Real talk, Pop_OS! is just nice. Besides Blackbox and like 3 Gnome Extensions I hadn’t had to change or add anything. It’s a great experience and I recommend it to everyone.
I tried it. Had a bunch of issues with it, like freezes, forcing me to manually reboot. Then I tried Fedora. It’s been great. Still using Fedora. Don’t like the opt-out (rather than opt-in) telemetry they’re planning to add though, but honestly not enough to make me switch
I’ve been using nobara, it’s fedora based and has made me swith from windows to it full-time. I’ve had zero issues with it. You may want to check it out?
(Also iirc it’s made by Glorious Eggroll, the guy who made GE-Proton)
Most people will install Windows 11, complain about it, complain about the lack of Windows alternatives, then get offended and spam downvote anyone who mentions an alternative.
I’m trying to learn Linux, got Cinnamon to dip my toes into, and love it.
And being someone who is computer literate, finding a distro that was similar to windows to learn with was a pain. With all the infighting and superiority complexs on forums, the absolute number of variations of distros, combined with the avalanche of information you need to digest just to get a basic understanding…
Yeah, I get why people will stick to Windows and ignore free/better alternatives, all while complaining. It’s just not worth it to a vast majority of users.
Yeah…this is going to be a super unpopular opinion, but there needs to be a designated distro for new users who aren’t sure what to go with. If someone asks “What distro should I-” the rest doesn’t matter. We just agree on one distro and that’s it. Once they have a reason to look for another distro, they’ll have the knowledge to find it themselves.
To me? I use a laptop and don’t really tinker with my hardware at all, the benefits for me is I get the latest-ish versions of software (including user applications), and there isn’t this big jump between new versions
that 'designated distro' for newcomers used to be ubuntu. probably still is. as much as i'd want to say mint or some other variant of ubuntu or debian that i happen to like.. 'one man shows' and distros with very small teams aren't what a new user should be going with. there's a reason why so many base off ubuntu. it's big. it's solid. and it just works.
Most people will buy a computer, that computer will have Windows 11 on it, they’ll start using that computer and the pre-installed OS that came with it, and maybe, occasionally, they will complain that “this is different now” and that “they always change things, it’s so annoying” and that will be the end of it.
If you’re talking about people who install or even just upgrade the OS on their computer by themselves, are aware of such a concept as “alternative operating systems,” engage in any kind of conversation about operating systems on social media, and then care enough about the topic to downvote people who disagree with them on purely ideological grounds, you’re already talking about a tiny, tiny minority of computer users.
As tech illiterate as people are they also love complaining. Mostly complaining that Microsoft has a monopoly over computing. They generally don’t know what an OS is as you said but will still complain. Of course since they don’t know much telling them anything will get them offended as they feel that their intelligence was questioned.
FOSS software demonstrates that one of the suppositions of capitalism - that innovation is primarily driven by profit motive - is incorrect. Humans want to help each other. People want to improve the world even if they’re not paid for it.
I’ve always been drawn to FOSS alternatives because they aren’t driven to try to create value by having unnecessary bells and whistles, they just work and continue to work as the years go by
Look, honestly, to me at least, this horse has been dead for a 1000 years and we’ve been beating it since then. Initially I was as well, “haha funny, what is vim, so hard” and then I happened to interact with it for the first time, did a web search and all the amusement died. If it’s like this we should make fun of Ctrl+C as well because “Omg, so hard to terminate a terminal program, there is no X to click on” just because this is non standard for a user that is familiar with only the GUI. We could abstract and transform this meme 1000 times because there will always be somebody who knows how to do something and then there is something else that doesn’t work the way he/she/they/etc. are used to and searching for an answer is too hard.
Or am I just dumb, ranting about something that doesn’t even matter because in the end there will always be new people, for which vim is new and hard and vim maybe is the most popular thing most of the new users on here have a hard time understanding. Will this meme ever evolve into something else at one point? Was there a precursor to this meme before vim or vi existed? What are other similar memes that I reacted to the same way because I find myself in a similar spot as most people find themselves with vim and I am just a hypocrite?
TL;DR: Just disregard my useless comment, enjoy the things you want to enjoy, and be happy, you only get one life, don’t waste it getting mad at useless shit.
Now if we’re talking about vi, that’s a whole other thing. First time on a system and the git editor was set to vi, and I was like oh I know exactly how to get out of this because I know vim a bit, turns out I was wrong. It did legitimately throw me for a loop haha
I think it’s just a memorable shared experience that a big portion of Linux users had at one point. That kind of thing is prime meme fuel. And sure, there is always a fresh supply of people who ran into it recently.
For me, I’ve been familiar with *nix for decades, but I’ve only been a daily Linux user for about a year. I remember using emacs back in my Unix days, so the sudden unexpected learning curve of vim commands is fairly recent to me. I’ve already seen like 50 variations of this meme since joining the “lol exiting vim” club, but they still amuse me.
