I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.
..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.
I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.
Wasn’t Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That’s what I’ve heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn’t (isn’t?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is “fine” at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.
Although it’s the third least-popular of the eight songs the guy’s done so far, it’s by far my favorite. Not only is the concept great, it’s definitely the most technically successful one (in terms of the lyrics being pieced together the smoothest).
Yeah I understand, and that does probably happen a lot. But we also seem to live in an age where we assume the worst of people… so even though it’s possible to partly agree with someone while genuinely condemning other aspects of that person, people are somehow certain that others are using that as a gateway to awful shit, as you say. (Not talking about you, of course.)
It’s not about assuming the worst, it’s more about being skeptical toward anonymous people on the Internet you don’t know, which I think is healthy.
The problem with JP is that even if you agree with one of his positions, he has almost certainly arrived to that opinion through his other terrible assumptions. By sharing his take, you’re not just sharing the opinion you happen to agree with, you’re sharing the underlying worldview he uses to justify it.
If you really do care about people assuming your support for him, you should use your own supporting arguments for the opinion you’re sharing instead of shoehorning his in.
When folks will stop with the “If Linux won’t become another Windows, it’ll fail” mentality? Linux is not Winblows – and we really mean it. To “increase adoption” users need to acknowledge (only) this – that both Windows and Linux differs from one another and that won’t change in any time soon.
I have just started trying to use Linux and I find it very hard to actually recommend it to anyone. And the problem isn’t really anything mentioned in the video, it’s just that the UX is not great. You have to google so much to get things working and the answers are almost always typing some cryptic stuff into the terminal. I am technically minded enough to get by but Linux ends up feeling more like a hobby to me rather than something I can actually get work done in.
That said, I really like Linux and am gonna stick with it. I just don’t don’t see it being widely adopted until it becomes a bit more straight forward.
I have tried quite a few now. Fedora, Mint, Debian - none could detect my wifi card so I had to go do a bunch of googling to try and get them working, found what driver I needed but was never able to actually find out how to install it, other than some terminal commands in forums that didn’t end up working. I stuck with Endeavour OS because it detected it without any problems.
I have a keyboard that I configure with an online tool called via that requires something called hid. On windows it just works but on Endeavour I have to enable something through the terminal.
I have a shared data drive and in order to make it mount when I start the computer I had to go and edit some fstab file?
I couldn’t even figure out how to install a dual boot with with fedora and mint because it asked me about the root and home and swap and boot partitions and didn’t explain how to set any of them up or what they did.
I needed a program for work that wasn’t on a repository and I had to google howw to launch an .sh file because clicking doesn’t work haha. Also through the terminal.
I’m not saying these are crazy insurmountable problems, and windows definitely has some similar things, getting my tablet working was so much smoother on Linux for example. But I’ve had to learn so much more about how my computer works to actually use Linux and I’m just not sure the majority of people will have that patience.
I wholeheartedly agree with you in regards to general lack in UX quality and lack of introduction for new users.
I have mived to use Linux exclusively for about 5 years now and whenever a teammember at work tries it, I have to give advice about once a day because of some cryptic info that has accumulated in my head and they couldn’t find through a 20minute internet search, to solve an endless stream of tiny issues.
It is an OS that I definitely could never recommend to people like my parents, which are by no means tech illiterate.
In regards to the specific point of launching .sh files:
On KDE Plasma I can double click sh files and a popup shows asking me whether I want to execute the program or edit the file in a text editor.
o, that’s weird, this one might actually just be user error then, haha. I’ll have to try again as I’m also using plasma.
I actually think it might be better for less tech literate people in some cases. Supposing it’s pre installed or they have someone to set things up for them. If you’re just using it to browse the web or write some documents the general experience is pretty good. It’s only when you start trying to do a bit more with it that things get complicated.
I agree linux can be very difficult but easy as well if you do not have “exotic” needs. If more people were using linux, especially more non techies, a lot would change but we’ll get there just slowly.
to respond to your points
I initially thiught you meant that you had to use commands in order to tinker with the UI - that’s my bad!
Wifi card, drivers, etc. can be a real pain. That’s neither linux or your fault. It’s just that noone prior to you wanted to use it and that’s why it wasn’t yet supported. Most systems are just plug and play. - compare it to macos, and you’ll find that linux is easy to install on most systems.
Auto mount is done using fstab right. Yoz xna also auto mount from the file explorer of the disk utility, it always depends on the system. There are a lot of different things and it’s not perfect.
