution, and the latest news.
And Mandriva itself was an attempted resurrection of the old Mandrake distribution (which was sorta the Ubuntu of its day). Really hoping OpenMandriva manages to make a go of it considering the ringer those folks have been through.
How do the 'offspring' of Mandrake/Mandriva compare to one another? IIRC, there's ALT, Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and ROSA.
I've also come to the understanding that what set Mandrake apart from its peers was its polish and user-friendliness. Which, harbored a great community back in the days. Currently, however, this role is fulfilled by distros like Linux Mint. Furthermore, most distros are relatively straightforward anyways. So, my other questions would be: - Could the argument be made that Linux Mint is the actual spiritual successor to Mandrake? - Are the Mandrake-offspring's most compelling raison d'être that they're Mandrake's offspring?
I think you right. Especially when PCLinuxOS is the “The Boomer Distribution“ according to the website. Obviously the community and user friendliness ( like the control center) you mentioned was the main reason. Lastly, destroying your CRT monitor by a wrong X config was part of the learning process.
PCSX2 is a popular open source emulation for the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) and PCSX2 version 2.0 is now officially available with a great many changes and improvements.
I'm running Proxmox on a Lenovo ThinkCentre and I decided to swap the internal 256 GB 2,5" SSD for a 500 GB NVME.
I installed the new NVME alongside the old SSD, and formated it in ext4 with a single partition. I then proceeded to 'dd /dev/sda /dev/nvme0n1' and it went through without an error.
My impression was that it would clone all content from the old drive to the new, but it wouldn't boot the new drive. I then logged in and set a boot flag via fstab a, but that only helped me boot but the system gets stuck at "waiting for root file system".
Nothing is lost as the old drive still works fine when installed but how do I complete the swap correctly so I can go NVME-only?
No UUIDs, only paths. When booting from a live system I noticed /etc/fstab is empty. Also, there where a bunch of partitions on /dev/sda and I can't see any on /dev/nvme0n1
it sounds like the bootloader is installed; but not updated to point to the ramdisk and i'd be surprised if your ramdisk doesn't need a new driver to load the nvme drive since it was created using your old ssd.
also: i'm going to assume that you want 500gb instead of 256gb and i think dd is likely going to give you 256gb since it also copies free space and your drives are not identical; if none of the resizefs commands work, then you'll be stuck at 256gb. in your shoes i would use that live distribution to create that partition (or better yet an lvm) like you already did; copy the data that you want with something like rsync; install grub and allow that bootloader installation to create a new ramdisk for you.
this way you're guaranteed to get all 500gb; the bootloader and ramdisk have the necessary bits to run your nvme and installation; plus, if you go with lvm, you're future proofed since you can add drives to that lvm into perpetuity with each new drive increasing its size or retire old drives without having to remove/re-create the volume and all without having to d
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it sounds like the bootloader is installed; but not updated to point to the ramdisk and i'd be surprised if your ramdisk doesn't need a new driver to load the nvme drive since it was created using your old ssd.
also: i'm going to assume that you want 500gb instead of 256gb and i think dd is likely going to give you 256gb since it also copies free space and your drives are not identical; if none of the resizefs commands work, then you'll be stuck at 256gb. in your shoes i would use that live distribution to create that partition (or better yet an lvm) like you already did; copy the data that you want with something like rsync; install grub and allow that bootloader installation to create a new ramdisk for you.
this way you're guaranteed to get all 500gb; the bootloader and ramdisk have the necessary bits to run your nvme and installation; plus, if you go with lvm, you're future proofed since you can add drives to that lvm into perpetuity with each new drive increasing its size or retire old drives without having to remove/re-create the volume and all without having to do any of it again.
Just using DD like this is not doing a bit clone of your drive. What you want to do can be done with DD on a blank disk (no filesystem), but you might as well just use gparted and make it easy on yourself. Otherwise, you need make sure the source and destination disks have the exact same geometry and such...it's just more steps you seem to not want to take. Just take the easy route.
So install back both disks, make a bootable gparted stick and do the cloning from there? The new disk is basically empty save the new file system, but ofc I can just delete that.
Yeah, that'll work. Gparted should wipe the destination disk for you and set the boundaries and such. Should be super easy. You can find guides online as well.
X2 for clonezilla. I would usually go the path of the OP with one exception: this particular example. Clonezilla just works so perfectly for this effect scenario i can't imagine wasting time using anything else.
That's the usual open source way. The config probably came later so they just added the option without changing the default because that would break backward compatibility.
And there would be too much boring work to build a migration.
Nice idea, I love. But you have to remember, those investigations cost huge time and money. When you consider the cost of a full-time staff over the 10 years, you include. Plus the cost of building a case against some of the largest cooperation. All before any court costs are considered.
We are likely better off having that money reinvested in preventing other companies from these practices.
It costs more than zero to levy a fine, but we are talking about many billions in income here. Your point would be valid if gathering staff and then fining Google 9 billion were a net zero. It isn't.
We are likely better off having that money reinvested in preventing other companies from these practices.
Which is what I suggested. The best way to prevent these practices is libre alternatives.
All the cloud services are built on top of free software, and big tech just built user interfaces on top of them.
That wasn't the intended purpose of course, to support billionaries becoming multi billionaries. So maybe a percentage of the profits should go back to the makers.
These past two weeks were big for Wayland accessibility support, as Nicolas Fella did a lot of work to improve support for sticky keys to equal the state they were in on X11. This work is not compl…
Kinda. One of the Linux "wrappers" (I'm a bit tired and can't think of the correct term here, bear with me) that lets you utilize some Linux utilities on Windows, maybe it was mingw or cygwin, actually uses pacman as their package manager IIRC.
The base tarball that separates Arch from Debian or Gentoo differ in very minor structural ways, but the difference is the way they fetch, parse, and install packages is huge.
Given this small difference in base tarballs, one can make the case the Arch codebase is the pacman codebase.
(not quite sure where the hostility is coming from, but) if you agree that the base tarball of the distro is inconsequential, then one could argue that the package manager is the actual distro.
That is, using pacman on Windows is akin to an Arch installation on windows.
Apologies, hostility wasn't my intention, only seeking understanding.
Ya know, in the context of the software in a vacuum, sure. But I think I'll ammend what I said earlier about what constitutes a distro:
IMO, It's not just software that glues other existing software together into a contiguous OS, but also a staff, a community, a philosophy cast on that collection of software. A way of doing things and thinking about them. Decisions and the rationale for them, a history of iteration, user needs and how those needs are filled. Us soft squishy humans that make, maintain, modify, administer, use, and complain about the software.
Because I think that reducing a distro to only the software it produces or uses fails to paint the whole picture. The mechanisms used for managing the collection of software on any specific machine is only one part of a larger system.
Pacman isn't the only part of Arch, and Arch isn't just pacman. The same is true if you s/Arch/MSYS2/g on that statement.
I hear what you're saying but I try my best to divorce a piece of art from its art fans and curators, because ultimately I don't want to be sold into a doctrine on how I should see something, I just want to enjoy it.
I do agree that Arch is much bigger than its codebase (I just sometimes wish it wasn't, with the sole exception of the Arch Wiki)
The moment I installed it, yay broke. To fix it, if any of you need this: do an ln -s to the .so that is being requested. This allows yay to work again. Use yay to upgrade yay. Finally remove the symbolic link.
That's how you're supposed to use AUR, I think. All yay, paru, etc do is make it convenient to do that while also helping with searching and upgrading them.
Worth a look at Coros. I find their battery life and product support to be much better than the garmin watches I've owned. They even added maps as an update for existing watches when they could have forced people to buy a new watch for that feature. Not FOSS though.
