The point is, I think, if they were to become billionaires (say Bll Gtes leaves it to them in his will), then they wouldn’t be billionaires for long – their moral compasses (given they’ve spent their lives on non-profit causes) dictate that they’d likely put the money into other non-profit ventures.
Thats a fair point, but money changes people. That kind of money is obscene because it effectively puts you above most laws. I, too, would like to believe that the folks on this list would do only good with the money; but the longer the list, the more likely you witness the “Bad Change!” At the end of the day, most folks have families and other concerns outside of their public pursuits. That kind of money, while bringing its own problems, can get rid of just about any “normal people” worries (obviously not something like inoperable cancer)!
Proton or Valve won’t magically make anti-cheat working on Linux. I do most of my gaming now on Linux, but for specific games I still boot into Windows.
I use a tablet for gaming, Linux for almost everything and a windows vm for de-DRM’ing books I boiught so I can read them the way I want. Windows vm is just for when I have no other option.
Serious question. I’m planning on switching from windows to some distro, but it will be the first time I’m daily driving Linux. Are there any solid beginner-friendly resources for getting started? I’m familiar with simple bash commands, but that’s about it
As someone who recently did a switch to get used to Linux, if you’re planning on gaming then Nobara is supposedly the beginner friendly gaming distro. I switched to Nobara and my only issue was screen flickering that I fixed by switching from Wayland to X11 (that was as simple a choosing the other option on the login screen). Everything else just works and KDE looks similar to the windows layout so it doesn’t feel too unintuitive either.
My two gripes that I can’t do anything about are the lack of HDR support (supposedly that’s finally in the works) and no Linux support for some online games (The Finals in my case, but maybe if Linux numbers go up they’ll finally flip the switch), neither could be solved by having a different distro.
If you just want to game and want it up and running without tinkering too much I recommend Nobara.
Raspberry pi os was built for education, it’s a fork of debain and can run on computers that aren’t raspberry pis. They also have a digital bookshelf with many ebooks that can also be downloaded without the OS as they’ve been released as creative commons.
be confused by all the options in the installation process, look up every unknown word, try to do everything manualy, fail
start installation process again, choose all the defaults, works!
trying to install a programm with terminal, fail because not in sudo list, look up how to get into sudo list
update in terminal doesn’t work, have to remove some lines in /etc/apt/sources.list - look up how to use the text editor nano, look many yt-videos about Linux filesystem (what to those folders mean? Everything is a file?)
try to resize a partition (can’t remember which), can’t, because I didn’t choose LVM in installation process - install Debian again, and do all the steps above again
I think I had to reinstall Debian 5 more times after that, just because I didn’t know what I was doing and it was an easy reset for me.
Very frustraiting at times, and a very rewarding feeling when something worked. Made me love tech again, 10/10 would do again.
Also, get the updated kernel out of the backports repo as the main repo is pretty far behind in my opinion. I needed 6.5+ to get the hardware compatibility for some stuff and then I more or less had an out of box experience. I also highly recommend having your /home on a separate partition or drive. This way you can keep your user files if you ever want to change or reinstall the OS.
Don’t feel bad about messing up the install. Everyone fucks it up a few times. The best one I did was forget to make the user account AND did not set a root password. Thou shall not install things at 2am…
But no person on the planet, except the nerdiest of pedants, are thinking of Xerox when they see Windows interface. They think of Windows, even if it’s KDE
The company was run by morons so “Xerox” deserves being synonymous with “company run by morons”. But the actual Xerox employees who invented the basic GUI deserve credit for being the great inventors they were. Unfortunately I have no fucking idea who those actual people were.
You gotta meet the customer halfway until you get enough of them hooked, then slowly start introducing new ideas into their mental ecosystems that align with your vision.
Then add adverts into that ecosystem and center their program menu. Ooh! Then change their right menus! They’d love that! Or, maybe they won’t, but whatever.
I like the terminal but don’t remember all the arguments. I find that clunky. That’s my main issue with it. (I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any)
Lots of terminal commands come with tab-completion out of the box (start typing a command, hit tab to autocomplete, hit tab twice to bring up a list of available options), or have tab completion scripts you can install after the fact.
