Can somebody ELI5 what the difference between Linux distros is? I’m ashamed to admit I don’t truly understand, aside from different package managers and DEs but even then there are only a handful of those.
Yes but they use different repositories with different maintainers. Think of a package manager like steam, epic, etc, except instead of games it’s everything. Some package managers get different applications, some have different versions of the same applications. In the case of Debian/Ubuntu it’s more like steam in China vs steam in the rest of the world. Same steam, different games, different maintainers of who decides what games get to go in which steam.
Generally end-user applications like Firefox would be the latest/same version, but system libraries might be a few versions different. Generally security patches are written for a few major versions of libraries/daemons at the same time. So features might be different but it’s all the same security for the most part.
That’s the major draw between one distro to another, they will have different philosophies on what to include, and what major version to use. Debian for example is much more reluctant to upgrade something unless there’s a large demand for a new feature. The theory is it is more stable and consistent to use that way.
Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern, expecting users to learn new things more often because they think the new features are worth it and they want to support all the things.
Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern
You can use the “testing” release of Debian if you want newer stuff. It’s still more stable than rolling distros. Packages have to be in the “unstable” release for 10 days with no major bugs to get promoted to testing.
It can sort of depend on the distro, there are a lot of Debian-based ones such as Debian (obviously), Kali, Ubuntu, and then ones based on Ubuntu like Mint and Pop!OS, those all largely work the same under the hood, ie you’d use .deb files and something like sudo apt-get install to install something.
Then there are Arch-based ones like Arch and Manjaro, which are a bit more different, you’d use pacman or yay or paru to install things instead, and they have things like the AUR, which is a big user-maintained repository or software that has just about everything on it.
Then you have the Fedora based ones and SUSE based ones, which are different again in other ways. And some more unique and weirder ones like NixOS which is having a bit of a moment, whereby you sort of configure the entire system in one single config file and rebuild it each time (as I understand it, that might be a bit off 'cause I’m still learning.)
So yeah it sort of depends. And then you have desktop environments like GNOME and KDE which aren’t distros, but do affect how the whole system looks (and functions, to an extent.) And these are largely agnostic of the underlying distro, so you could have say a machine running Debian with GNOME next to a machine running NixOS with GNOME which would look very similar from the desktop but would be hugely different under the hood, and two machines running Arch, one with GNOME and one with KDE which would look totally different but be functionally the same.
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.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.
I agree with you. There was a big outcry when they changed it, granted this was quite some time ago and the young ones here may not remember, but it’s still a break from the way everything else works.
But as usual, broken stuff becomes the new normal after a while.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)?
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have a source for this? I got this same behaviour on Epiphany, Chrome, and Chromium, so it’s not just Firefox. Is there any web-browser that handles this the “correct” way?
I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.
I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)
Vivaldi does that crap too. I’m used to clicking the bar, and selecting from there. Vivaldi fucks it up by suddenly showing the “https://” part and shifting everything else to the right. So fucking annoying.
I found it annoying when FF no longer showed the http part of an address, but since nearly everything is on https these days it very rarely bounces back and forth for me any more.
Every browser I tried does that. They’d be inconsistent if adopting a different behavior.
Idk about others, but most times I click the address bar I want to either copy the address, change it entirely, or search for something. Selecting the entire text just makes sense, especially on mobile where selecting things sucks.
They all do it NOW. They did not always do it this way. Firefox is what I’ve always used, so I know they used to let the desktop handle how clicks were managed. Literally anything else on my desktop, if I click once it simply places the cursor where I clicked. And since I need to copy partial URLs multiple times a day, this change is something that constantly aggravates me. Now I have to click the address bar four times quickly in order for it to finally place the cursor where I’m clicking at. It’s not nitpicking if they intentionally changed an operation to no longer follow the rules of everything else on the desktop. Being inconsistent is not user-friendly.
If you hold down the mouse button while hovering over the address bar, that starts selecting stuff. Is there a reason your usecase isn’t covered by this?
Well, if they did it as you want it, a bunch of other people would complain they’re inconsistent because they’re the only browser that does that (today).
And what’s “everything else on the desktop”? I’m struggling to find more examples other than browsers and file managers. And a few popular file managers don’t even have editable text path inputs enabled by default, so you can’t even say this is a “rule”.
Open any document. Single click somewhere within that document. What do you expect to happen? Do you expect your cursor to be placed where you clicked, or do you expect the entire line to be highlighted? My guess is that you expect consistency in every application doing the same thing for a single click.
