To me it was quite clear that they were asking, “Why Arch over Mint for OP?” They weren’t asking why you like it, they were asking why you think OP would like it.
In that context I think experience is extremely relevant.
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
this could’ve been done by most people with a little gumption.
My point was not that installing Linux is intrinsically difficult, it’s that people who have “a little gumption” to figure it out are a far rarer breed than you seem to believe.
Also, I wasn’t intending to “shit all over the possibility” of salvaging old PCs. I support that! I think Linux (Mint, specifically) would be a perfect drop-in for most light use Windows users, as it is a stable and friendly solution to common needs. I was just raising the part most people overlook: actually getting it running. Not just the technical challenges, but the mental ones, too. The people who stand to gain the most from a free and stable OS are paradoxically the same people who are the least equipped to find and set it up.
We have a long road ahead of us to normalize the procedures of obtaining and installing a new OS in the public eye. Linux can be as user friendly as you like, but it’s all for nothing to the average Joe if he doesn’t understand how to get it. Or why he should even bother getting it, for that matter.
But, assuming most people aren’t complete morons and can actually do stuff if they decide to sit down, Google how to do it and actually do it instead of declaring “I am stupid” and not even try
Extremely charitable assumption, I’d say.
I do think most people do in fact possess the ability to follow instructions and succeed at installing Linux from USB. But it all falls apart at the key word “decide”. Very few people choose to devote the low, but nonzero, effort required to pull it off.
for linux specifically the hard part is entering the BIOS to disable secure boot and then go into the boot menu to select the USB
I would say, for the demographic I’m thinking of, the hardest part is actually getting the installation media in the first place. Not because it’s challenging to do, but just getting over the mental barrier of this (to them) extremely unorthodox method of installing software.
Like, first you have to find the thing and download it. Which, fine, that’s typical so far But the thing you download isn’t some .exe you run. No, you need to put it on a flash drive. So you need one of those lying around, either empty or with nothing important on it. But you don’t just copy the installl file onto it the ““normal”” way, nooo… you also have to separately download some strange utility that burns it onto the flash drive in some special way or else it won’t work. Only then do you have to tickle the BIOS.
I understand if you or anyone else reading rolls their eyes at that description because these steps are so boneheadedly simple. And I agree, they are. But it’s not so much a question of whether it’s hard to do, it’s a question of whether it feels safe and natural to do. Which, to you and me, it is. But to the kind of person who, as you say, shouldn’t even be using a computer in the first place (but they must anyhow, because trying to live in our modern information age society without one closes too many doors), it’s an uncomfortable, dark ritual.
Theoretically, when it’s up and running. How do you intend to get to that state, though? One has to install it first. And I think that alone is a massive filter.
inb4 someone says:
I did it, and I found it extremely straightforward.
I’m sure you did, Mr. “I hate how much Reddit is pandering to the braindead to the point that I joined an experimental social media platform”, I’m sure you did. Clearly, you are a qualitative sample of people who use Windows computers.
Sarcasm aside, look at how railroaded and coddling the Windows 10 installer is. I am certain a large plurality of Windows users’ initiative would completely evaporate having to navigate that. And now we want to throw a Linux installation at them?
Factor on top how the vast majority of computer users in all forms that computers take simply take for granted that the OS the computer comes with is a part of the computer. Normal people don’t upgrade OSes unless the OS itself railroads them into it (which Win10 already does aggressively whenable), or they buy a new PC that happens to come with it pre-installed. The knowledge required to negotiate an OS wipe and reinstall is not something most people possess, and I expect presenting that knowledge to them on a silver platter is something they’d hastily recoil from.
We’re in a catch-22 here. Even if all the pieces for the fabled Linux Desktop are arguably here, actually getting it into the hands of those who would benefit from it most remains prohibitive.
This is also ignoring the elephant in the room: A massive swath of these Windows PCs (Maybe even most of them? I have no backing figures, just a hunch.) are not personal computers, but office PCs that belong to a company fleet. There’s a reason Windows utterly dominates the office–Windows rules the IT sphere, at least where personal devices given to employees are concerned. Active Directory? Group Policy? Come on, guys. None of the companies who depend on these management tools are pivoting to Linux anytime soon, and you know it. And if their cheap, bulk order desk PCs don’t support Windows 11, they are absolutely getting landfilled.
