The UX is still terrible. I must be cursed or something, since even normies are using linsucks now and are content, but my system keeps breaking even though I follow the official instructions. It breaks after simply upgrading to the next version of the distro. I'm really just scratching the surface with this comment, I have so many gripes with the system. Nonetheless it's my system of choice because it's Unix and libreware. But my standards for user friendliness are high, especially when it comes to recommending the system to others. It might be that some of the container-based distros are user friendly enough although I haven't tested them. Silverblue looks interesting.
I'm using KDE and I actually like the interface but Gnome, not as much. XFCE is nice and minimal and doesn't use up too much resources. Which distro are you using? Aptitude is a good package manager and shouldn't lead to system breakage if you stick to the official repos. Hell, I've even been using the pacman package manager with Manjaro and haven't had any issues for a good year and a half. But I'm playing it safe and only install from the official sources. So far so good...fingers crossed. Have you ever tried BSD? I tried it once and liked it but there weren't as many available packages as Linux at the time.
I've used KDE for a while. I like it, as well as Gnome, but they're both buggy. With Gnome, my cursor would become tiny if I used the laptop screen (as opposed to the external monitor), I wasn't able to resolve that so I said fuck it. Which is a bummer because I like its ability to integrate titlebars into the top panel. But they nixed all the options in Gnome, I have no control over it. It's good defaults but if you want to change things you're mostly out of luck.
That was on Linux Mint. But every time I upgrade a Debian-based distro to the next version, it breaks. In Mint you cannot even upgrade with apt, you have to use some stupid graphical tool. At one point there was a popup with an error message that I wasn't able to resolve then and there, so I closed it. Then I didn't have access to the error anymore, and after restarting, it failed to boot. Great. That's the risk when everything is a GUI: if implemented incorrectly, it becomes a toy-like OS, you lose control.
In my view, macOS provides the user friendliness of a GUI, and actually implements things correctly in it. Just try the Disk Utility. This is a graphical tool that lets you create encrypted images which you can mount and store files in, and the images aren't huge, vulnerable lumps, but rather they consist of lots of small files. (These images are called Sparsebundles btw.) Linux lets you create encrypted partitions by default. Maybe you can created encrypted images but I'm not sure you can do it with a GUI program. I don't know how to create a distributed 'bundle' that's also encrypted. It'd take at least an hour to figure it out with all the available options of which none are perfect. This after having used GNU/Linux for over a decade. In macOS I was able to figure out Sparsebundles in 10 minutes when I was a completely new user.
Anyway, more about DEs. I don't like how flashy both KDE and Gnome are with special effects and shadows cast over other windows. I need something more quiet. You actually cannot disable all of those things in either of them. So I switched to XFCE but I use it with Notion, which is a tiling wm that divides the screen into frames that have tabs. I like XFCE because it provides everything I need but still lets me pick an alternative wm easily. LXDE is another such DE which actually prompts you to pick one of your existing WMs upon first launch, but that one is very barebones.
I use this setup on Slackware now. I like Slackware because it provides what Debian promises but fails to deliver, namely a stable, low-maintenance system that doesn't change a whole lot. In Debian you need to upgrade after 2 years or your software is outdated. In Slackware you're good to go for 7 years. Don't worry about the lack of package manager by default. There are package managers available for it, it's easy to learn how to install one and work with it. I use sbopkg + sqg to get access to all the Slackbuilds. Plus I have plenty of alternative software sources. I can download a .deb pkg and convert it to txz with deb2txz, then use installpkg to install it as a native Slackware package. This has worked consistently for me.
In spite of my complaints about GNU/Linux, I do feel like it's improving with the addition of Appimages and Flatpaks, so I'm not switching to a BSD. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer but it doesn't support Appimages or Flatpaks. I'd have to virtualize Linux, but at that point I might as well run it on bare metal, especially if it suffices. That's actually the appeal of Slackware to me: it's BSD-like and suffices. If I really want access to everything thinkable, I'd run Qubes. I'm actually switching to that but at a comfortable pace. BSDs appeal but I'd rather use Qubes for virtualization since it's meant for that, and then I can run a BSD inside that.
I'm actually impressed by the software availability of FreeBSD btw. Not so much by OpenBSD, let alone NetBSD, those systems aren't for me.
