I don’t use it myself, but it’s been my main recommendation for newbies for years for that reason. No complaints yet, even from the less tech-literate.
While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).
I’ve been using Arch for years and can’t pull myself away because everything just works. Whats the difference between arch and whatever the derivatives are? I don’t even know what distros to arch are the Ubuntu / mint to debian
EndeavourOS is easy-mode Arch. You get a liveboot with XFCE and a graphical installer with quite some choices, from a wide selection of desktop environments and window managers to the init system and filesystem. You get pacman and yay, with the AUR preconfigured.
Manjaro is the easiest way to break Arch. It has its own repos which are just Arch but 2 weeks behind. This causes problems when (not saying if) you add the AUR, which is not 2 weeks behind but in sync with Arch main repos. Thus causing breakages due to migrations not happening at the same time.
Garuda is not as widely used as Endeavour and Manjaro, but from those who’ve used it, I’ve only heard good things.
I am using EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition. Was nice to have a starting point for my first pure WM and my first Arch install. The Sway Community Edition is looking for maintainers but I am a bit disappointed by some things in upstream Sway and am not sure I want to stick with it long-term yet. Might try Hyprland at some point.
Ah ok i gues si can understand it makes sense that if you really wanna learn linux you gotta be ready to get your hands dirty aka figuring out how to configure the distribution. Maybe its just very overwhelming because a beginner doesnt even know what you can / can’t configure. But probably everything
Yeah basically all a “distribution” is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I’ve seen many people begin their Linux journey on a “beginner friendly” distribution who come to see that distro’s configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don’t have a great perspective on what is/isn’t confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.
Oh, just invest in adobe and get it developed for Linux - easy, why didnt anyone think of this before. And better yet, if they do invest they could make it a PopOS exclusive!!?!?!! \s
It wont work because Adobe does not care and there is not enough market share in Linux for them to bother with it. No amount of money that PopOS has will be able to convince Adobe to develop it for Linux and there is no way in hell Adobe will give them access to their source to develop it for Linux. That whole argument is just a non-starter.
I would laugh if it wasn’t so bad that it makes you wanna cry. At least I’m lucky since this is the american perspective where all those services exist. Here in europe opening 90% of those streaming services webpages just says that the service is not available in my region. Some of them with new branding or different branding are not even available like max which is still hbo max here which changed recently enough.
I only know a few of the services names because I spent a few hours today before on wiki pages searching for legal tv apps and came across all the insanity. I only knew common names like hulu and roku which are things that don’t work here anyway. Ended up installing pluto tv again to experiment but then had to fight turning on vpn properly to counties where it actually is available. And all the countries have different channels and contents anyway.
It’s all insanity and horrible and sailing the high seas is honestly the only true no pain experience.
Stopped using netflix when they went after the accounts sharing. Only have hbo max and prime apps installed because my ISP bundled the subscriptions. But I never open them to watch anything anyway. Totally useless services.
Yep it’s hilarious that because all the streaming services trying to wall off their own content and region-lock it means that the illegal way is the only reasonable means to access the shows even if you would be willing to spend some money to see it.
Each one comes with predatory practices trying to lock you into long term costs, some have “ad-supported” plans, most have stupid space-wasting apps, and every single one has some onerous EULA they make you agree to.
I think what people are intuiting is really in two parts. Like another person said, if an observation is true, you can probably find someone who said it better.
The other thing is that crafted personae (think Peterson, Ayn Rand, Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh) will take a position and argue for it on the basis of their other opinions. Each observation is meant to be a facet of an integrated philosophy.
So if they take position A, they will support it by opinions X, Y, and Z. If you accept A, as presented by them, but reject X, Y, and Z, then it’s up to you - if you’re using them as a point of reference, to point out the flaws in their supporting arguments and substitute your own. If you do not, it’s reasonable for a listener to think you also subscribe to their supporting premises.
Let’s say we’re having dinner and you comment that Ayn Rand was right when she said welfare is evil. Rand meant that welfare is evil because it takes the hard-earned wealth from the good and virtuous rich and gives it to the lazy, greedy poor. If you go no further than naming her and stating your agreement, we will probably think you picked her because you agree with her reasoning. You may actually mean that you prefer a universal basic income over welfare, or a completely egalitarian society where everyone from surgeons and ceos to grocery clerks make the same wage. Or you might be advocating for societies like those documented by David Graeber, who describes the indigenous people of the Northeast US where there was no notion of cash or barter but instead something closer to “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” But because you started by quoting Rand and not Marx, people aren’t going to just jump to that conclusion.
It’s like why math teachers ask you to show your work. If you made a bunch of self-cancelling errors and blundered onto the right answer, you didn’t actually learn the material, so the fact that you wrote down the numerically correct answer doesn’t mean that you understand how to solve that kind of problem, and it will get 0 credit. The same for a philosophy or history professor who wants you to justify your answer and not just write down a one sentence opinion.
“Culture” is probably an overstatement. Isn’t it just horrifying zoning laws that lead to sprawl and people didn’t have a choice as there is a lack of public transportation?