Lacking tab completion, any worthwhile terminal commands will at least support a -h/–help flag that will print out a help menu summarizing the different options, or you can open up the man pages to see even more detailed documentation with man [whatever terminal command]. If the terminal command doesn’t have either of those, I’d recommend against using it.
I highly recommend zsh. It takes a moment to setup initially, but you can use oh-my-zsh to just skip that part and use one of the many, many presets, and it supports plugins, of which there are many. It gives you tab support for so many popular commands, you will never need to remember them, and it has a lot of small improvements that makes your terminal life a breath. For example, if you do cd tab in bash, it will give you a list of subdirrectories. If you do the same in zsh, it will give you that list and a cursor that you can use to navigate said list, so instead of typing the dir, you can do cd tab tab tab enter
I have very little experience with fish, but by my first experience zsh was way better at handling wildcard matching, and for me it’s half of the stuff I do. You are trying to open a file and all you remember is that it has some substring in the name probably, you just type some of it, double tab, and you have all the files that match. At the time I was trying it, fish couldn’t do it.
I use macOS as my daily driver, though still use Linux sometimes. When I dual-booted macOS with Linux, I immediately fell in love. I don’t have a Mac, but my next computer will be a MacBook. Of course there are things I don’t like, but I will not write it down right now, maybe edit this comment later. I love the virtual desktops tough, I always press the green button on Safari to maximize, and put it on a new desktop, so I can easily switch with a 4-finger swipe, and I don’t have to overlay another window or Safari when I am switching apps.
I’m sure the Gentoo crowd will refute this in a day or two when they’re finished compiling and can read it.
Edit: bro, a 2001 era Thinkpad is going to take like a month to finish building everything. You can probably cross build that system faster on your phone.
Yes it would be faster but it’s my first go at Gentoo for the base install I want to stick to the handbook. As soon as the base install is done I will see how to make my good Debian machine compile the packages for the IBM. Besides, I have time.
How does everyone feel about the “isolation” of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.
I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.
No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows
Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.
Open-minded people can get into linux. You also have to be open-minded to consider being trans. My take is that linux and being trans are not directly influencing each other, but both increase your open-mindedness separately which in turn drives you towards more open topics generally
Trans etc. are always a minority, obviously. They would not have to fight for their rights otherwise.
no one should have to fight for their right, but that doesn’t change the fact that non-trans people enjoy customizing their os as well. so answer to the original question is yes, it is a loud minority.
It’s IT wages and being able to take a break and think about oneself. When Twitter was called Twitter and I’ve been there, the core population of trans, lgbt+, kink, furry, whatever communities were those who could afford a brief moment to think about themselves, these later magnfied other folks who aren’t as well-off. Being gay or trans is natural as our science says, but understanding you are gay or trans means you have enough time, resources, safety to even discover you are one, not to say about presenting as one in public. Tech persons have a natural advantage here over a doordash delivery guy, but as they show it’s possible, many poorer persons show up too. And it’s not a coincidence Lemmy is popular in these communities, as it’s not only a tech-gated space, it’s also a promising safe space where they can be whoever they want without social pressure.
ed: if not for us being that fucked by capitalism, the distribution would be more even
While funny to meme about not really true. IT is made up of all sorts of people. Furries, trans, lgtbq+, tired oarny old men and everything in-between.
There is a disproportionately large number of furries working as network admins though. Whenever you use the internet, there’s a good chance that your data is transiting via a network administered by furries.
it’s just a meme. although there is perhaps a higher percentage of trans people using linux, perhaps due to the correlation with autism or because they’re attracted to less opressive alternative safe spaces in general
(As it turns out, the cause was a previous attempt to get xdg-desktop-portal-termfilechooser to work - I’m just going to sneak this edit in here and go die in a corner or something)
It’s not even that, I wanted to try using Ranger as the file chooser because Dolphin would freeze up if it ended up in a tmpfs mount point… which I can deal with if the only alternative is the default GTK file chooser.