If there was an open source GPS watch that could last long enough with enough accuracy for my workouts, I'd be all over it!
That's what I use. It's way more stripped down than a modern smart watch, but it has good battery life, a transflexive LCD, can discretely give me notifications so I can keep my phone on silent, and can show me the weather at a glance.
There are more things it can do, I just find my phone is better for the majority of them.
Gatgetbridge (your link) has a breakdown of devices they support gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/ . You can click through the vendors to find devices which are both "highly supported" and "no vendor-pair". Meaning most/all the features work without any reliance on the vendor app.
As for the similarity you are asking about with pixel->GrapheneOS, there are very few watches that can run an alternative open source firmware or operating systems apart from the ones that are already open source, like bangle.js, pinetime, etc. Wearables are even more specialized than phones, they require specialized code designed specifically for them and would likely require pretty extreme effort to reverse-engineer.
I use a pebble 2 HR with gadgetbridge but the watch it self runs the old pebble firmware which gadgetbridge talks to. This is fine for me, but if you are looking for a more modern watch you may have to make some compromises.
I have a pinetime and I basically just stopped using it. I thought it being open source would mean I could add my own features, but development for it sucks and it's massively limited.
It has 512kb of flash, and Over 400kb is already taken by the base firmware. Also, you have to flash a new firmware every time you want to try a new feature.
64kb of ram, too. So you have to be extremely cautious and careful about how you code any features.
I'm looking for a 3atm waterproof os smartwatch. Banglejs Is supposed to be 3atm like the amazfit bip If you close the hole for the barometer but I won't risk it. Any 3atm os smartwatch available?
I would reall love to have an open source watch, but unfortunately both the pinetime and bangle.js 2 lack severely in the activity tracking, which is the primary reason for me to have a smart watch.
I'm not sure how the screen is on the pinetime, but on the bangle.js 2 it's surprisingly bad. Not a deal breaker by itself, but combined with a sort of limping experience on other parts, it's not a good product (yet).
If you want something feature rich, I have the Amazfit Balance Watch and its just as nice as the Pixel Watch hardware wise. It runs a closed source Chinese Zepp OS but if you pair it with GadgetBridge, none of your data can go anywhere except your phone local storage, and 95% of the features work well.
Notifications, media control, minor navigation aids, some heart rate stuff (they've linked some papers for their algorithm which I think is cool cause now we can discuss the validity of said algorithm for heart rate monitoring) and most importantly 1024 (the game)
I'm a PineTime-user too, but be advised, that there is no sleep tracking, and the heartrate measurement is not passive, nor does it work in the background.
But if you want a simple watch for notifications, weather, time, step count, and a handy flashlight, with up to three weeks uptime with one charge, the pinetime is for you!
Also, you might want to consider joining the PineTime-Community, bring some life there! ❤
Similar to what most smartwatches can: measure heartbeat, show notifications and answer calls from your smartphone, flashlight (by showing white write screen), show weather, etc.
There's AsteroidOS but I couldn't find any of the supported watches (all quite old IIRC) at a reasonable price.
Gadgetbridge with some proprietary watch is fine privacy-wise (I had an Amazfit GTR3 pro, I needed to register an account with the Zapp app and use it once, but then uninstalled it once I got the required password and used Gadgetbridge exclusively).
Bangle and the Pine Watch are low-res and IMHO quite ugly compared to alternatives from big brands.
I use the AmazFit Band 7, the last sensibly sized watch that exists it often feels like.
Weather fails to sync, but then it's probably the least important feature on a watch. The only feature I really wish Gadgetbridge could do that even the official stack can't is "nap mode"
As a narcoleptic person still recovering from major depression, I wish I could either press a button to silence the watch and set a "smart alarm" for 30 minutes. Even better if it would turn on automatically if it detects me sleeping during the day!
The only other thing GB can't do is stand in for the phone-side ZeppOS API functionality, but who needs that, let's be honest!
Fantastic battery life to boot. I have gone two weeks after forgetting to charge it while wearing it almost 24×7!
But, I now have Breezy Weather setup and working! I can now know how much it won't rain during the rainy season where every other part of the state is flooded with the flick of a wrist 🥲
Really wish we'd get some nice, fast RISC-V base boards with a nice amount of flash memory paired with a cool round LCD display..keep patrolling CNX for the parts but they don't seem to be quite there yet.
I just picked up a banglejs 2 and I love it. I was using a galaxy smart watch 5 but didn't work without gapps on my lineage phone. Its obviously not as good as the Samsung smart watch but I've been super happy with it. No creating accounts, getting tokens etc. Just pair it via Bluetooth and gadget bridge and you are good to go. Its a little pricey but for open source watch its awesome, I've heard good things about pinetime as well.
Lilygo T-Watch. Sorry, I know I'm late to the party but no one mentioned these. They're a little closer to a development platform, but basic enough for anyone to pick up and learn. They're similar to the PineTime in terms of being low-power, more simple options. But this uses a more powerful ESP32-S3 SoC and is a lot more responsive.
T-Watch S3 meets the needs of developers who want to experiment with LoRa and ESP32 S3 technology in wearable devices, highly customizable and usable in a variety of applications.
We’re now at a point where transitioning fully to the open-source GPU kernel modules is the right move, and we’re making that change in the upcoming R560 driver release.
With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted…
This instance is encouraging naked unashamed white supremacy by permitting this filth. The moderators of .world have a sustained record of not just complicity but encouragement of this behavior. Lemmy.ml is turning into a nazi bar.
As you kids like to say these days, you need to get outside and touch grass.
Even if there were "slurs", offense can only be taken.
Then there's also the issue of you labeling something racist or a slur just because you don't like it, as a means of getting your way. Now that I find offensive.
Some people are asshats, (actually, we're all asshats from time to time). That's life.
This is cool. I struggled with exactly the problem as described. Installed the NVIDIA driver and it would not load, without telling me why. Somebody on Lemmy pointed out that you need to disable Secure boot.
It's nice to know they are working on a solution, just a pity it's so difficult. But they are trying very hard to make it workable.
With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted…
Just a basic critique, but you should have a short description of what speedcubing is and what/how your software works (in general terms). I know this is probably niche software, but if people can see your vision a bit better, they might be more likely to contribute. Your current Description is pretty sparse.
"A speedcubing timer for the 21st century" doesn't really say much, especially since we live in a world where that lingo has become background noise, thanks to aggressive advertising.
I mean, people who find your software are probably looking for it, so they're probably your target audience, but you never know what might pique somebody's interest!
And maybe somebody out there has been living under a rock, has been doing speedcubing, but has no idea that's what it's called. You never know!
I'm still struggling to find the info here. I love those comments that clarify click bait or obscure titles so that I don't need to click. Anyway, in this case I just assume it's about Rubik's and I don't care about this. But kudos on building a stopwatch, I guess :P
Yeah you got it. Theres a regulatory body, WCA, that oversees competitions on who solves the Rubik's cube fastest in any number of events. They have particular rules that dictate how long you are able to inspect the cube and also provide the scramble for each solve so as to maximize randomness, so its a bit more than a regular stopwatch. Granted I haven't looked at this app in particular but speedcubing apps tend to keep track of averages of 3,5, and 12 previous solves and provide lifetime stats and graphs for monitoring trends.
This isn't a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn't log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company's messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
Latest Crowdstrike Update Issue: The issue seems widespread, affecting machines running various CrowdStrike sensor versions. CrowdStrike has acknowledged the problem and is currently investigating the cause.
Feel you there. 4 hours here. All of them cloud instances whereby getting acces to the actual console isn't as easy as it should be, and trying to hit F8 to get the menu to get into safe mode can take a very long time.