Just because one browser decided to change how they react, and everybody else copied that behavior, does not mean it is the correct or expected behavior. You’ve just gotten used to the difference that was forced on you, but imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot? What happens when they also start modifying the results of a right-click into something unexpected like clearing your cookies? Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
The problem is you’re expecting consistency between elements that should not have consistent behavior for having completely different functions.
A line of text in a PDF, in a WYSIWYG editor, text in UI labels, and text in an address bar all have different roles and should be expected to behave differently, idk why you’re surprised for this “inconsistency”.
A single line text field in any interface doesn’t behave the same way as the single line text field in the address bar. It certainly does break conventions.
Maybe because it WAS consistent until the FF devs made the choice to change it? As I said before, if they decided to change the role of the right-click to no longer bring up a context menu, would you be ok with that as well? What about the difference between clicking on text in a browser article or clicking into a textarea? Those also have different roles, so if the devs decide that a user single-clicking into the textarea should automatically select the entire field, would that make sense to you? If I click on any text anywhere in any application, I expect to get the same results, and not have to remember how every application handles that click differently. Sure if I was clicking on something other than text then different actions might make sense in different applications, but the idea of a single click on the address bar selecting everything is akin to clicking an icon on my desktop and having all the surrounding icons also getting selected – it just doesn’t make sense and it’s not consistent with a single click in any other application.
So it’s ok that it works for your use-case and screw consistency? My point is that if you say it’s ok for one application to do things their own way, it basically invites every other app developer to ignore the standards and just do whatever they want. And no, single-click selecting the entire URL shouldn’t be considered a standard, it’s just something that changed in the last few years when one browser made the call and everyone else played follow-the-leader.
By the way, you mentioned that “all” of your browsers behave the same way . I’d like to remind you that Chrome, Chromium, and Safari all use the same engine so they’re basically the same thing. I think Opera stands alone but I don’t have that installed here so I can’t check it immediately. I’d ask if anyone had checked Exploder, but who in their right mind uses that except for work-related stuff where their developers can’t write HTML, and Microsoft is probably the ones who started this mess anything since they’re well know for ignoring standards. That really only leaves four unique browsers though. Not saying you didn’t consider this already, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn’t.
If you want an example similar to an address bar, how about the current path in any file manager – I have Caja, Dolphin, and something called PCManFM here (not sure where that came from)? Once again, a single click does not select the entire path, it just places the cursor exactly where you clicked and nothing is selected. I can’t think of any other types of applications where you have some kind of a navigation bar, but that’s the closest example I know.
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…
Honestly. I don’t think you’re missing much. It’s not like if you go to a different distro suddenly you’re going to have all these new applications you can’t get on mint or anything.
I started with mint and played around with other distros (mostly Debian/Ubuntu & Arch based ones) and I ended up settling on an Ubuntu based distro with kde desktop.
Using something like Arch might make sense if your PC is super new as they tend to have support for the newest hardware.
At most you might want to try a different desktop environment but if you have no reason to hop I would say don’t waste your time unless you’re bored and want to experiment just for the hell of it.
there’s a site that will let you play around with different distros/desktop environments over the Web (it’s going to be slow and you can’t use a VPN when connecting) but that might be a good choice before going through the trouble of downloading a distro, flashing to USB and possibly installing it on your PC/laptop just to find out you hate it.
Btw I’d still use mint…I only switched away because I wasn’t a big fan of how much it looked like windows and how green everything was. Lol. But I was still a noob at the time and hadn’t fully comprehended how customizable Linux distros are. I could’ve changed a lot with the appearance if I knew what I was doing
When I started using Linux I distro hopped a few times before finding mint, now I have been stuck on mint for a few years, but I still dream of hopping again.
When I was hopping I was in high school, so I had time, now I got to work and hopping takes too much time and effort to set everything up again. If I had a second pc or a laptop I would do it.
now I got to work and hopping takes too much time and effort to set everything up again.
This is the same reason I haven’t switched to Linux again even though I want to. Limited free time.
I also switched to playing games on a console for the same reason. I don’t have to worry about system specs or driver issues or anything like that… I can just launch the game and play it.
I would say plasma, Gnome has too many stupid issues for it to be a real contender IMO. I constantly found gnome to be laggy on my chuwi, even to the point that it would occasionally drop inputs.
Performance of gnome isn’t great I often find it laggy on my lower end devices.
Configuring gnome requires two separate GUI apps, and then you still may need cli.
Gnome apps like nautilus, the file browser are also absurdly slow, sometimes taking more then 4 seconds for me (and others see here medium.com/…/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e3010…) to load thumbnails.