I think whoever recieved this would be completely fine to report Linus to HR or something. The fact somebody thought to circulate it is suggestive that it crossed a line. I do appreciate he does seem to really care about the kernel. He could maybe tone down the hysterics a little.
I think if there’s a lesson here its “Never hit send while you’re angry” always wait until your hormones to subside before sending an email because emails are records and people don’t have good judgement while angry, so an email sent in anger is just a record of your poor judgement.
Does the Linux Foundation even have HR? Even if they did, does an employee of a separate company even have the ability to make a complaint about Linus with them?
For the first part, no clue, but for the second, absolutely
Just because you work for someone else doesn’t give them the right to treat you badly and that sort of behavior can and should be reported to a person’s employer.
I think whoever recieved this would be completely fine to report Linus to HR or something.
As unnecessary as the tone was, if your first reaction to such a form of address is to run to HR, you’re contributing to a toxic workplace. The first and foremost way to address etiquette problems (I am not including criminal behavior in this) is to talk directly to the person who offended you. Everyone has a bad day once in a while, and some people may even shout. If the first reaction is to get them into legal trouble with the employer, most people will rightfully avoid you like you just stepped into dogshit.
If this kind of behavior - despite having addressed it face to face - keeps occurring, that’s a different issue, then HR may be necessary.
An individual misbehaving does not constitute a toxic workplace. If you can’t tell people that you think their tone is inappropriate, then take it to your manager, but going straight to HR is about the dumbest way to deal with this. Some people don’t even realize they overstepped but might be able to empathize once informed.
Oh yeah, when your boss has anger issues and curses you in email, you really want to politely talk to him and ask him to stop. That will show them that you’re a little spineless sucker and can be shat on indefinitely.
Yes, even to your boss you can say that you feel something could have been communicated in a more friendly way. “Anger issues” implies the repeated occurrence for which I already stated before that is a different situation.
The term is “hostile work environment”. HR doesn’t just respond because of strict liability. Just one occurance of something like this can lead to an otherwise solid worker to spiral from discomfort of the situation, both feeling like a prisoner at their job and producing far less value for their employers.
The latter is why HR cares, but the former is why it’s OKay to go straight to HR. If HR is well-trained, things like this shouldn’t escalate just because you went to HR. They should be able to diffuse it productively.
You have obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario. Going straight to HR for someone being verbally(!) out of line, without even using insults, means you are the bigger problem.
Actually, I’ve watched two GREAT workers and good people end up losing their jobs because a easily resolved situation turned toxic. The person who felt uncomfortable tried to take care of it 1-on-1 but had too passive aggressive a nature to really be clear when she confronted the guy.
So 6 months or a year later, she was on the verge of quitting and went to HR. He was terminated because it had gone too far. She left soon after because she still wasn’t comfortable at work after the cause of that ended.
…look. I “obviously never dealt” with anything because nobody is allowed differing opinions here, but I have 20+ years experience at businesses where the existence or lack of good HR has been a deciding factor of the work-culture and comfort level of team members. I work 1-on-1 with my company’s Directors of HR on a regular basis to make sure my team is happy and because I am involved with other teams at my job who have their own interpersonal conflicts. One of HR’s responsibilities in a good company is to involve themselves in interpersonal conflicts BEFORE decisive action has to be taken.
The problem is that face-to-face confrontations without a mediator don’t always end well. And I would rather not have HR decide “we have to fire our Rockstar senior dev or this random guy”. But if you address it earlier, HR deals with it earlier (yes, because the paper trail m eans HR can’t just fire “this random guy” later over the Rockstar senior dev). It’s win-win for all parties INCLUDING the Linus Torvalds in this explanation.
But I’ve “obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario” and my experience doesn’t count. So you can ignore everything I said.
You are under the very relevant misassumption that HR is less likely to be handling a situation inappropriately than two people speaking with each other directly. I stand by my original comment. A simple verbal overstep, on the first occurrence, should definitely be addressed without involving HR
Hard disagree. This letter is what happens when direct communications have failed.
Realistically, somebody near Linus probably told him to chill out and that he’s damaging his own reputation and his project’s by sending out this temper tantrum bullshit. In no world would the target of this letter be the person who successfully sits him down and lectures him on not being an asshole.
But honestly if he had a habit of sending out this kind of stuff it would be a liability/legal problem.
This is far from the first (or last) time he wrote something like this. This was just a regular thing in the kernel world for a long time (until Linus matured a little).
Whether or not it was a good thing is up for debate I think. Yeah, it’s very rude and unprofessional (and discourages new contributors who don’t want to risk getting chewed out), but considering the importance of the Linux kernel, it’s good to know the lead maintainer is doing too much of the right thing than not enough (i.e. being lax with bad code in order to be respectful). I’m fine knowing that a few tech workers got their egos smashed if it gives me confidence that the code powering civilization is high quality.
Unix was meant to be much friendlier than the mainframe systems that wer prevalent at the time and which wer horrible to use without a lot of training (or even with it). By contrast, Unix commands were simple, self documenting. Anyone could use it.
