Matt

I only self-host a MediaWiki website at the moment, along with a PPSSPP adhoc server for said game that the wiki is related to. I want to self-host a lot more stuff, but storage space is expensive, and I don’t really want to leave things running at home all the time either as it will eat into my electricity bill.

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are what I’m interested in next, and perhaps a Fediverse platform.

You don’t - you just open your distros software manager (which is like an app store) and get all your apps that way.

Been like this for several years.

While this is true, if someone goes to a shop and buys a “PC”, it will have Windows 100% of the time.

You have to look to get Linux preinstalled on stuff, or pick the choice yourself. People buying PCs aren’t picking Windows, it’s just what comes with them.

1. Isn’t pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
2. Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn’t matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it’s more than just click the icon, it’s too much.
3. If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

Linux Mint Cinnamon.

It tries to make things similar to Windows (which most people are accustomed to due to school), and also has its own set of apps that try to make things as simple as possible by having simple names so people know what to expect.

In my opinion, the only “root distro” which ticks all your boxes is Debian, especially with the advent of Debian 12.

All the other distros are too opinionated to be “user friendly”, except maybe Solus which I’ve never tried.

Literally any of them.

All you do is install your drivers if using Nvidia, then just install your games, whether native packages, flatpak, Steam, Lutris, or whatever.

I just run Debian 12 and everything through Lutris or native. Used to run Steam through Flatpak which also worked perfectly, but don’t play any games on Steam anymore.

Debian 12 with KDE Plasma, works perfectly on every system I have thrown at it.

GamingOnLinux has been on Mastodon for ages, Nov 21 2016 in fact!

But with the recent migration to Mastodon, I guess it couldn’t hurt to let people know you’re there already.

I don’t think your drawback example is something inherent to open source at all - people absolutely do demand things from closed source programs as well.

Open the sidebar, tap settings, tap user settings, and it’s part of that screen.

If you don’t see it, you’ll need to update.

I can only answer a couple.

3. This is by design, due to how federation works. Federation is literally just:

• Instance A requests information from Instance B
• Instance B responds to the request and sends it back
• Instance A follows Instance B
• Instance B now federates all future posts to Instance A

There’s nothing more complicated to it, but it does mean that instances cannot know about other instances without being told, as there is no central location that instances connect to in order to find out about all other instances.

4. Only posts after subscribing are federated to an instance, it doesn’t backfill. An option for admins of an instance to request a backfill would not be a bad option though, but as time goes on, backfilling an entire community could take too much data on instances.

5. Issue with Lemmy.ml, although when you see Subscribe Pending, you tend to still see things in your feed.