side note i like the use of calvin over that other guy
yeah fuck crowder
don’t fuck him tho
not unless you want to be a victim of abuse i guess
Crowder’s one of my favorite musicians… Oh wait, different Crowder.
Music Crowders’s good. Who’s this other Crowder?
That Covfefe got cold a long time ago.
Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.
My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can’t deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are…cough more lenient with their permissions.
There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can’t accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.
Yesterday morning i installed Mint xfce on an old laptop.
I wanted to install synaptics drivers for the touchpad because i use the trackball as mouse but need the touchpad for clicking. Something that isnt configureable in the default driver.
When i copied an example config file and added my line, i rebooted the computer.
The GUI broke because in the example config file, there were “…” To indicate writing further options, but xorg couldnt interpret or ignore it, so i had to figure out how to edit textfiles in the command line.
No fun times, and definetely a risk for new users.
This story is literally every experienced Linux users first horror story.
I still remember the first time I broke my xorg config on my shiny new slackware 10 install in early 2005.
It’s so common there’s an XKCD about it.
deleted by creator
Do any of those actually match this one? I looked through the first few pages, and there was nothing related to Linux.
You are correct, which is why I deleted it about a minute after I posted it. Unfortunately deletion of a comment does not propagate to other instances as well as creating one.
Which does not change the fact that this “hot take” IS a repost.
Not really, the vaaaast majority of PC users don’t need the linux commandline.
I agree, BUT that is only because the average windows user never even had to bother with permission. I find permissions on Linux A LOT easier to handle than on Windows. Basically the way Windows does permissions is garbage, so they made it so that people can just do whatever so they won’t complain about permissions. That is… one way of doing things, I guess.
i love K⭐D⭐E
KDE FTW!
Arguably you can’t beat Debian + KDE
Just installed Mint to try it out because it looks similar to Windows. Don’t judge me.
Oh I’ve judged you! And I find you guilty of making an acceptable decision that suites your preferences.
I’ll get the pool noodles!
Installed it on a thin client instead of win10 iot for the same reason, basic functionality all there, being used as a media streaming browser machine, no regrets.
Had previous experience with fedora and others many years prior, definitely can tell how far it all progressed since
I think that SteamOS is a great place to start people off with Linux.
Well sure. My approach for looking for a distro was usually “which ones have KDE and pacman” and after that I start comparing.
someone who switches away from the distro’s default desktop environment is not a new user.
Yes, but a lot of them have multiple DEs (Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu…) and sometimes the DE is specific to the distros (Mint).
Linux Mint uses Cinnamon as the DE, which you can use with Fedora (and probably others).
You can actually choose to download an Linux Mint iso with either Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, so you’re not exclusively locked into Cinnamon.
Nowadays they’re so many options, GNOME and Plasma are nice, but heavy, same for DDE(Deepin) and others fancy DEs I know why it’s heavy, but xfce and lxqt looks better on my PC, xfce you can make looks beauty and fast too
For the WM guys: I’ll try some day, for now only DEs :3
Too a certain point. I’ll give you that this applies to the Debian and Ubuntu distro. Gentoo, on the other hand, is a completely different animal and will have a far greater impact on user experience than the DE.
on a related note, help I’m too used to my i3wm config and now I cant switch to wayland at all, what do I do when xorg gets fully depreciated
Sway is basically the wayland version of i3. I’ve switched to wayland on my new laptop and learning sway after using i3 for years has been relatively easy.
Yeah, the config syntax is exactly the same. The major difference is the wayland version of various programs can be hard to figure out with out some decent google-fu.
I’m on BSPWM on X11, but have been trying river wm and that is a much less friendly conversion than i3 to sway. I’d convert entirely were it not for certain applications still not quite working on wayland without considerable configuration (wacom tablet drivers don’t work, screenshottung and eyedropper tools are available but still need more work to be feature comparable with equivalent tools on X11).
And I’m using proprietary NVIDIA drivers which are currently stuttering real bad on the wlroots protocol since driver update to 545 (sway/river both stutter bad whenever lots of movement on the screen, I’ve tried many tweaks to my environment variables to no avail).
So…just gonna wait for app, wayland, nvidia devs to eventually make the migrate worth while.
I’ve heard sway is a drop in replacement of i3 for wayland. Only going off what I’ve heard though since I haven’t tried it myself
I’ll go one further and say choosing applications is more important than choosing a Desktop Environment.
I’m typing this message on Firefox. I installed it (and updated it) with Debian’s package management system. I clicked on a button on an XFCE panel to open it. But in terms of the time spent interacting with things on my computer I’m using the applications far more than anything else.
For new Linux users choosing a distro IS choosing a desktop environment. Installing a new DE that’s different from the default is not a day one Linux task, so the default for the distro is what matters. Yes. the DE is the most important factor in choosing a distro, but saying that means the distro doesn’t matter is just fundamentally incorrect and unhelpful.
I don’t thibk op intended to imply that new users instal a new DE on whatever distro they choose, but rather it’s clunky to explain that they should prioritize DE when choosing distro. like, imagine a new users asks what distro they should start with, I believe op is advocating we say “anything that uses KDE by default” (or gnome or xfce etc). plenty of distros have derivatives that are basically the same but use a different DE, so it’s pointless to suggest one over the other when a new user is just going to use the DE to do everything graphically anyway.
I do not fear OpenBSD, but FVWM… it scares me.
fvwm95 is nice though…
But for me my secret forbidden love is still AmiFVWM, an FVWM clone with the look of AmigaOS 3.1.
Just hopped back over to linux mint again after years of making due with Windows
- Went with cinnamon cuz pretty.
- switched to CobiWindowList so I could see all windows on either of my monitor menu bars.
- switched to CinnVIIStarkMenu for a more familiar menu system.
Not much change, I can lean on the habits I’ve gotten from windows, and now my switch is pretty much unnoticeable to me.
Funny enough, Lutris has made it alot easier for me to access games I usually would just have downloaded, like my itch.io library. Proton has tackled all my other games fine. Hell, I even got Tarkov running smoothly, even though you can only do offline raids on Linux ATM.
The most important thing for most new Linux users would be a pathway to getting support. Because of this the distro you use matters much more than the DE because each of the major distro’s have different pipelines that the funnel users in to getting support. The package manager lock in is distro dependent and depending on the philosophy that they subscribe to can be the difference between how many steps a new user has to take to get a working system up and running. Thankfully, with the rise of flatpak, appimage and snap being more popular than ever package availability is much more streamlined but that is another layer on top of an already overwhelming package system for new users. The defaults for all of this depends on your distro which can be different. Heck we haven’t even gotten to support cycles which depending on user needs can be different. Because not every user has or wants what comes with for example maintaining an rolling release distribution. Did they setup their system to have snapshots so they can roll everything back when the new kernel update breaks something system critical and they have a presentation at 2:00? None of these things are really DE dependent but are baked in to the defaults you subscribe to when you choose a disto. The good part is that if you don’t like how something is configured you can change everything easily depending on how well documented it is. This is why it’s more important to choose a distro with good documentation or at least a active enough community so when you run into hangups you can get some sort of resolution.