Sadly not. Windows doesn't boot. You can boot it into safe mode with networking, at which point maybe with anaible we could login to delete the file but since it's still manual work to get windows into safe mode there's not much point
It is theoretically automatable, but on bare metal it requires having hardware that's not normally just sitting in every data centre, so it would still require someone to go and plug something into each machine.
On VMs it's more feasible, but on those VMs most people are probably just mounting the disk images and deleting the bad file to begin with.
I guess it depends on numbers too. We had 200 to work on. If you're talking hundreds more than looking at automation would be a better solution. In our scenario it was just easier to throw engineers at it. I honestly thought at first this was my weekend gone but we got through them easily in the end.
Also a lot of people were "on call" to handle any problems when the year changed, so the few problem that had passed unnoticed when doing the fixed and did pop up when the year changed, got solved a lot faster than they normally would.
More generally: delegate anything critical to a 3rd party and you've just put your business at the mercy of the quality (or lack thereof) of their own business processes which you do not control, which is especially dangerous in the current era of "cheapest as possible" hiring practices.
Having been in IT for almost 3 decades, a lesson I have learned long ago and which I've also been applying to my own things (such as having my own domain for my own e-mail address rather than using something like Google) was that you should avoid as much as possible to have your mission critical or hard to replace stuff dependent on a 3rd Party, especially if the dependency is Live (i.e. activelly connected rather than just buying and installing their software).
I've managed to avoid quite a lot of the recent enshittification exactly because I've been playing it safe in this domain for 2 decades.
Was there patching systems and testing they survived the rollover months before it happened. One software managed the rollover. But failed the year after. They had quickly coded in an explicit exception for 00. But then promptly forgot to fix it properly!.
I'd use ME before the adware that is the current version. It wasn't that bad, it was just Win98 with some visual slop on top that crashed slightly more often.
I think you mean - the shareholders enjoy the profits of scale.
When a company scales up, prices are rarely reduced. Users do get increased community support through common experiences especially when official channels are congested through events like today, but that's about the only benefit the consumer sees.
Company offering new-age antivirus solutions, which is to say that instead of being mostly signature-based, it tries to look at application behavior instead. If Word was exploited because some user opened not_a_virus_please_open.docx from their spam folder, Word might be exploited and end up running some malware that tries to encrypt the entire drive. It's supposed to sniff out that 1. Word normally opens and saves like one document at a time and 2. some unknown program is being overly active. And so it should stop that and ring some very loud alarm bells at the IT department.
Basically they doubled down on the heuristics-based detection and by that, they claim to be able to recognize and stop all kinds of new malware that they haven't seen yet. My experience is that they're always the outlier on the top-end of false positives in business AV tests (eg AV-Comparatives Q2 2024) and their advantage has mostly disappeared since every AV has implemented that kind of behavior-based detection nowadays.
The first half-year Enterprise main-test series report with Real-World Protection, Malware Protection and Performance Test, along with security solution reviews has been released.
I wanted to share the article with friends and copy a part of the text I wanted to draw attention to but the asshole site has selection disabled. Now I will not do that and timesnownews can go fuck themselves
Download Activate Reader View for Firefox. This add-on adds a button to the toolbar. Clicking on it activates the Reader View even if the icon in the address bar is not present.
Latest Crowdstrike Update Issue: Many Windows users are experiencing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors due to a recent CrowdStrike update. The issue affects various sensor versions, and CrowdStrike has acknowledged the problem and is investigating the cause, as stated in a pinned message on the company's forum. Who Have Been Affected Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first reported the issue, which quickly spread to Europe as businesses began their workday. UK broadcaster Sky News couldn't air its morning news bulletins, while Ryanair experienced IT issues affecting flight departures. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all Delta, United, and American Airlines flights due to communication problems, and Berlin airport warned of travel delays from technical issues. In India too, numerous IT organisations were reporting in issues with company-wide. Akasa Airlines and Spicejet experienced technical issues affecting online services. Akasa Airlines' booking and check-in systems were down at Mumbai and Delh
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heres the entire article
Latest Crowdstrike Update Issue: Many Windows users are experiencing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors due to a recent CrowdStrike update. The issue affects various sensor versions, and CrowdStrike has acknowledged the problem and is investigating the cause, as stated in a pinned message on the company's forum. Who Have Been Affected Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first reported the issue, which quickly spread to Europe as businesses began their workday. UK broadcaster Sky News couldn't air its morning news bulletins, while Ryanair experienced IT issues affecting flight departures. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all Delta, United, and American Airlines flights due to communication problems, and Berlin airport warned of travel delays from technical issues. In India too, numerous IT organisations were reporting in issues with company-wide. Akasa Airlines and Spicejet experienced technical issues affecting online services. Akasa Airlines' booking and check-in systems were down at Mumbai and Delhi airports due to service provider infrastructure issues, prompting manual check-in and boarding. Passengers were advised to arrive early, and the airline assured swift resolution. Spicejet also faced problems updating flight disruptions, actively working to fix the issue. Both airlines apologized for the inconvenience caused and promised updates as soon as the problems were resolved. Crowdstrike's Response CrowdStrike acknowledged the problem, linked to their Falcon sensor, and reverted the faulty update. However, affected machines still require manual intervention. IT admins are resorting to booting into safe mode and deleting specific system files, a cumbersome process for cloud-based servers and remote laptops. Reports from IT professionals on Reddit highlight the severity, with entire companies offline and many devices stuck in boot loops. The outage underscores the vulnerability of interconnected systems and the critical need for robust cybersecurity solutions. IT teams worldwide face a long and challenging day to resolve the issues and restore normal operations. What to Expect:
-A Technical Alert (TA) detailing the problem and potential workarounds is expected to be published shortly by CrowdStrike. -The forum thread will remain pinned to provide users with easy access to updates and information.
What Users Should Do:
-Hold off on troubleshooting: Avoid attempting to fix the issue yourself until the official Technical Alert is released. -Monitor the pinned thread: This thread will be updated with the latest information, including the TA and any temporary solutions. -Be patient: Resolving software conflicts can take time. CrowdStrike is working on a solution, and updates will be posted as soon as they become available.
In an automated reply from Crowdstrike, the company had stated: CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor. Symptoms include hosts experiencing a blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. The course of current action will be - our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket. Status updates will be posted as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved. For Users Experiencing BSODs: If you're encountering BSOD errors after a recent CrowdStrike update, you're not alone. This appears to be a widespread issue. The upcoming Technical Alert will likely provide specific details on affected CrowdStrike sensor versions and potential workarounds while a permanent fix is developed. If you have urgent questions or concerns, consider contacting CrowdStrike support directly.
It's actually a "test things first and have a proper change control process" thing. Doesn't matter if it's open source, closed source scummy bullshit or even coded by God: you always test it first before hitting deploy.
Same here. I was totally busy writing software in a new language and a new framework, and had a gazillion tabs on Google and stackexchange open. I didn't notice any network issues until I was on my way home, and the windows f-up was the one big thing in the radio news. Looks like Windows admins will have a busy weekend.
Huh? Crowdstrike is an antivirus product, you're only affected if you bought and installed it on your Windows devices. Crowdstrike also had issues with their Linux version a few weeks ago, but that one was thankfully less severe.
It is on the sense that Windows admins are the ones that like to buy this kind of shit and use it. It's not on the sense that Windows was broken somehow.
Didn't Crowdstrike have a bad update to Debian systems back in April this year that caused a lot of problems? I don't think it was a big thing since not as many companies are using Crowdstrike on Debian.
Sounds like the issue here is Crowdstrike and not Windows.
They didn’t even bother to do a gradual rollout, like even small apps do.
The level of company-wide incompetence is astounding, but considering how organizations work and disregard technical people’s concerns, I’m never surprised when these things happen. It’s a social problem more than a technical one.