Installed it on a thin client instead of win10 iot for the same reason, basic functionality all there, being used as a media streaming browser machine, no regrets.
Had previous experience with fedora and others many years prior, definitely can tell how far it all progressed since
I installed Mint for the sake of trying it and I quite liked Cinnamon, but after that I did some distro and desktop hopping, I will not go back until it has proper Wayland support.
I’ve been using Linux in different capacities since the late 90s. I use Mint with Cinnamon because it’s stable, does all I need and I don’t need to fuss with it. You’re more than fine.
It works great until you try to use Bluetooth anything and need to connect and disconnect regularly (it can literally freeze your entire system), and don’t get me started with trying to get digital surround to work
There’s this one Bluetooth speaker with a microphone that I have, that I had hoped to use for calls, that has just refused to work. Spent hours trying to get them to work but had to admit defeat. But yes, things have improved significantly.
You don’t have to do this, I manage some machines that haven’t been reinstalled for over a decade. It’s really just because “it feels cleaner”, I guess.
I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.
Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.
I have 3 clones of my 10yo Manjaro desktop install running on other hardware around my network, including a Proxmox VM. It just jumps across, fires up and I fix the hostname, good to go.
Cloning a base image and creating VMs from it is one of the coolest things. I do it for my VMs on my Proxmox cluster any time i need a new server for something - and yeah just copying my dev desktop to my new laptop for going to a conference was such a great way to avoid hours of setup
It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything… at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I’ve used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.
PS: now that I think about it I’ve never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling… call me crazy?
I reinstall about every 6 months, or whenever there is a big feature update. It’s rather noticeable when running benchmarks that performance drops over time mostly 0.1% lows.
Especially when running a stripped install, Microsoft somehow always finds a way to enable shit again or reinstall bloat with updates.
This, plus I’ve found corruption to be a way bigger issue on Windows. I had been using a Win10 install for about 5 years and eventually it just stopped booting and I had to reformat. Maybe it was my SSD, but I’ve been running Linux on that same SSD ever since then with 0 issues.
Realistically you don’t have to if you’re not constantly tinkering, but if you’re changing a lot of low-level stuff without knowing what you’re doing, you have the ability to break things. If you don’t know how to fix them, then it’s easier to just reformat. Basically it’s a skill issue lol.
I’ve broke things often and had to reinstall a lot because I didn’t know what I was doing. Still kinda don’t know, but do y’all recommend anyways to learn the knowledge?
Like I could probably read through man pages but I want something that shows how everything builds on each other to fill any gaps I’m missing
Depends on what you’re breaking I guess. If it’s DE stuff, kernel stuff, etc. Usually I just find a good YouTube tutorial if I want to learn something new and don’t know what I’m doing.
The Arch Linux Wiki is an incredible resource, even if you’re running another distro. Most of it is pretty universal (other than specific commands like the package manager), and it explains how everything functions and fits together. If I’m troubleshooting, it’s always my first stop.
I would recommend reading the manuals yes. Their are many manuals and not all are equal. The man pages can feel a bit strange as they list everything the software can do. To learn I found the archwiki to be better. (Also info manuals but many people are weirded out by the controls used to read these.)
Also don’t blame yourself for reinstalling if you mess up. It’s normal especially if you need the computer to actually work in a timely fashion
Just keep breaking stuff! It means your learning and trying new things, for the most part. Eventually you’ll just break stuff less and less or know what to look for when something breaks. On that note do try to struggle with something a little bit before rolling back or reinstalling.
Yep tinkering with the system is probably the main issue (for that NixOS is awesome btw.). But even when you’re not constantly tinkering. System-State accumulates over time, bugs are also apparent in (upgrading of) distros, and the maintainers of a distro cannot realistically handle every upgrade time-point x -> y, so stuff will likely break after some time.
But even when I have fixed all the issues in my previous at some time broken distros, at some point it just feels good to have a freshly installed system without all that dirty accumulated state (NixOS + impermanence and you’ll have that every reboot :P, see also this)
Aktually, I prefer Arch + KDE. I say if you like your current desktop, then stay with it. I’ve hit the sweet spot with what I’ve got because I love the AUR, pacman, and paru.
A little story about windows. I know it’s partially my fault but Microsoft just hates it users.
So I was running dual boot an messed up the boot loader. A quick fix and I was back to Linux.
When I wanted to boot windows the bootloader was damaged and I couldn’t fix it with windows repair tools.
So I thought: ok just install the snapshot windows found. Worst case they delete windows right?
Well it told that it will reformat the boot partition and no more info. It took a suspicious amount of time and when I booted it I was in windows and all ALL of my connected drives where formatted. No question asked just wiped the whole system!
This is one of the reasons why my Windows bootloader is currently broken. I made a similar mistake a few years ago, and now I don’t have the mental energy to make sure that everything’s ready in case Windows screws up again
Whenever i need to use windows, i leave it on a separate drive, and then just point a rEFInd entry to it. It really frustrates me, that Windows just expects full advocacy over your hardware, and performs changes like this without any warning
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