The only effective mitigation I could think of would be to start a charity that takes obselesced office PCs, refurbishes them to Linux, and provides them at low or no cost to those who need a low cost or free PC. It would get Linux into more hands, but it would also strengthen a stigma that Linux is nothing more than the poor man’s OS. The Dr Thunder to Window’s Mountain Dew.
I guess by “Windows installer” I actually meant the setup wizard that runs the first time you boot an OEM machine from the factory. The thing 99% of Windows users actually see. Not sure if that’s significantly different.
And if you want to claim even that is terrible, I really have to question by what metric you’re measuring. Is it because it doesn’t give you the options you want, like creating an offline user account, or because it’s full of bloat screens for products like OneDrive? Sure, I guess. But I’d say having these criticisms are very specifically the kind of things that make you an outlier compared to the average person I’m talking about. These are things normal people don’t bat an eye at. Giving them more control just intimidates them.
And yeah, I’m sure you agree, “provided [they] can create a USB” is a huge ask for a lot of people. Child’s play for us, but weird and scary black magic to most. Guides can and do make it crystal clear what to do, but as long as it feels spooky to download and run the magic programs, no one will feel comfortable doing it.
Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It’s also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I’m curious what other people are using these days. What’s your favorite player?
I had a period where I didn’t really understand the GPL or what it was trying to do. All I knew is that it was ““viral”” (whatever the hell that meant!) and that, supposedly, trying to use it would forever bind you and your creation to who knows what unforeseen legal horrors. I mean, look how long it is! It’s frightening! I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it at first.
Then I got a clue and actually read it. It’s quite straightforward. For almost all serves and purposes it’s basically just MIT plus copyleft. All the legal density is just an effort to squash every conceivable loophole to the copyleft directive. I’m no longer afraid of it, I think it’s pretty cool.
The thing I want to know now is why so many projects think their shit don’t stink and that they need to pollute the FOSS ecosystem with their own stupid permissive license that is functionally identical to the MIT license.
Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments...
Computers are like servants. They do whatever you ask of them. But to be able to ask them things, you must do so in their language. On the extreme low level that means writing code to make programs, but on a higher level, it means talking to programs someone else already wrote using special commands.
The buttons and switches on a GUI that you can click on with a mouse are like pre-recorded commands that instruct the computer to do some specific thing. The button or whatever will have a symbol or text description that lets you intuitively know what it’s for, and when you click on it, it plays a pre-recorded command to the computer in its language that tells it to do that thing. With these buttons, you can ask things of the computer in its language without having to know that language.
As you get more intimate with the computer, this system can start to feel a bit stiff. You’ve essentially got a butler who doesn’t speak your language, and any time you need to give him a task, you have to fumble through a basket of pre-recorded tape recorder messages to find the one for the task at hand, and play it to him. For more complex tasks, you may need to chain several of these together. It gets slow and awkward. And god forbid you don’t even have a tape recording for the thing you need.
It’s easier if you learn the butler’s language yourself. Then you can ask him for things directly. You’re not bound to any collection of pre-recorded messages to use, you can tell him exactly what you need. And if you don’t happen to know the word for something, you can look it up. It cuts out all the faffery with fumbling over a tape recorder looking for the messages you need to play.
Using a terminal is roughly the computer equivalent of speaking to your butler in his native language. You’re not limited to only the buttons and features any particular program lets you have; you can make up exactly what you need on the spot. And you never have to bounce your hand between a mouse and keyboard to do it, you can keep your hands in one position at all times, which really adds up over time in both speed and comfort.
Practicing this will also give you the side perk of better understanding how the computer actually works overall, and what it’s actually doing. This knowledge can come in super handy when diagnosing problems with the thing. When a GUI gives up, a terminal can keep digging.
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
IANAL and I don’t have the actual court papers, but is seems to me they were violating GPLv2 Section 6.
Essentially, what this section says is that if you distribute a chunk of software (in this case, the firmware embedded in a smart TV) that in its compiled form contains part or all of a software library covered by this license (in this case, Busybox, which is a bundle of common shell utilities you use every day in a Linux terminal, compacted into one binary to fit onto embedded systems), you have to do one of these four things:
Package the source code of the GPL’d library with the distribution itself. If your executable contains a version of it modified by you, those modifications must be in the source. In this case this would require putting the raw source code for Busybox on the TV itself in a place the user could access it, or perhaps bundling a flash drive with the source code on it with the TV.
Include a written offer to send the source to anyone who asks for it, at no cost (except for the cost of transfer itself if applicable, e.g. postage), and honor that offer for at least 3 years. I believe this is what most companies that use GPL’d code do.