And roll it out in a controlled fashion: 1% of machines, 10%, 25%...no issues? Do the rest.
How this didn't get caught by testing seems impossible to me.
The implementation/rollout strategy just seems bonkers. I feel bad for all of the field support guys who have had there next few weeks ruined, the sys admins who won't sleep for 3 days, and all of the innocent businesses that got roped into it.
A couple local shops are fucked this morning. Kinda shocked they'd be running crowd strike but also these aren't big businesses. They are probably using managed service providers who are now swamped and who know when they'll get back online.
One was a bakery. They couldn't sell all the bread they made this morning.
From my understanding, they have some ring 0 thing that fucked up. Could that not in theory happen on our beloved Linux systems? Or does the kernel generally not give that option?
Still this fiasco proved once again that the biggest thread to IT sometimes is on the inside. At the end of the day a bunch of people decided to buy Crowdstrike and got screwed over. Some of them actually had good reason to use a product like that, others it was just paranoia and FOMO.
One program I tested went from (31,12,99) to (01,01,100). Its front end formatted the date and added the century, so it showed 1 January 2000 as 01/01/19100
That wasn't fixed. The fault didn't affect processing (the years were wrong but had the correct offset between them) and was only visible to internal users, and also that system was expected to be retired in 2004
Crowdstrike already killed some Linux machines. Let's not pretend Windows is at fault here or Linux is magically better in this area. No one is immune from software that can run as a kernel module going bad.
Every system has its faults. And I'm still going to dogpile the system with the most faults. But hell Microsoft did buy GitHub, Halo, MineCraft, and a million other things they will probably find a way to buy Linux and ruin it for us just like they ruin everything else.
Let's see, ...we are somewhere in between Extend and Extinguish on the roadmap.
Edit: Case & Point, RIP RedHat & IBM and GitHub CoPilot, what a great idea. RIP Atom Editor and probably a million other things. Do we have a KilledByMicrosoft website yet? I hope people in the pharmacy could get their prescriptions or we might have to add peoples names to the list.
Microsoft has many faults and I'll criticize them as I please. And if Linux is a culprit in a global outage someday I'll contemplate criticizing them too.
This "Not Microsoft's Fault" comes off as white knighting for Muh Billion Dolla Corporation.
Do we really need to SIMP for the company town.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and others deserve every ounce of vitrol they earn through their shitty practices. Again I am criticizing them for being shitty not for the particulars of System X vs System Z but for the aftermath.
I get where you are coming from, but this event is pretty much entirely the fault of Crowdstrike and the countless organizations that trusted them. It's definitely a show of how massive outages are more likely when things are overly centralized and proprietary, and managed by big, shitty, profit driven organizations. Since crowdstrike operates in kernel space, it doesn't matter which operating system it's on, it can break it if it does something stupid. In fact they managed to break some redhat machines not too long ago, and some Debian machines not long before that. It's just the impact wasn't as far reaching as this recent utter fuckup, just because fewer critical machines were affected, so we didn't hear about those smaller fuckups in the news.
Yes, thank you, exactly. The centralized model has its benefits but it also can act as a single point of failure.
If I was going to analyze from an engineering perspective I would focus on when these inevitable events occur due to human error do we have adequate tools to roll back updates? Do we snapshot OS drives before updates? Is there adequate Safe Mode or Fallback Tools to diagnose which files are offending in order to allow the user to remove them.
In my view the windows user isn't dignified to have the skills or intelligence needed to workaround a "setback" issue like the one yesterday.
It doesn't help that NTFS is missing modern capabilities, or that there isn't easy to use DIFF for the layman to understand which files were added to the filesystem that may be causing the breakage.
To be fair though even with those pot holes filled the entire design paradigm of Windows and a proprietary platform is part of the problem. Software is not broken up into package modules that can be assembled into a functioning system it is encumbered with "anti-piracy" bo
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Yes, thank you, exactly. The centralized model has its benefits but it also can act as a single point of failure.
If I was going to analyze from an engineering perspective I would focus on when these inevitable events occur due to human error do we have adequate tools to roll back updates? Do we snapshot OS drives before updates? Is there adequate Safe Mode or Fallback Tools to diagnose which files are offending in order to allow the user to remove them.
In my view the windows user isn't dignified to have the skills or intelligence needed to workaround a "setback" issue like the one yesterday.
It doesn't help that NTFS is missing modern capabilities, or that there isn't easy to use DIFF for the layman to understand which files were added to the filesystem that may be causing the breakage.
To be fair though even with those pot holes filled the entire design paradigm of Windows and a proprietary platform is part of the problem. Software is not broken up into package modules that can be assembled into a functioning system it is encumbered with "anti-piracy" boogie man where the software treats the user as an enemy and is designed to break.
Linux isn't like that. I've cloned many distro drives and swapped them into new machines and with 1 or 2 tweaks they JustWork
I see many people on the net defending Microsoft as blameless for technical reasons.
My criticisms were that Microsoft just sucks as you interpreted correctly and offered a eloquent summary. Thank You.
Where I think the entire conversation should move is --
What are the design flaws that allowed this to happen?
"More Rust & Less C" I see some people suggest as this was allegedly a null pointer issue.
And is Windows Broken By Design? My opinion answer - Yes.
(Okay, and what to do about it before the next billion dollars is lost. I would think critical infrastructure should have a model similar to NixOS in immutability but that's just my opinion.)
Windows does have a fallback mode called safe mode and that's exactly what's being used to fix this utter mess.
Package management isn't going to save you from this as it didn't save the Linux systems affected last time. It didn't stop Arch Linux from failing to boot after a Grub update either.
Windows also has drive cloning tools, that isn't unique to Linux.
NixOS isn't immutable. It's not an a/b root system and / isn't read only. Rather it's what's known as reproducible. I am not convinced NixOS would make this any easier either given how simple the fix was. Funnily enough though tools exist called ansible and puppet for configuring systems in repeatable ways that apply to both other Linux systems, Windows systems, and even macOS.
There are like one or two valid points in this whole comment and the rest is pretty much falsehoods and misconceptions.
Edit: Forgot to mention tools exist to make Windows immutable as well. So that is an option.
Package management isn’t going to save you from this as it didn’t save the Linux systems affected last time. It didn’t stop Arch Linux from failing to boot after a Grub update either.
Prior to the most recent version, grub only registered the fwsetup if detected support. If your machine detected support, you would have had the fwsetup command registered and the failure wouldn’t occur.
The other fix was reboot your Windows computer at least 15 times.
How is that an argument against anything I have said?
Not everyone was affected though
Only machines running crowdstrike were affected, not all Windows machines. So in neither case were all systems affected. In this case though Microsoft doesn't bare any responsibility as they didn't distribute the software. In the case or Arch and EndeavourOS they had a responsibility to check packages before they shipped them to users. In this case the OS maker was more at fault.
Except they haven't done anything shitty this time. What you are doing would be a bit like claiming the Nazis are responsible for micro plastics. Like yeah Nazis are shit but making false allegations is just giving their defenders something to throw in your face. It makes you, and everyone who is critical of Microsoft look dumb. How about you criticize the company that actually screwed up? They are also a multi-billion dollar company, yet you aren't blaming them for something that is clearly their fault.
Sure you can criticize as much as you want but if you are wrong in your criticism it just damages all of your criticism over all.
In my opinion it is important to state facts not fiction. This was not Microsoft's fault, no matter how much you hate Microsoft it still wasn't there fault and saying that is was is incorrect and doesn't solve the issue.
Hilarious. I am sure that, out of principle, you have stopped using all the software that Red Hat contributes to your distribution.