It sounds like you're saying they're livng in an effective dictatorship rather than a democracy.
They should be able to choose by the way they vote.
I dont reallly know much about how planning and public services works in the USA.
Im my country we have fluctuating quality of local and national public transport investment and maintenace, and one of the sources of variation is who they're voting in to power.
When they keep voting in individualistic self-serving leaders the public infrastructure gets shat on sometimes duismantled and snaked off outside of public control. The rare time they vote for politicians who support public infrastructure and the general public, then it improves,
however briefly.
So my country is probably average on public transport - by the sounds of things, it's generally better than most of the USA - I'd rather it be better. but I tend to accept the choices made by the electorate, saddening though it may be, this is what people want.
If i'm really that bothered about it then i have to stand for election myself.
I guess it might all come down to how free and fair the elections are and how easy it is to enter and get your manifesto heard by a fair number of people.
A lack of options isn’t really the same as a dictatorship. The day to day choices are sometimes hard to abstract into an intelligent vote every 2 or 4 years. The US suffers from a lack of trust in public institutions, so they aren’t given enough funding or the right leadership to take a step back, take a good look and make tough choices that goes against reactionary NIMBYs.
The sprawl may very well be part of the culture. I just don’t like to call everything a culture, including commuting. Commuting just seems a necessity and the choice of how and how far you commute is a function of infrastructure and land value. Sounds almost too boring to organize around, but it would be important to find a solution that works for everyone, instead of just single individuals.
For all I’ve read, the lack of public transportation in US cities (or the badly managed ones) is by design, influenced on politicians by the car industry lobby.
I guess it’s the same for zoning laws? I’ve no idea, and I’m probably not exactly true, as I’m stating a huge generalization. The US is so big and diverse that there may be places with good public infrastructure.
But in a broader sense, it seems that the car lobby played a big role in how cities were designed and run.
In Canada the resistance to change is fueled by “this is how we’ve always done it” which is false as Canada was founded before the car was made. There is also a conflict of interest to reduce dependance on roads as we have a decent auto manufacturing sector and many people rely on jobs related to roads and cars. With zoning there is hesitancy to change because many of our politicians are land lords using single family homes as rentable apartments and they know that their property values will drop if we start building real multi unit residences and affordable housing.
Our cities have been caught in this style of development for decades and to try to change it really goes against the current political grain. It takes a brave and determined politician to try for change and they will meet resistance from their colleagues and parts of their voter base the entire way.
Yes, I think to work well the Land zoning and transport planning need to be hand in hand.
(and ideally serve people rather than car companies).
A local bus service is more efficient the denser the population it serves.
Rural densities will struggle to support/ warrant frequent bus services.
Really dense areas will more easily support more frequent bus services / netwoks and even trains / grade separated or exclusive land use for public transport.
It's no suprise that super dense places like Japan, Singapore, and desely populated European , Chinese regions have more public transport.
Add New York City to that list for that matter. Presumably NYC benefited from achieving it's density before cars became too powerful politically..
Urban planning and public transport should absolutely go hand-in-hand.
But on to your other point.
The key factor for transport use isn't just population or density. It's also the proportion of the population that uses public transport. And places that have more frequent public transport will have a higher proportion of the population using it than places with low quality public transport.
Imagine a city with just 100,000 people. But the local bus service is exceptional, and half the population uses it. That's a base of 50,000 people.
Imagine a city of 500,000 people. The public transport network there is average, so just 10% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Now imagine a metropolitan area of 5,000,000 people. The public transport network there is poor and infrequent. Only 1% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Three cities, same absolute number of public transport users, different modal share.
If you run frequent services, every 10 minutes or better, and services connect so that it's a two- or three-seat journey to everywhere in your city, you will have a much higher ridership than if it's an hourly bus service. That's with the same population and density.
Frequent bus services (once every 10 minutes or more) can also act as a feeder into a higher rail, light rail, tram, or metro services. In suburban, rural, and seni-rural areas, that extends the reach of your rail network.
Yes, higher density around railway stations is the best option. But where there is a lot of low-density suburban sprawl, frequent feeder buses are a good option.
Somehow there’s always a “death spiral” for public transit, especially now as people commute less. But somehow… There never is for roads. We never seem to have enough roads. Funny that.
The car lobby thing is true for LA, but I’m not sure you can apply this to every city. What is evident, is that cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly (see east coast cities or European ones for example) and the ones founded after are more grid like and car friendly.
Public transportation is only worth it if there is a high enough density of people (yeah, this sub may not like to hear it), so if you have huge sprawling suburbs it’s not obvious where to even put your bus/train stations. Usually it’s great to connect centers of some sort.
So yeah, if there had been more incentive to connect centers and dense clusters of population with each other, they may have planned according to that.
That’s certainly one cause, but culture is as well. The American dream of a quarter acre in the quiet leafy suburbs, easy commute to work by car on the freeway, has been a pervasive part of culture for a long time. It’s only recently that we’ve started appreciating the unsustainable reality of that idea.