That's why I stick to the terminal for anything update-related. It's more verbose than the GUI. Flatpacks are alien to me. I just know they use up a lot of space because they contain all the necessary libraries for the app to work. I've become somewhat of a Linux purist in some regards. But I do like translucent and wobbly windows on the desktop.
I've never updated a distro. I just start over. Is there any good reason to?
Nonetheless it's my system of choice because it's Unix and libreware.
Me too, despite a handful of apps and functions that are missing. At the moment I'm still using the default Win10 because I've not properly geeked out on this laptop yet (too many other project on the go). Maybe with the New Year I should. The question: x0x7's Artix or Lunduke's OpenMandriva?
I agree with x0x7 that things don't have to be Lunduke approved, it's really quite silly. Lunduke may be counteracting some wokeism but he does it in a way that makes everything even more about politics. He discourages people from using Nix and Librewolf because of their woke policies but he doesn't show said policies to affect the quality of the code, that's just an assumption he makes. Honestly, they seem more like personal vendettas. Projects ban him or mentions of him. He has a big following. So, as a revenge, he tells all his followers not to use said software. We need to reduce the polarization, not increase it.
But leaving out politics, both those distros seem fine. But also consider installing Silverblue or Secureblue, I get the feeling they are more user friendly and I'm curious about your impression of them.
Agree to all of that. Except he doesn't say not to use software - rather to be cautious.
Regardless of Lunduke, can we trust the woken-source coders, the technocratic corporate meddling, and their rigged Rust foundations not to be compromised to surveil and serve the Enemies-That-Be?
Silverblue or Secureblue
First I'm hearing of them. I'm not a good person to ask about impressions of software. I know enough to know that I don't know much.
Maybe you are seeing the empirical evidence that rolling releases are more stable. It flies in the face of narritives but just seems to be the case that a slow continuously upgrading system is pretty stable. And new versions of software doesn't break things if things are properly tested.
What does break things is when you have a sudden upgrade with changes to a distro's rather ambitious and unique configurations, while having big changes in version numbers being applied at the same time. Distro managers can't test every permuntation of selected software, and user configs, to make sure their sudden changes don't wreck things.
So what you want is basically no unique contribution of configs from the distro, and software that keeps consistent track with the most most up to date stable version of software. What you want is Arch. The stable desktop Linux.
Basically linux should be a platform for installing software. Not an art project. Unless you want to make it your art project. Individual softwares are more valid art projects and so you can install things that look good with no contribution from the distro. The role of a distro should just be to package software that isn't broken. That's it.
Disagree. First of all, my experience with Arch is different. I used it in the early '00s when there was expected breakage. At work they allowed me the liberty of using GNU/Linux and as a result I was the only one who didn't even have working graphics and had to fix that for half a day at one point. My more recent experience is Manjaro on an rpi. Now, I'm really looking for zero maintenance. Gradual updates are a form of maintenance if they're mandatory. I didn't use the rpi all the time, sometimes it'd just sit idle for many months. Now I can't upgrade the software anymore. I wanted to use it for something as simple as emulating Snes games, and that fails. Separate from the GPU sucking, I mean: I have trouble getting many of the emulators to install and run. Some install but have shared library issues.
The other reason why I disagree is because an art project is exactly how developers need to approach the OS if they want to provide a good user experience. macOS is an art project, and it's lovely for it. When I hackintoshed, I had a system that I could simply start using right away while loving every bit of the system and without annoyances. macOS uses a stacking wm. I hate stacking wms. I don't know what secret formula they used, but there is an attention to detail that makes it so I'm quite okay with their specific wm. If developers don't provide this attention to detail, then the user is forced to, or at the very least, users as picky as me. Thus it becomes a timesink.
I'm willing to put in the effort that Qubes requires and want to experiment with various OSes anyway, so that will be my next OS. Nonetheless an immutable OS that installs containers is my idea of an actually user friendly OS that I can recommend to others, just I haven't verified it to be the case.