If it is ok with you, I am not going to define my morality in terms of corporate interest. They are not my friends but I do not believe that shutting on their contributions does much for me either.
I am not shitting on their contributions. All I am saying is that as a large company they aren't anymore my friend than Microsoft. Generally they still exist and make contributions. Microsoft didn't kill them like the person I am replying to is insinuating.
I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn't be at enormous risk nor should critical services. Even if it's your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn't be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you're just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn't do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource's update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you'd be using if you aren't allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.
No because Windows Indoctrination starts with Academia.
There will have to be heavy monetary losses before IT is forced to leave their golden goose that keeps them employed with "problems" to "fix" that soak up hours each.
But maybe they will notice the monetary losses and competitors not using their trash will pull ahead -- that will get their attention. Still they require the cognition to understand the problem and select a solution and the Linux Jungle is hard for corporate minds to navigate without smart IT help.
I'm pretty sure this update didn't get pushed to linux endpoints, but sure, linux machines running the CrowdStrike driver are probably vulnerable to panicking on malformed config files. There are a lot of weirdos claiming this is a uniquely Windows issue.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !linux@lemmy.ml
Thanks for the tip, so glad Lemmy makes it easy to block communities.
Also: It seems everyone is claiming it didn't affect Linux but as part of our corporate cleanup yesterday, I had 8 linux boxes I needed to drive to the office to throw a head on and reset their iDrac so sure maybe they all just happened to fail at the same time but in my 2 years on this site we've never had more than 1 down at a time ever, and never for the same reason. I'm not the tech head of the site by any means and it certainly could be unrelated, but people with significantly greater experience than me in my org chalked this up to Crowdstrike.
I love how everyone understands the issue wrong. It's not about being on Windows or Linux. It's about the ecosystem that is common place and people are used to on Windows or Linux. On windows it's accepted that every stupid anticheat can drop its filthy paws into ring 0 and normies don't mind. Linux has a fostered a less clueless community, but ultimately it's a reminder to keep vigilant and strive for pure and well documented open source with the correct permissions.
While that is true, it makes sense for antivirus/edr software to run in kernelspace. This is a fuck-up of a giant company that sells very expensive software. I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, but I mostly see this as a cautionary tale against putting excessive trust and power in the hands of one organization/company.
Imagine if this was actually malicious instead of the product of incompetence, and the update instead ran ransomware.
If it was malicious it wouldn't have had the reach a trusted platform would. That is what made the xz exploit so scary was the reach and the malicious attempt.
I like open source software but that's one big benefit of proprietary software. Not all proprietary software is bad. We should recognize the ones doing their best to avoid anti consumer practices and genuinely try to serve their customers needs to the best of their abilities.
I deployed it for my last employer on our linux environment. My buddies who still work there said Linux was fine while they had to help the windows Admins fix their hosts.
That's precisely why I didn't blame windows in my post, but the windows-consumer mentality of "yeah install with privileges, shove genshin impact into ring 0 why not"
CrowdStrike recently caused a widespread Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue on Windows PCs, disrupting various sectors. However, this was not an isolated incident, CrowdStrike affected Linux PCs also.
It's not that clear cut a problem. There seems to be two elements; the kernel driver had a memory safety bug; and a definitions file was deployed incorrectly, triggering the bug. The kernel driver definitely deserves a lot of scrutiny and static analysis should have told them this bug existed. The live updates are a bit different since this is a real-time response system. If malware starts actively exploiting a software vulnerability, they can't wait for distribution maintainers to package their mitigation - they have to be deployed ASAP. They certainly should roll-out definitions progressively and monitor for anything anomalous but it has to be quick or the malware could beat them to it.
This is more a code safety issue than CI/CD strategy. The bug was in the driver all along, but it had never been triggered before so it passed the tests and got rolled out to everyone. Critical code like this ought to be written in memory safe languages like Rust.
True, then I'd be screwed. But, because my system config is declared in a single file (plus a file for channels) i could re-install my system and be back in business relatively quickly. There's also guix home but I haven't had a chance to try that.
I would definitely recommend using guix home because having a seperate config for you more user facing stuff is so convenient (plus no need for root access to install a package declaratively) (side note take this with a grain of salt because I don't use gnu guix I use nixos)
WHO ARE WE? we’re a scrappy little fresh-faced underdog instance of sharkey (a misskey fork). we have but one humbly stated mission: to put the PUNK back into cyberpunk on the fediverse
WHO AM I? i’m vanta. trans enby girl polyam lesbian gender terrorist, the fediverse’s favorite pirate radio DJ, DIY clothing auteur, and rogue wordsmith extraordinaire. i’ve been posting on fedi heavily since 2017
THREADS? not only is this instance a fedipact instance that has threads.net blocked, but… i’m the one who made the whole pact to begin with lmao
In the end I'd say this is likely a nice demonstration of decentralisation and a plurality of instances is inherently valuable. Every online place will have its inclinations and slants, in many ways, which can always combine to create shitty interactions between otherwise defensible or understandable actors/motives.
Ensuring that there are multiple such "places", which we can each connect to as we wish, means that many/most issues or people can have a place to "breath" without handling the shitty noise and friction the internet is so liable to create.
You make an excellent point about the fediverse with which I wholeheartedly agree, but the point still stands that OP’s experience on lemmy.world in this particular situation was a result of their own unnecessary aggression towards someone asking a sincere question, not because it’s a “queerphobic shithole.”
Matt
in reply to WFH • • •bsergay
in reply to Matt • • •I'm well aware that both elementaryOS and its Pantheon DE were innovative and made major strides for user-friendliness a couple of years back. Hence, they rightfully earned a spot among the newbie-friendly distros. However, I might be wrong, but it feels as if they haven't been able to keep momentum. And therefore lost their significance.
If you think I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me; I would love to be educated on how elementaryOS has kept relevance (if they actually have).
aarroyoc
in reply to WFH • • •ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє
in reply to WFH • • •Very good write up overall. I'll start by admitting that I didn't read all of it. But from the parts that I did read, I have some small comments. I think that Debian Stable is a great beginner distro, since it's essentially unbreakable. With something like KDE Plasma as a DE, it's perfect for noobs. EndeavourOS is another great one. Maybe not for beginners, but for semi-advanced usecases.
Also, I'm not sure about suggesting the Atomic family of dostros to newcomers. It might be my relative unfamiliarity with them, but I don't think immutable distro are a good place to start. They're definitely great to try when you're familiar with Linux, but they're still kind of fringe. It's hard to get support using those.
bsergay
in reply to ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє • • •FWIW, the first distro I used and subsequently daily-drove^[1]^ was Fedora Silverblue over two years ago. The try-hard in me immediately started off (or at least tried) applying the hardening outlined in Madaidan's article. After banging my head for a week, I started actually using the system and it has been a very smooth ride ever since. The uBlue images are straight up better when it comes to the OOTB-experience without even mentioning the associated 'managed'^[2]^ aspect that comes with it. Therefore, I believe that they're perfectly suitable. They're not for everyone, but no distro is anyways.
Plopp
in reply to ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє • • •I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I'm just thinking they're still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you'll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what's what.
That's also a reason I'd recommend something like Debian (although I've actually never even used it myself) because there's so much compatible info out there. I would recommend OpenSUSE, even Tumbleweed, but there's just not as much help or there to find as there is for Debian. But even with that said, OpenSUSEs snapshots and the way they're configured out of the box is an absolute godsend and game changer for newcomers.
bsergay
in reply to Plopp • • •I definitely agree. But, I think it's sufficient to communicate to new uBlue users that they should check uBlue's own documentation first. And, if they didn't find the answer there, that they should ask on discourse or on Discord.
I only addressed this for new uBlue users as I don't think other immutable distros are sufficiently newbie-friendly yet.