If the distribution happens at a designated place, offer the source at that same place. This is mostly relevant to download pages, not physical products.
Verify that the customer already has a copy of the source distributed in advance. This is a specific edge case that makes no sense in this context.
This lawsuit was brought about because the sellers of the TVs that contained Busybox were not doing any of the above four things, and those sellers ignored or ghosted plaintiff when plaintiff contacted them about it.
I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS....
The grand theory of classic package managers is the idea that lots of programs all need the same core libraries to function. An analogy would be like noticing most construction jobs need nails. So instead of making everyone bring their own copy of nails, resulting in dozens of redundant copies of it lying around, they have a single nails package that everyone can use.
But there are different versions of nails out there. Each version picks up unique new features, and drops legacy ones. Recent builds may incorporate and thus require the new features, making them incompatible with old versions of nails that don’t have them. On the other hand, some builds may still use and rely on legacy features of nails, and are thus incompatible with the new versions. You may run into a scenario where you want Software A that needs nails version 14+, but also Software B that can only run on nails v <13, and you just can’t, because they don’t overlap.
Additionally, there may just be a totally different competing package out there, screws, that does largely the same job as nails, but in a completely different way that is totally incompatible with projects that expect nails. So if you need Software C that relies on nails, but also Software D that relies on screws, you might cause problems by installing both.
What a distro is is essentially a group of devs declaring that they are putting together some specific list of libraries (like, say, nails v14), and then sculpting up a bundle of software around those specific libraries. Can’t cope with nails v14? That sucks. No package for you, then.
In that sense, distros are differentiated by what libraries and other low-level system softwares are available to the programs you wish to install on them. If you want your program to be available natively on every distro, it needs to be compatible with every competing set of libraries each distro has elected to use.
It is possible to just say “fuck it” to the distro’s built-in libraries, and instead bundling the specific version of nails or screws or whatever you project needs directly with it. Build your own with blackjack and hookers, as it were. That’s exactly what Flatpak does, among others. But it’s trading flexibility for redundancy. In the age of cheap and plentiful storage memory, many people think this trade is well worth it. But it makes many formalists cringe.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
They don’t listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there’s probably at least three people who don’t have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they’re an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it’s a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that’s clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don’t even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.
Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It’s designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.
When it comes to closed-source software developed opaquely by for-profit corporations, particularly the huge, monolithic ones like Microsoft, I generally have the attitude that, if I do discover a problem:
They won’t take my detailed report
If they do take my report, it goes straight into a shredder bin (or a massive queue where low priority problems go to die, which may as well be the same thing)
If they do read my report, then it’s likely something they already are aware of
If they don’t know about it somehow, the issue is probably so low-priority and niche that it wouldn’t escape the backlog anyway
Probably not nearly as bleak as I make it out. But when you can’t see the process, how can you tell?
With open source projects, these things can all still happen, but at least the process is more transparent. You can see exactly where your issue is, and what’s been done to it so far, if anything. Other users can discover and vouch for your problem. And if the dev team takes pull requests, and you are willing, able, and permitted to contribute, you can make the fix yourself.
I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:...
The point of the firewall is not to make your computer an impenetrable fortress. It’s to block any implicit port openings you didn’t explicitly ask for.
Say you install a piece of software that, without your knowledge, decides to spin up an SSH server and start listening on port 22. Now you have that port open as a vector for malware to get in, and you are implicitly relying on that software to fend it off. If you instead have a firewall, and port 22 is not one of your allowed ports, the rogue software will hopefully take the hint and not spin up that server.
Generally you only want to open ports for specific processes that you want to transmit or listen on them. Once a port is bound to a process, it’s taken. Malware can’t just latch on without hijacking the program that already has it bound. And if that’s your fear, then you probably have a lot of way scarier theoretical attack vectors to sweat over in addition to this.
Yes, if you just leave a port wide open with nothing bound to it, either via actually having the port reserved or by linking the process to the port with a firewall rule, and you happened to get a piece of actual malware that scanned every port looking for an opening to sneak through, sure, it could. To my understanding, that’s not typically what you’re trying to stop with a firewall.
In some regards a firewall is like a padlock. It keeps out honest criminals. A determined criminal who really wants in will probably circumvent it. But many opportunistic criminals just looking for stuff not nailed down will probably leave it alone. Is the fact that people who know how to pick locks exist an excuse to stop locking things because “it’s all pointless anyway”?