I'm coming to the belief that sometime this is an overblown excuse. I'm sure it's not true everywhere, but I just visited a friend in a medium sized (well under 100k people) Florida city, and spent a day going around by bus and foot, and it was great. Buses were reliable, air-conditioned, cheap, and traveled all the main routes, running about 18h a day, but they were barely used. Still loads of 6 lane roads, paved everything, massive parking lots, and more SUVs than I could count.
Even if you have a car for some trips, people in this city could easily reduce their usage, but they've become far too reliant on car culture. A trip to the store, 15 min walk, hop in the car. A trip downtown, 10min walk and 30min bus ride, nope... Car.
If we want more public transport, we need to encourage people use what exists when they can.
Transit needs to be competitive with cars to really see a difference. In your own example a bus somehow takes 20 minutes longer to get downtown than walking there would, which is completely ridiculous but possible with how american transit is managed.
The transit needs to be nearly as fast and convenient as cars are. The city could take some of those 6 lane roads, dedicate a bus lane, and reduce the travel time of the bus by reducing time spent in traffic and prioritizing signals at intersections for the bus.
As for zoning, it is to blame because zoning prevents density and denisty helps support transit by increasing ridership in denser areas. If every building is limited to 1 or 2 stories and has a massive parking lot, it takes more space and everything gets farther away, increasing travel times for all transportation. This also increases the costs of road maintaince, sewer and water pipes, elecitricity delivery and is just pretty much one of the most ineffecient ways for a city to use space and resources.
All I know is that PalmTran in south east Florida became wildly unpredictable during the Great Recession due to suicide by train. Many many times it was shut down do to people offing themselves on the tracks.
I read a study long time ago, I can’t find it, it’s old, and I have not kept up with new publications so take all this with a huge grain of salt. The study found that not only does a public transit system need to be available and dependable, it needs a certain amount of people too. Once a critical number of commuters used public transit it passed a tipping point where even more people began to use it. The study concluded that people seeing people take public transit will increase the likelihood that they will choose public transit next time compared to people who saw deserted public transit. It’s a chicken and egg problem on top of everything else. Keep in mind I am not an expert and I am not current with the topic.
What you forgot to mention is that someone bought the original piracyisacrime.com domain as printed on your DVD. They made it redirect to The IT Crowd piracy scene :d
The IT Crowd basically cemented itself as timeless by never directly referencing anything super techy that would date it. Sure, there’s a guitar hero controller and an xbox 360 in a lot of shots, as well as some 4:3 laptops, but that’s about it.
Is there a community or database where people have tested different plugins on Linux either natively or with Wine to see if they can get things working?
There is, if you look up yabridge that’s like a plugin bridge that natively runs windows vsts in reaper for Linux through wine with almost no hassle. They have a list somewhere
just go zorin os. it attempts to simulate the look and feel of windows while also having a lot of pre installed applications including playonlinux/wine sot that once its installed you can just go.
Sorry, but Debian stable is a terrible recommendation! They don’t even ship bugfix releases of KDE Plasma… It’s stuck with a months old version that has lots of known and long fixed bugs in it
Get into the “variety is good” mindset. Having options is always better than not having options, even if it feels overwhelming at first. It’ll get easier with time
One of the great things about Linux is that you can almost always just run whatever distro from the USB drive before installing (and just reboot without the USB drive to get back into Windows) So you can download a few ISOs and try each one for a bit before committing to anything.
This is nice if there’s anything specific that you need to work, you can try it and make sure it’s usable for you before making any permanent changes.
For example, I’m legally blind and use a screen magnifier. I tried a few distros to compare the built-in magnifiers before settling on one.
I’d also recommend using Ventoy on your USB. That lets you just plop ISO files on the drive and choose which one at boot.
I made the dive into Linux mint last night. If you already have windows installed you can side load so you don’t have to completely commit right out of the box. I play games that would require windows so this was necessary for me but so far outside of hating middle mouse click to paste and some troubleshooting for my headset (I could hear myself quietly through my headphones when speaking into mic) Linux has been preferable to win11
You’re right, but the point I was trying to get across to another layman is you can have windows already installed and not break anything with another install of Linux. Rather than get into partitioning and dual booting.
Sideloading an app on a phone doesn’t have the potential to wipe everything else off the phone. It’s bad advice to call dual booting that because you might cause someone to go into it without understanding the risks involved. In fact, the best facsimile, which doesn’t even require knowing how to get into the boot menu, would be to run a Virtual Machine instead. That way there actually isn’t any risk of erasing Windows. It’s also really simple these days, here’s some guides from ubuntu and fedora:
Or if you don’t want to go through the hassle of installing Linux inside the VM yourself, you can download pre-built VMs for most major distros from here:
Sure, I’ll do that. But you’ve lost 99% of average people when you mention “virtual machine”.
Also at least for mint which I was directly talking about you actually boot via live USB first and have to install from an icon on the desktop so there really is no risk for erasing windows until your well into making decisions. Which again you have to choose to erase windows.
youtube.com
Top