Universal Blue
Universal BlueWFH
in reply to bsergay • • •I'm doing an experiment right now. I'm giving my previous laptop to my dad to replace his very old, very close to death MacBook Air. I've installed Bluefin, rebased to the Stable branch and keeping everything else stock.
We'll see how it goes :D
bsergay
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
in reply to bsergay • • •Will report :D
The only thing that scares me a bit is that not only he's a newbie, he also actively refuses to understand how computers work ^^;
bsergay
in reply to WFH • • •Plopp
in reply to bsergay • • •Totally agree with that. I'm just wondering how many people read things like welcome screens etc where such info usually is presented.
They should have all necessary software installed and configured for people to easily get to things like those you mentioned. And have a clear help section in the OS, preferably with sections for different large topics and what not, that links to forum sections or similar. Steer them right before they even hit the web sort of.
bsergay
in reply to Plopp • • •Wonderfully laid out. Couldn't agree more.
I'm also curious to find out how effective welcome screens are.
I suppose the most effective would be if the user is told how to act whenever they're about to commit a 'mistake'; after which they're friendly reminded what they should do instead 😅. But I believe that's a gargantuan effort to effectively gameify the distro 😂. Cool idea though; hopefully some iteration is already in the works.
MonkeMischief
in reply to Plopp • • •I have a general idea of how to set this sort of thing up in almost any distro now, but this is absolutely one of the ideas that swept me off my feet with OpenSUSE. I like a lot of distros but keep coming back to that wild little tumbleweed chameleon/geeko. :D
Plopp
in reply to MonkeMischief • • •It's huge. I've been using ~10 distros sporadically over the past 25 years, and I never ever felt like I could depend on my systems running Linux. Because one simple mistake by either me or an update could render the computer unusable because I didn't (and still don't) know how to fix it. And that was always something that finally happened that made me revert to Windows full time. Tumbleweed is the first distro ever where I feel like I'm standing on solid ground instead of on a house of cards that I can't put back together, because of the snapshots. It gives me confidence and I feel like I finally can use Linux while slowly learning it at my own pace. Absolutely love it.
Also, I see that I have a typo to fix in my previous comment lol.
WFH
in reply to ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє • • •bsergay
in reply to WFH • • •First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.
Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:
... show more- I absolutely love Fedora. But if it's named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain't the case. Hence, at least mentioning
First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.
Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:
- I absolutely love Fedora. But if it's named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain't the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise.
- I'm fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it's too early to be recommended.
- I'm personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead. ~~(I'm a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.)~~ However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification.
- Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I'd refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.
GitHub - devangshekhawat/Fedora-40-Post-Install-Guide: Things to do after installing Fedora 40
GitHubWFH
in reply to bsergay • • •I pondered a lot including a bit about rpmfusion in Fedora's paragraph, but I elected not to because there is already too much stuff here :D
As a 20-years Debian user who switched to Fedora a couple years ago on my main laptop, I would say confidently that Debian is the distro I'm the most comfortable with. I love Debian. But, there are a couple things that prevent me from recommending it as a very first distro:
- The base system is very barebones and you're required to manually install vital things like proprietary drivers (I think it's a bit more painless now with the nonfree installer but I haven't installed a fresh Debian in a few years). For me, having a fully functional Debian laptop is not hard work but requires a bit of knowledge beforehand.
- A lot of people want the latest and shiniest, and with Debian might be tempted to switch to Testing or Sid which is a very bad idea for a daily driver.
Good call about Kalpa, I'm removing it
bsergay
in reply to WFH • • •Thank you for the clarifications!
Regarding what you mentioned on Debian; ultimately, you're a lot more experienced than I am with it. But, IIUC, Debian 12 should have done a great job at easing (new) users into its ecosystem. Not sure if it's sufficient though.
WFH
in reply to bsergay • • •You're welcome!
Yeah I think the recent nonfree images should take care of the most pressing driver issues (last time I installed Debian, I had to separately download and put on a second USB stick the drivers for my WiFi card just to be able to proceed with the installer). I don't know if you still need to manually install proprietary blobs for the CPU or the GPU post-install tho. If not, that would mean modern Debian is indeed very close to OOTB functionality.
superkret
in reply to WFH • • •HubertManne
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
Unknown parent • • •Bombastic
in reply to WFH • • •How is a noob supposed to read and understand any of that?
Even my friends to which I have explained the general philosophy and utility of Linux (some of which are intrigued and somewhat open to switching) would look at me as if I were insane were I to send them this "guide"
woelkchen
in reply to Bombastic • • •WFH
in reply to woelkchen • • •MonkeMischief
in reply to WFH • • •Like FOSS philosophy:
Both can exist, and both are great, and that's okay. :)
yetAnotherUser
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
in reply to yetAnotherUser • • •Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker and I work in IT :D
I however believe that it's more useful in the long run to use correct terminology (with a small explanation if necessary) rather than "dumbing it down", as it makes finding pertinent information quicker/easier.
Yondoza
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
in reply to Yondoza • • •lemmyvore
in reply to WFH • • •Wow, basically everything you wrote about Manjaro was wrong:
WFH
in reply to lemmyvore • • •FWIW I ran my gaming rig on Manjaro for a couple of years.
It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement. It doesn't break if you follow these maintenance steps when relevant to your install. It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly. It might be "stable" as in "crash-free", but it is not "stable" stable. And as I said, after running it for 2 years, I'm not convinced it's that crash-free either. I remember an era (I think 5.9-ish kernel series) that crashed all the time.
Okay, almost-semi-regular then.
True, AUR is not sentient. AUR creators, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly Arch users who builds their scripts targeting an up-to-date Arch system.
lemmyvore
in reply to WFH • • •If you're talking about "Known issues and workarounds" those aren't caused by Manjaro, they're issues that crop up with various packages. The forum attempts to crowdsource fixes as part of Manjaro's mission to make it easier on its users.
It's a great resource and it can be used by people on any Arch-related distro (and potentially other distros as well). I wish more distros would do this.
... show moreWell it's still a rolling distro with Arch heritage. It's as stable as you can make Arch. Which is quite stable in the sense that a Manjaro install won't stop working out of the blue (I can attest to that personally, going on the 5th year as a daily driver). And they've gone and added Timeshift snapshots as default so if you mess something up you can simply restore a snapshot, which takes care of user-related tinkering
If you're talking about "Known issues and workarounds" those aren't caused by Manjaro, they're issues that crop up with various packages. The forum attempts to crowdsource fixes as part of Manjaro's mission to make it easier on its users.
It's a great resource and it can be used by people on any Arch-related distro (and potentially other distros as well). I wish more distros would do this.
Well it's still a rolling distro with Arch heritage. It's as stable as you can make Arch. Which is quite stable in the sense that a Manjaro install won't stop working out of the blue (I can attest to that personally, going on the 5th year as a daily driver). And they've gone and added Timeshift snapshots as default so if you mess something up you can simply restore a snapshot, which takes care of user-related tinkering as well.
Not sure I understand your point about the updates (or the "almost-semi" thing). What does it matter if updates come after 13 or 17 days? Is it important to you to be exactly 14 or what?
10% of AUR packages are abandoned. Another 20% have never been updated after the initial release. Only 35% have been updated within the last year.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. AUR "packages" are recipes that either compile packages from source or download binary releases. Both methods are very resilient and don't care about delays of a couple of weeks.
While you can in theory run into an AUR package that was just updated to require something that was just added to Arch the chances are extremely small. It's hardly a common problem.
nyan
in reply to WFH • • •Distro best added to the "Power-user distros to avoid" list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).