This question reads a bit to me like someone asking, “Why do trapeze artists perform above nets? If they were good at what they did they shouldn’t fall off and need to be caught.”
Do you really need a firewall? Well, are you intimately familiar with every smidgeon of software on your machine, not just userland ones but also system ones, and you understand perfectly under which and only which circumstances any of them open any ports, and have declared that only the specific ports you want open actually are at every moment in time? Yes? You’re that much of a sysadmin god? Then no, I guess you don’t need a firewall.
If instead you happen to be mortal like the rest of us who don’t read and internalize the behaviors of every piddly program that runs or will ever possibly run on our systems, you can always do what we do for every other problem that is too intensive to do manually: script that shit. Tell the computer explicitly which ports it can and cannot open.
Luckily, you don’t even have to start from scratch with a solution like that. There are prefab programs that are ready to do this for you. They’re called firewalls.
imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot
yeah, wow, imagine. different applications using different design patterns for different contexts. perish the thought!
Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
one browser did an arguably useful thing, every other browser agreed it was arguably useful, and it became a widely adopted feature? sounds ok to me. gee, it’s almost like this is how standard patterns come to be, or something…
I downloaded Java, Removed LibreOffice, and installed OpenOffice. I see all the icons, and everything, but when I click on it to open it, NOTHING happens. I just, wont open, I uninstalled, and reinstalled it. and I dont know what to do. Can anyone please help me?
I admire the respect you have for those who ask questions like this, but I think I disagree.
If there is something egregiously wrong with the premise of what a person is seeking to do, and there are no qualifying statements in their query about why they do in fact need to do this specifiic thing in this specific way, chances are high that they are uneducated about why the premise of what they’re trying to do is flawed, and they are best served by being course corrected. Giving them the answer they’re looking for to continue the bad thing while hiding your suggestion of what they should be doing instead in a footnote is just enabling them to double down on the short term path of least resistance that will probably come back to bite them again later.
If they really did know what they were doing with regards to doing an otherwise unsafe and/or unsupported thing, or if the restrictions tied their hands from using the obvious replacement solution, it either should have appeared in their question prompt, or it should be in the first replies to the first round of answers.
I say, withhold outdated advice unless the context of the conversation makes it explicitly clear that the old advice is genuinely required and not substitutable with current advice. But also don’t be smug, rude, dismissive, or standoffish about it. Don’t argue with someone who says they really do need a specific solution.
That said, this only applies in really cut and dry cases like this one, where there very clearly is an indisputable thing you shouldn’t be doing, and a drop-in replacement you should be using. The ones I hate are moreso those you may see on StackOverflow where the question is like, “how do I do <X> in JavaScript?” and five of the seven responses including the accepted answer offer a solution in some big dumb framework or lib that they apparently expect you to just incorporate into your project.
I’m playing with a couple of routers and comparing proprietary to open source on the same hardware. I miss my .bashrc functions and aliases… and compgen, tree, manpages, detailed help, etc; the little things that get annoying when they are missing....
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What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them? (gadgettendency.com)
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
What's your favorite music player on Linux? (lemmy.ml)
Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It’s also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I’m curious what other people are using these days. What’s your favorite player?
Microsoft says a Copilot key is coming to keyboards on Windows PCs starting this month (www.cnbc.com)
18+ [Content Warning: Transphobia] From the very same people who tell us to "boycott Wayland"
Transphobic comments...
Why do you use the terminal?
Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments...
Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?
I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name....
Thoughts on Post-Open Source? (www.theregister.com)
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use....
I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping
I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS....
Loving this AI revolution so far (sh.itjust.works)
Gamedev and linux (treebrary.pone.social)
Source: reddit.com/…/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38…
When do I actually need a firewall?
I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:...
What's up, my fellow trees? (media.kbin.social)
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4 reasons to try Mozilla’s new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives | The Mozilla Blog (blog.mozilla.org)
[QUESTION] I installed Apache OpenOffice
I downloaded Java, Removed LibreOffice, and installed OpenOffice. I see all the icons, and everything, but when I click on it to open it, NOTHING happens. I just, wont open, I uninstalled, and reinstalled it. and I dont know what to do. Can anyone please help me?
Do you mount an embedded Linux file system to the workstation and use your host scripts or do you SSH/SCP and deal with the limited shell commands?
I’m playing with a couple of routers and comparing proprietary to open source on the same hardware. I miss my .bashrc functions and aliases… and compgen, tree, manpages, detailed help, etc; the little things that get annoying when they are missing....