Some stuff related to madaidan I wrote and compiled a couple years ago.
i.imgur.com/FiYhbkk.jpg: madaidan being very 4chan-y in terms of blaming the computer language for problems in particular software code (in this case Linux kernel), while dismissing everything when it comes to Windows. His blog page about Linux is a massive piece of “toilet paper” repeatedly debunked at this point. If you think the phrase “toilet paper” is mine, come, have a look.
TL;DR his blog has been dismissed enough at this point to consider it nothing more than digital rag. Security zealots are dangerous to FOSS community, like Brad Spengler/grsecurity, madaidan, GrapheneOS and so on. You can identify them as Big Tech security evangelists trying to shit on FOSS with arguments I would say do not end up being very intelligent and academic, and more reactionary and flakey.
Also a little note on security. You do not need as much security as much as you need privacy, freedom and anonymity. Security is variable, it only buys you the time against attacker, and is the least priority among these 4 things in computing.
I find it to be quite inaccurate depending on who you are. As a beginner, it’s fine, but for me, for example, the distro I’m looking for is Arch-meets-NixOS. All the packages I need, with the packages being easy to install, avoiding compiling wherever possible, NOT immutable, and having a Stable release, with a 6-month release cycle.
You can use the bangs !arch or !aw to search the arch wiki, e.g. !aw kde.
I don’t think dash to dock is a must have extensiom. The workflow of GNOME is different to other opersting systems. That’s why GNOME boots into overview and not the desktop. The overview is there to launch an app or switch to it graphically. When you boot the system the first thing would be to go into overview to launch an app, hence it boots directly into overview. Removing dash from overview defeats the purpose of it.
But “hot bottom” is important otherwise you have to move the mouse into the upper left corner in order to move the mouse to the bottom to launch an app which is nuts.
I don’t like the philosophy of “if they do it, it’s safe”. But I couldn’t explain it in one sentence either. Not only debian but all big distros have systemd. Not having systemd is such a nieche that you shouldn’t bother with it as a beginner.
Snaps. You don’t provide info why snaps are bad. The snap store is centralized and canonical controls every part of it. Moreover, I’ve never read that snaps are reproducible. Flatpaks are technically reproducible. And we all want and need reproducible builds because then we don’t have to trust but know that it’s the original and published source code.
Am I the only person that just uses the Super/Windows key to navigate GNOME. Super to open up the global search and dock, Super again quickly to open up the full app menu, and Super again to go back. Or just press Super and type name of the app you want to run
And again, a distro chooser guide that completely fails to mention OpenSUSE, despite being a full-featured desktop OS supported by the second biggest corporation in the Linux world (behind Red Hat), with a history that goes back longer than Debian’s.
They didn’t include my distro of choice (Gentoo) or my desktop environment (TDE) . . . but I’m not surprised. Lists like this aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and they always reflect the author’s biases and what they’ve been exposed to. Not including someone else’s favourites doesn’t make them bad lists for the purpose they’re intended to serve.
Probably the best way to deal with newbie choice paralysis is a big flowchart, or a questionaire: "Which of these are important to you: ‘just works’ - stability - customizability - organizational transparency - keeping up with the bleeding edge - . . . "
Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.
TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.
For me, the fact that Chris Titus basically said “the opensuse installer is better” is, I think, more praise than OpenSUSE has receive in years , but far less than it deserves. Honestly, the only issue I had with Tumbleweed was the notoriously slow package manager. I think it’s the only package manager slower than dnf, and even installing apps by appending them to configuration.nix (if you so choose) on NixOS felt far faster than using zypper. I really like Yast, though.
Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is “start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later”.
Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.
Then why even mention arch? Especially a guide claiming to be for beginners? Using your own metaphor, that’s like teaching someone to swim by tossing them into a shark infested reef.
Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.
I like that you are nuanced about 99% of the information provided, but you dogmaticaly say that snaps are bad lmao. At least provide an explanation for your opinion. It just looks like you were tired at that point or something.
I am always amused by how "Linux newbie" guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at "well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help".
Look, I'm not particularly new to Linux, but also don't daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I've ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they're trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.
There are daily threads started by new users who say stuff like “I read that systemd is bad, should I switch to [insert systemd-less distro here]” or “My RTX 4080 runs Sim City 2000 at 12 FPS, is Linux trash?”, so there seems to be a need to at least help alleviate the fears of people who read conflicting stuff (or downright flamewars) on the internet and might be overwhelmed by those conflicts.
I'd agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I'm a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it's very directly in their way.
Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn't use to work to work better.
A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.
To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn't try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal...
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I'm trying to provide a perspective on those.
In my opinion one of the full design themes should be picked because some of those single designs look very nice individually but would clash with others.
My pick would be Emiliano’s theme, it looks the most like an evolution of the opensuse style. Imo the others are either a bit too minimalist or deviate too strongly from the original design.
Nikolayan’s design is also good, but I prefer Emiliano’s because that you can recognise the chameleon better in every logo.
It is a friendly recognizable chameleon and they did a good job with integrating the existing abstract logos.
From the Solo designs I loved the ones with the branch with different endings a lot. It had a warm touch to it, but was a little to filigrane for a logo.
I strongly object to this, having used neither on stock GNOME for the majority of my time on Linux. These extensions make GNOME different from intended and not necessarily better, and while beneficial to some are hardly must-haves.
My kids only know Linux and have never seen Windows in their life before. They know their way around KDE just fine and get the stuff done they need. For gaming, it is steam with proton but mostly they game on consoles.
Then you’re on your own. What the duck 🦆 do you expect to happen if you can’t even invest the 10sec to skim over a message (in the few events that there even is one) to see if it affects you and any manual intervention is required.
A fully functional system, just like any other normal OS?
You hit update - boom - you get one, seamlessly, with no breakages and no other user interaction. And that’s how it works pretty much everywhere - except, you know, Arch.
If you’re fine with it - that’s fine, go ahead and tinker all you like. But don’t expect others to have the same priorities.
Man that’s news from 2016, like, it’s a bit rare occasion, y’know. You’re way more likely to get borked by Arch even after reading all the instructions, and it did happen numerous times.
Touching grass is what I do when you take steps to intervene in your system to make an update work.
I see you are an Arch maximalist, but that goes beyond reason. Even Arch proponents are normally not as aggressive on the topic, and admit Arch is too complicated in that regard.
The only problem here is that snapshots (and btrfs for that matter) are not the default behaviour. I would really appreciate Endeavour having this as the default setup. It is very likely what you’d want.
Yes, Garuda does, even with bootable snapshots, but it’s otherwise not as clean as Endeavour. As far as I can tell, mkinitcpio/GRUB2 or their setup thereof causes more problems than it solves. My system was bricked multiple times until I switched to a dracut/systemd-boot setup, which works flawlessly since quite a while.
As for the user experience, there are 0 distros you should perform a (major) upgrade on without taking a snapshot first. I had broken systems after apt upgrade. From my point of view rolling vs versioned release are basically occasional mild vs scheduled huge headaches.
This is pretty useful information as someone that has used Linux off and on (still essentially a beginner). I'd like a bit more elaboration on why it is that Snaps is bad though, as I'm currently using Kubuntu and I haven't found anything seemingly wrong with it on my end.
From what I hear, it just makes things slower, and it’s proprietary. Basically exactly what OP said. It also makes a ton of loop devices, so if you’re working with them yourself it’s kind of annoying.
There isn’t anything wrong. Many of the things that “common crowd wisdom” in the Linux community says are bad are just drama. They get into their own heads about something and lash out at anything that’s different.
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