I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn't the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn't appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that's been broken by automation that didn't quite work as expected. Anyway, I'd suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.
communism
in reply to nyan • • •dubyakay
in reply to communism • • •communism
in reply to dubyakay • • •typhoon
in reply to WFH • • •Very good write up. If I not agree with all, I probably agree with most that is in here. On the DE section, I think we should help drive the beginner choice. In the recent past, KDE and Gnome were the early adopters of Wayland and the ones introducing the new features. They are also the choice of most distros. Therefore, I'd recommend one of those two.
I'd open a new section worth of scrutinies, dedicated about security. I believe it may worth advising that as a criteria of selection is recommended to not use distros that freezes regular releases for more than 1 year in desktop installations. Like is explained here. At least in your first distro selection. Advise about restricting privileged access with SELinux or AppArmor. Perhaps, also add a note about secure boot as well and some guide of how to harden your installation, Madaidans, Privacy Tweaks, PrivSec and PrivacyGuides.
Hardening Your Desktop Linux System's Security
Privacy Guidesfoofiepie
in reply to WFH • • •This is an exceptional write up, thanks!
I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?
I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.
emergencyfood
in reply to foofiepie • • •Download Linux Mint 21.3 - Linux Mint
www.linuxmint.combsergay
in reply to foofiepie • • •You definitely can.
It ain't bad. However, I would opt for a distro that defaults to the preferred DE. In this case, similarly to Linux Mint, the distro would have to be beginner-friendly, popular, polished and stable^[2]^. So, IMO, that would be:
- GNOME^[3]^; Pop!_OS or Zorin OS
- KDE Plasma; Tuxedo OS
- Xfce; MX Linux
Note that there are many other DEs. However, the above mentioned DEs (together with Cinnamon) are the most polished and popular. And while there are many other distros through which you might 'consume' said DEs, the distros mentioned above are the ones I (personally) like to recommend.
like this
Barbiegirl likes this.
WFH
Unknown parent • • •Brickardo
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
in reply to Brickardo • • •This is REAL Linux, done by REAL Linuxians.
"Hello I would like
sudo pacman -Syyuapples please"They have played us for absolute fools.
communism
in reply to WFH • • •I don't agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it's Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That's also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there's a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it's worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)
I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for "very advanced users". It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you're replacing, what you're replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide d
... show moreI don't agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it's Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That's also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there's a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it's worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)
I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for "very advanced users". It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you're replacing, what you're replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide documentation is not as important as whatever your reason for wanting to use a different init system, or a different C library, or whatever. Tbh, personally, I use runit right now and find it a lot easier to use than systemd. It's very simple—services are just executables and symlinks. I'd have to check documentation and look at examples to make a systemd service, but to make a runit service I just have to create a directory with an executable in it, and to enable it I just make a symlink. The benefit of systemd is how widely used it is so you're more likely to find someone with the same problem as you, not because it's inherently easier to use.
madasi
in reply to communism • • •If you
then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.
A beginner should avoid these things, once you are far enough along to understand why you might want to replace one of these things, and form your own opinion on it, then go right ahead. But you're no longer a beginner at that point.
communism
in reply to madasi • • •I don't agree, but how people define "advanced"/"beginner" is mostly arbitrary I guess. I wouldn't say that qualifies as advanced, maybe intermediate at best, but I think it's entirely possible to understand eg the basic differences between init systems without ever touching Linux before in your life.
737
in reply to WFH • • •superkret
in reply to 737 • • •Arch just throws everything and the kitchen sink at you when you install a package. Debian lets you choose how minimal or bloated, stable or bleeding edge you want your system to be.
737
in reply to superkret • • •superkret
in reply to 737 • • •737
in reply to superkret • • •737
in reply to superkret • • •This is false.
You can't really choose the release cycle on a per package basis practically:
wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebia…
Pacman also supports optional dependencies.
DontBreakDebian - Debian Wiki
wiki.debian.orgsuperkret
in reply to WFH • • •Except the oldest distro that still exists is maintained by one person.
hopefull_cottonball
in reply to superkret • • •superkret
in reply to hopefull_cottonball • • •737
in reply to WFH • • •RavenofDespair
in reply to WFH • • •corsicanguppy
in reply to WFH • • •See: "Best Practice"
Einar
in reply to WFH • • •Thank you. Fantastic write-up. Saved for future use.
I generally agree with these assessments. One point I would like to add some nuance to, though. This might not be the most popular take, but saying that Ubuntu should be avoided at all cost is a bit extreme. IMO.
If I may, here some counter-arguments to the criticisms of Ubuntu:
It is easy to use and accessible. It has a user-friendly interface and is installed with ease, making it an excellent choice for beginners. The large user base and extensive documentation also provide a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and learning.
Snap packages are convenient as they bundle all dependencies. Flatpaks do something similar, of course. But just because Canonical controls Snap and it is closed source doesn't automatically make it evil.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to wide
... show moreThank you. Fantastic write-up. Saved for future use.
I generally agree with these assessments. One point I would like to add some nuance to, though. This might not be the most popular take, but saying that Ubuntu should be avoided at all cost is a bit extreme. IMO.
If I may, here some counter-arguments to the criticisms of Ubuntu:
It is easy to use and accessible. It has a user-friendly interface and is installed with ease, making it an excellent choice for beginners. The large user base and extensive documentation also provide a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and learning.
Snap packages are convenient as they bundle all dependencies. Flatpaks do something similar, of course. But just because Canonical controls Snap and it is closed source doesn't automatically make it evil.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux. Ubuntu has a large and active community that can be incredibly helpful to new users. The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don't currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently. Their work also makes the work of distros like Mint, Elementary and Pop! OS easier.
Ultimately, the choice of Linux distribution depends on individual needs and preferences - even for beginners. Although I am not a Ubuntu fan, I wanted to provide a counterpoint with this post. Ubuntu certainly has its flaws, but are we really doing the world of Linux a favour by promoting complete avoidance and thus damaging Ubuntu?
Anyway, just my opinion. I know some of you will disagree with me, perhaps passionately and strongly. Some will agree. That is fine. My hope is that the Linux world remains as diverse as possible, with plenty of options for everyone, and enough resources for fast, high quality development.
WFH
in reply to Einar • • •I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it's neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I'd even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.
I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.
What's bad about Ubuntu is that the "free" version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).
... show moreI think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it's neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I'd even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.
I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.
What's bad about Ubuntu is that the "free" version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).
Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.
wuphysics87
in reply to WFH • • •There are two reasons switching to, or even trying out Linux is difficult and often ends in failure: too many choices or too much information. This (great) write up is an example of the latter. Those among us, the would be tutors of Linux, actually read the whole thing before hopping down to the comments, or offer our opinion. Be honest.
We are all passionate about FOSS. Not just because it's neato, but because we recognize that it improves the quality of life of anyone who uses it, and (hopefully) society at large.
Rather than providing many choices with a sink or swim mentality, or write a novel Herman Melville would envy, my suggestion is to become mentors rather tutors. What's the difference?
MonkeMischief
in reply to wuphysics87 • • •Haha I dunno I thought it was a pretty good primer for people seeking it out, and people in this community are super helpful and mentor-like in my experience.
I wouldn't even call myself a beginner anymore, but I read the whole thing. :)
wuphysics87
in reply to MonkeMischief • • •Oh yea folks on lemmy are super helpful. And some of them are mentors. To me there are two qualities of a good mentor: time and patience. They will take a student and work with them for however long it takes. They know the student won't get it immediately, so they wait. They recast the question. They will provide personalized examples. They spend enough time with a single student for that student to mature as much as they can while the two are together. Think Mr. Miyagi from the karate kid.