I found gestures to be inconsistent on my Chuwi hi10x too. They often times wouldn’t work and I would need to try multiple times.
I did have other issues, but I didn’t exactly log them.
GNOME is built for touch. if I rotate my HP laptop 90 degrees sideways, GNOME automatically rotates the screen to suit. Its why latest gnome has so many multifinger touch gestures for interacting with screen
usually when I have problems with YubiKey being detected it is because the pcscd service has not been started, or I forgot to enable it so it would start automatically on boot.
yubikey works on every linux distro I have tried, and even on freebsd. Some people say it “works out of the box” but that part is not true on every distro. Every distro will recognize the device when it is plugged in, but not every distro will all 2FA actions out of the box, and almost no distro comes with the management tools.
On linux (and BSD) you can install a CCID tool to get the 2FA, which installs software that needs to be running (you can use the yubikey as a keyboard approach if you really need it) On Linux you can install a manager tool like ykman is easy, if you want to manage the tooling on your card On Linux you can setup PAM (authentication) so that yubikey can be used for logins, sudo auth etc On Linux you can use yubikey to do advanced things like manage the encryption keys for encrypted disks
I appreciate the detailed response. I looked at the Arch wiki page and ensured that I have all packages listed. Still, the output of ykman info is “Error: No YubiKey detected!” :P
I do not get any messages. I’m starting to think there is an issue with my motherboard’s USB-C port. If I can get my hands on a USB-C to USB-A adapter, I can test this theory…
Go with EndeavourOS. It won’t “just work”, but it will be the best compromise between confusing abstraction and low level frustrations.
Fedora is good but it abstracts a little too much away, this is great when you understand how software works, but it’s very confusing when you’re new to Linux and programming.
Arch is good, but you won’t be able to hid the ground running, you’d have to sacrifice a weekend to learn.
Go:
[Optional] Fedora
Endeavour
Arch
Learning
Ghost BSD
Void
Gentoo
Tinkering with those in that order, after about 6 months, you’ll start to feel at home.
In my experience, any HDMI’s or Display Ports plugged into my GPU have terrible performance on Wayland while working perfectly on X11, so it seems there are still problems. Though tbf X11 doesn’t work at all with HDMI’s plugged into my motherboard so it could be a hardware issue? I have a 11 year old motherboard so idk.
If you’re mixing a dedicated GPU and onboard graphics you need to set the dedicated GPU as primary somewhere, otherwise all screens get rendered on the onboard and “reverse PRIME’d” to the dedi GPU outputs.
I’ll see if I can find the snippet that fixed this for me.
All these people saying “Just use LibreOffice” are missing the point: if they ask about a program, then that means they have a usecase for said program.
This isn’t StackExchange; let’s not repeat that cycle.
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.
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 …
You are probably right about this. Still, as I said to another user, I just feel it’s a bit of a slippery slope from a stance of concern to full-blown-StackOverflow-ignoring-the-question.
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 can agree with this.
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 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.
Fair enough.
Truth be told, I work in customer service, and have very little tolerance for bullshit, so I’m genuinely surprised to find myself as patient and giving-the-benefit-of-the-doubt as I am being. I guess this thread just reminded me a bit too much of the days of 2015. Lol.
Edit: Shit. Forgot to add the > at the quote at the top. My bad.
You’re not wrong, and I’m upvoting everything you say because I hate the smug SO people who ask why instead of actually trying to help.
But in this specific case, there’s literally no reason to use OpenOffice, it’s discontinued. People shouldn’t have to explain how to use a defunct software with an addendum.
It’s not an obscure programming language with an edge case, it’s a word processor.
You’re not wrong, and I’m upvoting everything you say because I hate the smug SO people who ask why instead of actually trying to help.
Yeah, I hate those people too. I appreciate the support.
But in this specific case, there’s literally no reason to use OpenOffice, it’s discontinued. People shouldn’t have to explain how to use a defunct software with an addendum.
It’s not an obscure programming language with an edge case, it’s a word processor.
I can see where you’re coming from. Still, I personally try to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume until demonstrated otherwise that they have considered alternatives and decided their current program is best for their particular usecase.
Is it naïve? Possibly. I fully admit that possibility.
Eh, I can see where you’re coming from, certainly, but I feel it’s a slippery slope from this stance to full-blown StackOverflow levels of ignoring-the-question.
Foxit still provides a free version that’s linux compatible. Its been a lifesaver at work to do document signing without messing everything up. It may take a little tweaking to run, but it’s worth a try for forms.
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