Oh yeah, on the subject of software installation: macOS does this right with self-contained, portable apps which you install simply by moving them from a .dmg image to your /Apps directory. It's one drag-and-drop gesture. I agree that it's better if everything is done by the program developers and none of the configuration is done by distro maintainers. But in practice, Linux apps aren't as polished, generally speaking, and that creates a need for distro maintainers to do the polishing. What are they going to do, create an issue with the program developers and hope they'll take it up? The only Linux software that's in any way polished seems to be ugly as shit Electron apps, and they leave out basic things such as a menu bar. Maybe to save space, while in macOS the menubar is integrated into the top bar so it doesn't even take up extra space. And everything has to have a bulky sidebar nowadays which gets in the way of free window management, like every program demands to be the sole open window or at least take up half your screen. Yuck. I'm just so frustrated that in practice the techies get everything wrong. The quality in Linux programs is mostly in works of engineering that stem from the '80s such as vim and emacs, and the things inspired by them. But GUI apps people can't get right nowadays. Electron sucks. Gtk sucks. I'm somewhat glad the KDE folks make a suite of Qt apps, however. They allow me to open a random film editing app (Kdenlive in this case) and it just works.
We don't need his approval, and he's certainly not always correct (like on Zionism), but he does wage the war on woken-source (which is likely more than just politically compromised) - thus a couple times a year he lists software development that doesn't care what politics you do or don't support.
I'm still a +1 for Arch/Artix. It's the most popular non-cucked distro. I find you'll experience the least number of quirks on it than most distros because it's not a quirky disto. Every distro needs to have a quirk of some kind and then you find there is a cost to that quirk or some mismanagement in another area because their focus is on that.
Arch is simple. Deliver the software people write, and deliver it how they intended it to be distributed.
It turns out you don't want an opinionated distro. Because the people with the good opinions are the people who wrote the software.
Well I guess it depends on your preference, but if you're migrating from Windows, I heard it has a more familiar UI. And apparently people prefer to the way Ubuntu's UI has gone, although it is basically a Ubuntu fork.
I dunno, I haven't used Linux for a while. I might give it a spin again at some point.
Ubuntu was good 15-20 years ago. Their parent company Canonical got too big and too corrupt for me to appreciate, though I didn't investigate Mint when I used that. It's hard to keep up with all the things I'm supposed to be paranoid about.
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The UX is still terrible. I must be cursed or something, since even normies are using linsucks now and are content, but my system keeps breaking even though I follow the official instructions. It breaks after simply upgrading to the next version of the distro. I'm really just scratching the surface with this comment, I have so many gripes with the system. Nonetheless it's my system of choice because it's Unix and libreware. But my standards for user friendliness are high, especially when it comes to recommending the system to others. It might be that some of the container-based distros are user friendly enough although I haven't tested them. Silverblue looks interesting.
I'm using KDE and I actually like the interface but Gnome, not as much. XFCE is nice and minimal and doesn't use up too much resources. Which distro are you using? Aptitude is a good package manager and shouldn't lead to system breakage if you stick to the official repos. Hell, I've even been using the pacman package manager with Manjaro and haven't had any issues for a good year and a half. But I'm playing it safe and only install from the official sources. So far so good...fingers crossed. Have you ever tried BSD? I tried it once and liked it but there weren't as many available packages as Linux at the time.
I've used KDE for a while. I like it, as well as Gnome, but they're both buggy. With Gnome, my cursor would become tiny if I used the laptop screen (as opposed to the external monitor), I wasn't able to resolve that so I said fuck it. Which is a bummer because I like its ability to integrate titlebars into the top panel. But they nixed all the options in Gnome, I have no control over it. It's good defaults but if you want to change things you're mostly out of luck.
That was on Linux Mint. But every time I upgrade a Debian-based distro to the next version, it breaks. In Mint you cannot even upgrade with apt, you have to use some stupid graphical tool. At one point there was a popup with an error message that I wasn't able to resolve then and there, so I closed it. Then I didn't have access to the error anymore, and after restarting, it failed to boot. Great. That's the risk when everything is a GUI: if implemented incorrectly, it becomes a toy-like OS, you lose control.
In my view, macOS provides the user friendliness of a GUI, and actually implements things correctly in it. Just try the Disk Utility. This is a graphical tool that lets you create encrypted images which you can mount and store files in, and the images aren't huge, vulnerable lumps, but rather they consist of lots of small files. (These images are called Sparsebundles btw.) Linux lets you create encrypted partitions by default. Maybe you can created encrypted images but I'm not sure you can do it with a GUI program. I don't know how to create a distributed 'bundle' that's also encrypted. It'd take at least an hour to figure it out with all the available options of which none are perfect. This after having used GNU/Linux for over a decade. In macOS I was able to figure out Sparsebundles in 10 minutes when I was a completely new user.