Just as with the other two, there are drawbacks. Mentorship takes time. I'm from the standpoint that if we spend that time, and I mentor 2 people, and you mentor two people, and they mentor two people, we reach critical mass and we start reaching the normies who want, but don't have another way. I'm not as wise as Mr. Miyagi and I'm quite snarky with my opinions 🙃
bsergay
Unknown parent • • •To be clear; while OP does mention "Fedora Silverblue" to introduce and contrast atomic distros to traditional ones, they only explicitly recommend uBlue images.
And while it's by no means as exhaustive as the ArchWiki or Gentoo Wiki, uBlue's documentation isn't a slouch either; I've seen far worse. If possible, could you name what's crucially missing?
Docs - Universal Blue
universal-blue.discourse.groupbsergay
Unknown parent • • •Thank you for the reply!
Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that's not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.
How is uBlue's documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.
Naive in a post-Discord world.
Based on what do you imply that uBlue's discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.
... show moreAssumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.
Thank you for the reply!
Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that's not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.
How is uBlue's documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.
Naive in a post-Discord world.
Based on what do you imply that uBlue's discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.
Assumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.
What choices?
I believe there's definitely some truth in your earlier made statements.
Even if that's true, I think it's hilarious to appeal to their consensus 😂.
Possibly linux
in reply to WFH • • •WFH
in reply to Possibly linux • • •"Hate" is a strong word. I don't hate Ubuntu. It's just irrelevant.
It's not alone anymore in the realm of "easy to install and use", and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.
MonkeMischief
in reply to WFH • • •Exactly. Both Manjaro and Ubuntu have had a certain history of "silly misguided shenanigans" that sorta damage trust. You just never know when the next stunt might be pulled.
I personally didn't have too many problems with Manjaro on my gaming laptop, but have since moved to EndeavourOS, which I'm enjoying very much. :D
N0x0n
in reply to MonkeMischief • • •Same here :) switch from a 2 day Manjaro testing into EndeavourOS without the hassel of native Arch install.
Manjaro looks like a really good distro from the outside, but heard a few strange things about that specific distro I didn't like at all. Also they messed with the boot up logo, add their personal bookmarks in new firefox install...
Had a really strange feeling about that non-authorized intrusive installation. I'm no expert so I won't rant over Manjaro, but my moto says to always follow your guts !
The Cuuuuube
in reply to Possibly linux • • •bsergay
Unknown parent • • •Your reply is much appreciated! Even though I am saddened by the content. And apologies for the upcoming long reply. I thank you in advance for reading through it all.
Thank you for weakening it with "Imo"! To clarify; it seemed as if the "authority" in "appeal to authority" was conflated with content creators. If this wasn't an appeal to authority in the first place, then please feel free to dismiss my earlier stated sentence.
Normally, I would have asked for clarification in order to prevent possible miscommunication. Unfortunately, after our first serious attempt at reconciling our differences failed miserably, I have instead chosen for a more direct approach in hopes of making it more accessible. It's also more prone to being misunderstood as confrontational, aggressive et cetera. But, if even my super sweet approach in the earlier mentioned conversation failed, I don't see why I should make it less accessible for all involved
... show moreYour reply is much appreciated! Even though I am saddened by the content. And apologies for the upcoming long reply. I thank you in advance for reading through it all.
Thank you for weakening it with "Imo"! To clarify; it seemed as if the "authority" in "appeal to authority" was conflated with content creators. If this wasn't an appeal to authority in the first place, then please feel free to dismiss my earlier stated sentence.
Normally, I would have asked for clarification in order to prevent possible miscommunication. Unfortunately, after our first serious attempt at reconciling our differences failed miserably, I have instead chosen for a more direct approach in hopes of making it more accessible. It's also more prone to being misunderstood as confrontational, aggressive et cetera. But, if even my super sweet approach in the earlier mentioned conversation failed, I don't see why I should make it less accessible for all involved parties if it doesn't benefit either of us.
I may as well accuse you of doing the same. But..., I don't. But somehow I'm perceived as the villain. I simply fail to understand.
On Lemmy, I engage for one reason, and for one reason only; to arrive at a mutual understanding. This manifests itself in multiple ways:
- I'm interested in the communities output on a certain query and engage with them through a post I create.
- I'm introduced to a new concept through a post/comment -> Search engines don't yield anything useful -> I ask a question in hopes of learning something new -> And hopefully that engagement yields new information for me; I'm primarily on the receiving end of 'profit'
- Someone poses something that I don't agree with or don't understand -> I engage in hopes of my understanding being proven wrong; as that results in the most new information; hence most profit -> Most often, it's somewhere in between; I might get a new perspective on something, but not too crazy. At times, though, the person I was engaging with had some notions that were not entirely backed up; hence, we both end up learning a thing or two
- Misinformation or fake news or misunderstanding or whatever known false fact is shared -> I engage in hopes of combating false notions. No profit; but you gotta do what you gotta do
- Question is asked, I happen to know an answer that might be helpful -> I contribute. No profit; but contributions are required to foster a nice community
To be clear; I love to accept valid criticism. Especially, if they provide me with new insights and polish my own ideas/notions. Heck, I've even been complimented on how I engage with them in one of our first interactions. And, if you've noticed, this very conversation below our current post is not very different. I just ask you to back up your claims so that I may learn from them. I want to accept them; new knowledge/insights/profit et cetera. But I can't simply accept your claims on the basis of nothing. That doesn't make any sense. That's not how epistemology works.
If they're "obviously more true", then it should have been obviously easy to prove their truth. But, I've yet to receive a proof, even after I've explicitly asked you. Or, conversely, proof my falsehood. That's basically the problem at hand: you're less sensitive to back up your claims; even when pressed to do so. Instead, you choose to do whatever you did (or tried) in your most recent reply.
Or, I don't know, ask me how I'm so sure of my own convictions/judgements/ideas. But, and that's very curious; I don't recall you ever asking me a question. Isn't that the most obvious indication that I'm actively trying to engage with your ideas and your output? While you seem to be completely devoid of that. And, somehow, I've become the one that's regarded as possessing "aggressive inability to accept opinions different to yours, even if they are obviously more true.". Sorry, I simply can't take this serious 😅.
Fam, you got some hate-boner towards Fedora, 'immutable' distros and especially their intersection; Fedora Atomic. Either educate yourself on them and act accordingly, or simply stop spreading misinformation. Either way, you'll never hear from me again. Related point; simply don't spread misinformation. Period.
I fail to see how I am even making fun of you. If you perceive 'pressing to back up claims' as making fun of you, then... I simply don't know what to say.
Custom Linux Distribution just for Gaming - tchncs
discuss.tchncs.dejpablo68
in reply to WFH • • •dubyakay
in reply to WFH • • •Thanks to this guide I've stopped banging my head against the wall trying to install Arch on a laptop and just ended up putting Mint on it. Nearly everything works out of the box, and Cinnamon seems to be close enough to what a Windows user would expect, and then some, seeing how customizable it is.
I'll bang my head against the wall again once I've familiarized myself with it.
Thanks again OP!
bsergay
in reply to dubyakay • • •Thank you for sharing your experiences!
May I ask you what made you pursue an Arch installation in the first place?
dubyakay
in reply to bsergay • • •bsergay
in reply to dubyakay • • •fine_sandy_bottom
in reply to WFH • • •My opinion doesn't mean much since it's been forever since I tried any other distro but I'm surprised Debian isn't on the beginners list.
I'm not really sure what this means? It might be more accurate to say it's not the best distro if you'd like to tinker with your desktop experience.
Notably, nothing on the beginners list ought to be run as a headless server, but debian is perfect for that job. The reason I've become so enamoured with debian over the years is that I can use it on my desktop and on servers and it's the same system - everything is exactly where I'm used to it being.