Dual booting is in my opinion something for advanced people. I have no idea why anyone would ever suggest it to a newcomer! It’s pain in the ass if you deviate from the standard protocol.
Xou can double click on a shell script (.sh) by chmod +x file.sh or > right click > properties > exe as program
I have the same issue with Windows. I’ve been using Linux since I got my first PC. Trying to navigate Windows is a pain in the ass. It’s just old programs somehow put together. When I find some solutions online it’s often opening who knows what via Windows+R or better yet, changing something I have no idea about in regedit.
And even the most basic things are hidden away by many steps.
I feel you, I’m sure a lot of it comes down to familiarity. I just very recently did a fresh reinstall of windows and endeavour in a dual boot. And honestly the Calamares installer is a lot nicer than the windows one. But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.
But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.
What do you mean by that? Are you talking about RAID, having some partitions on separate drive or something else? Because if you mean just using secondary drive for files that’s just as easy as on Windows with most distributions.
Or did you mean installing programs to secondary drive? Yeah… I have no idea how that can be done. By a quick 4 minute search it seems… that it’s a problem.
So yeah, I can see a problem here. So many computers have something like 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD.
No, just a secondary hard drive. I use it for Windows and Linux so it’s ntfs. I was just trying to save a file to it but it said I didn’t have access, turns out I needed to specify ntfs-3g in the fstab file before I could write to it.
NTFS is proprietary FS that works on Linux thanks to great reverse-engineering efforts. To make this more fair, try accessing ext4 partition from Windows. Oh, it can’t even recognize it. Except that ext4 is open-source, so it wouldn’t even require reverse-engineering.
That said, have you fully shutdown Windows? You generally get write access out of the box nowadays, but only if Windows is fully shutdown. And clicking “Shut down” does not properly shut it down unless you disable fast startup.
Another method is to choose a “Restart” in Windows, and then instead of continuing with the restart, choose Linux on bootloader screen after you get there.
I’m mostly just speaking to the process. I can right click and mount the drive without a problem, but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.
O and yea, I did have to disable some fast startup setting in windows to get the write access, I forgot about that. But yeah, that one’s on Windows.
edit: sorry, this was actually pretty irrelevant to what I actually said, which was just about the write access which you pointed out was a windows issue. I got mixed up with my replies.
but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.
it’s under an hour long so I can watch more than one like this during my lunch break. It’s the long form content over an hour long that I have to avoid because it’s usually just vods which severely bore me.
Haha, I just mean a bot that posts the peertube link instead of youtube just like the piped bot. It was a joke but it would be cool if there was one - but it should remind OP to post on peertube as well - probably a bad idea! 😅
There is no such thing as “the peertube link” (emphasis added) because (a) as with Lemmy, there is no single canonical Peertube instance, and (b) unlike Piped etc., Peertube isn’t designed to mirror Youtube, but instead be its own platform.
In other words, in order to post a Peertube link, somebody would have to explicitly choose to upload the Youtube video to a specific Peertube instance and then post the link to that.
I mean, the internet was fine until the advent of global “engagement-driven social networks” that practically became filter bubbles optimizing for ads delivery, then echo chambers for political gain, down to self-sustained propaganda machines for geopolitical sabotage. Early internet felt like village-scale communities centered around a single purpose/interests where people came in the first place to contribute something or help each other. Trolls did exist but there was no tolerance for them because the absence of centralization meant they didn’t have to be accepted there in the first place.
Because that lobster has no original thoughts. Whatever insight you think he has is not unique to him and the fact that you choose to watch his content and quote him without knowing any alternative is going to make people ask questions.
Here’s the thing, I never watch his content. And I can’t even remember why I happened to watch that clip, I saw it somewhere randomly. But it stood out to me because I’ve never heard another person really acknowledge the problem with telling people they’re fine and dismissing any problems they might be experiencing, which denies their own experience and can make them feel invalidated. It seems to be very common to do that in society and to subvert that idea seems relatively uncommon. I’m sure other people have explained why it’s problematic but I just haven’t seen any others. So my go-to for explaining that concept is more or less what Jordan Peterson said.
You've never heard anyone say to be empathetic with others and not be dismissive of their problems? Really? I guess for most people that's not something that needs to be said...
… I’m not sure what the opposite of toxic positivity is, but probably not that. Basically acknowledging problems and working from there in a positive direction, rather than simply denying problems and pretending everything’s fine when it isn’t. A google search tells me “tragic optimism” can be described as the opposing concept, whether that fits or not.
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