Anyway, more about DEs. I don't like how flashy both KDE and Gnome are with special effects and shadows cast over other windows. I need something more quiet. You actually cannot disable all of those things in either of them. So I switched to XFCE but I use it with Notion, which is a tiling wm that divides the screen into frames that have tabs. I like XFCE because it provides everything I need but still lets me pick an alternative wm easily. LXDE is another such DE which actually prompts you to pick one of your existing WMs upon first launch, but that one is very barebones.
I use this setup on Slackware now. I like Slackware because it provides what Debian promises but fails to deliver, namely a stable, low-maintenance system that doesn't change a whole lot. In Debian you need to upgrade after 2 years or your software is outdated. In Slackware you're good to go for 7 years. Don't worry about the lack of package manager by default. There are package managers available for it, it's easy to learn how to install one and work with it. I use sbopkg + sqg to get access to all the Slackbuilds. Plus I have plenty of alternative software sources. I can download a .deb pkg and convert it to txz with
deb2txz, then useinstallpkgto install it as a native Slackware package. This has worked consistently for me.In spite of my complaints about GNU/Linux, I do feel like it's improving with the addition of Appimages and Flatpaks, so I'm not switching to a BSD. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer but it doesn't support Appimages or Flatpaks. I'd have to virtualize Linux, but at that point I might as well run it on bare metal, especially if it suffices. That's actually the appeal of Slackware to me: it's BSD-like and suffices. If I really want access to everything thinkable, I'd run Qubes. I'm actually switching to that but at a comfortable pace. BSDs appeal but I'd rather use Qubes for virtualization since it's meant for that, and then I can run a BSD inside that.
I'm actually impressed by the software availability of FreeBSD btw. Not so much by OpenBSD, let alone NetBSD, those systems aren't for me.
That's why I stick to the terminal for anything update-related. It's more verbose than the GUI. Flatpacks are alien to me. I just know they use up a lot of space because they contain all the necessary libraries for the app to work. I've become somewhat of a Linux purist in some regards. But I do like translucent and wobbly windows on the desktop.
Yes, it's dumb how much space Flatpaks use. I use them as a last resort. I do like how it Just Works(tm).
Agreed that the user experience is not up to par.
I've never updated a distro. I just start over. Is there any good reason to?
Me too, despite a handful of apps and functions that are missing. At the moment I'm still using the default Win10 because I've not properly geeked out on this laptop yet (too many other project on the go). Maybe with the New Year I should. The question: x0x7's Artix or Lunduke's OpenMandriva?
I agree with x0x7 that things don't have to be Lunduke approved, it's really quite silly. Lunduke may be counteracting some wokeism but he does it in a way that makes everything even more about politics. He discourages people from using Nix and Librewolf because of their woke policies but he doesn't show said policies to affect the quality of the code, that's just an assumption he makes. Honestly, they seem more like personal vendettas. Projects ban him or mentions of him. He has a big following. So, as a revenge, he tells all his followers not to use said software. We need to reduce the polarization, not increase it.
But leaving out politics, both those distros seem fine. But also consider installing Silverblue or Secureblue, I get the feeling they are more user friendly and I'm curious about your impression of them.
Agree to all of that. Except he doesn't say not to use software - rather to be cautious.
Regardless of Lunduke, can we trust the woken-source coders, the technocratic corporate meddling, and their rigged Rust foundations not to be compromised to surveil and serve the Enemies-That-Be?
First I'm hearing of them. I'm not a good person to ask about impressions of software. I know enough to know that I don't know much.
You're a great person to ask because it will indicate to me whether or not I can recommend it to the average person.
Maybe you are seeing the empirical evidence that rolling releases are more stable. It flies in the face of narritives but just seems to be the case that a slow continuously upgrading system is pretty stable. And new versions of software doesn't break things if things are properly tested.
What does break things is when you have a sudden upgrade with changes to a distro's rather ambitious and unique configurations, while having big changes in version numbers being applied at the same time. Distro managers can't test every permuntation of selected software, and user configs, to make sure their sudden changes don't wreck things.
So what you want is basically no unique contribution of configs from the distro, and software that keeps consistent track with the most most up to date stable version of software. What you want is Arch. The stable desktop Linux.
Basically linux should be a platform for installing software. Not an art project. Unless you want to make it your art project. Individual softwares are more valid art projects and so you can install things that look good with no contribution from the distro. The role of a distro should just be to package software that isn't broken. That's it.
Disagree. First of all, my experience with Arch is different. I used it in the early '00s when there was expected breakage. At work they allowed me the liberty of using GNU/Linux and as a result I was the only one who didn't even have working graphics and had to fix that for half a day at one point. My more recent experience is Manjaro on an rpi. Now, I'm really looking for zero maintenance. Gradual updates are a form of maintenance if they're mandatory. I didn't use the rpi all the time, sometimes it'd just sit idle for many months. Now I can't upgrade the software anymore. I wanted to use it for something as simple as emulating Snes games, and that fails. Separate from the GPU sucking, I mean: I have trouble getting many of the emulators to install and run. Some install but have shared library issues.
The other reason why I disagree is because an art project is exactly how developers need to approach the OS if they want to provide a good user experience. macOS is an art project, and it's lovely for it. When I hackintoshed, I had a system that I could simply start using right away while loving every bit of the system and without annoyances. macOS uses a stacking wm. I hate stacking wms. I don't know what secret formula they used, but there is an attention to detail that makes it so I'm quite okay with their specific wm. If developers don't provide this attention to detail, then the user is forced to, or at the very least, users as picky as me. Thus it becomes a timesink.
I'm willing to put in the effort that Qubes requires and want to experiment with various OSes anyway, so that will be my next OS. Nonetheless an immutable OS that installs containers is my idea of an actually user friendly OS that I can recommend to others, just I haven't verified it to be the case.
Oh yeah, on the subject of software installation: macOS does this right with self-contained, portable apps which you install simply by moving them from a .dmg image to your /Apps directory. It's one drag-and-drop gesture. I agree that it's better if everything is done by the program developers and none of the configuration is done by distro maintainers. But in practice, Linux apps aren't as polished, generally speaking, and that creates a need for distro maintainers to do the polishing. What are they going to do, create an issue with the program developers and hope they'll take it up? The only Linux software that's in any way polished seems to be ugly as shit Electron apps, and they leave out basic things such as a menu bar. Maybe to save space, while in macOS the menubar is integrated into the top bar so it doesn't even take up extra space. And everything has to have a bulky sidebar nowadays which gets in the way of free window management, like every program demands to be the sole open window or at least take up half your screen. Yuck. I'm just so frustrated that in practice the techies get everything wrong. The quality in Linux programs is mostly in works of engineering that stem from the '80s such as vim and emacs, and the things inspired by them. But GUI apps people can't get right nowadays. Electron sucks. Gtk sucks. I'm somewhat glad the KDE folks make a suite of Qt apps, however. They allow me to open a random film editing app (Kdenlive in this case) and it just works.
Linux is good for now - until it all gets Rusted and fucked by the wokensource.
archive.today mirror | archive.org mirror
I heard Zorin OS is the way to go now.
Why?
Lunduke promotes OpenMandriva, Omarchy, Devuan, and GhostBSD.
Who cares what Lunduke likes. He can be semi-good at spotting things to not like. But does a distro really need to be Lunduke approved?
Just pointing out non-woke distros.
We don't need his approval, and he's certainly not always correct (like on Zionism), but he does wage the war on woken-source (which is likely more than just politically compromised) - thus a couple times a year he lists software development that doesn't care what politics you do or don't support.
I'm still a +1 for Arch/Artix. It's the most popular non-cucked distro. I find you'll experience the least number of quirks on it than most distros because it's not a quirky disto. Every distro needs to have a quirk of some kind and then you find there is a cost to that quirk or some mismanagement in another area because their focus is on that.
Arch is simple. Deliver the software people write, and deliver it how they intended it to be distributed.
It turns out you don't want an opinionated distro. Because the people with the good opinions are the people who wrote the software.
Well I guess it depends on your preference, but if you're migrating from Windows, I heard it has a more familiar UI. And apparently people prefer to the way Ubuntu's UI has gone, although it is basically a Ubuntu fork.
I dunno, I haven't used Linux for a while. I might give it a spin again at some point.
Forkin eh! Good to know. Thanks.
Ubuntu was good 15-20 years ago. Their parent company Canonical got too big and too corrupt for me to appreciate, though I didn't investigate Mint when I used that. It's hard to keep up with all the things I'm supposed to be paranoid about.