I won free airline tickets once and was shocked and appalled when they said I COULDNT use them to go to the moon. I fought long and hard for the right to use those tickets the way I wanted but alas.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which lets you basically run linux kernel along side the windows kernel which lets you do a lot of cool stuff like containers, linux apps, whole DEs, etc.
It was pretty cool for like 5 minutes until people realized that keeping windows around was kind of pointless and we should just be running pure linux lol.
It’s still a good feature, but it just gives you a direct comparison of linux vs windows which tends to outshine windows.
It was pointless to keep windows at all. Pure linux is much cooler and running it inside windows was pointless. Unlike wine which runs windows programs inside linux which is big deal
What was weird was one of my friends who is “baffled by my choice of Linux” let me know about this subsystem and said “hey, look! There’s no reason to use Linux again!”
What? All I am seeing is stars. That’s how I know you entered your password correctly. Passwords entered via this form input are automatically masked as stars.
I actually did this once. My USB was on /dev/sda instead of sdb and I didn’t bother to check. It took me like 2 days to fix it because you can’t just delete partitions and start over normally, it changes some flags on your drive that you need to manually reset for them to be usable again. Fun times.
I once mistyped and didn’t realize until it was done that I wrote a Fedora ISO to the home partition. I didn’t even realize what I did until everything was done and wiped out.
Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don’t need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
Having run PostmarketOS on an old Samsung Galaxy tablet and now Arch on PineTab 2, Flatpak often works better than the native package manager. Especially with Wayland, many packages just work including touchscreen.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was “oh, you don’t have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?” As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
I’ve seen a trend where people move the goalposts on the reasons they’re not able to switch. “If only this program worked I could switch”, but when that program is ported it’ll be a new excuse next. Sooner or later you’ll have to draw a line and say “99% of my stuff works, the 1% that doesn’t can get bent”.
I had used Linux before so I wasn’t too worried, but gaming for me was the reason. With Proton I had the desire to switch, but I needed something to just push me over the edge. I wasn’t taking the leap on my own. For one Windows update it put the search bar back on the Taskbar, which I had told it to remove. Microsoft, once again, ignoring what I had told it before to try to force me to use something is the thing that pushed me over. It’s such a small thing, but it’ll be different for everyone.
I don’t blame anyone for not switching. It’s a fairly large change (though not as large as some imagine). Most people will just stick with what they know until something comes along that makes them trip up, and then the thing they know is seen as a hindrance. That’s going to be different for everyone. We just need to inform people that, when that thing comes, there is an option for them that will handle pretty much whatever they need.
I switched to Ubuntu a few months ago and the only thing that doesn’t work are a few online games due to anti-cheat software and those games I’ll just play on PS5 now. I don’t see myself ever going back at this point. Every issue I have encountered I’ve been able to resolve with a quick google search. Google search has been getting kinda shitty so that’s the next thing I’m looking to replace.
If you’re willing to pay for a search engine, I highly recommend Kagi. I’ve been using it for a few months and I like the results better than Google or any other search engine I’ve tried.
And the reason is going to be “enterprise” software, which is usually a pile of a flaming wreck that barely runs in its native Windows environment in the first place. So it is with the point of sale/inventory software I have to use for work. I can run it in a VM, but it explodes spectacularly in Wine.
Moving goalposts is a concept that applies to debates. Choosing an operating system shouldn’t be a debate. It’s a personal choice, or sometimes a professional choice. Convincing people who don’t want to be convinced shouldn’t be anyone’s goal.
I didn’t mean my post to be read as trying to convince someone to use Linux, but as someone trying to convince themselves to use Linux. It’s fairly common that people want to switch but have convinced themselves that unless they have their exact same workflow from Windows they won’t be able to.
M$ has been the dominant OS for the majority of a lot of peoples lives, accordingly a massive, massive ecosystem has grown up around it.
My IT career has taken me some weird and wonderful places, and there is a lot of extremely specialised software that will only run on windows, and wine unfortunately still has a bit of a stigma with its interoperability. When you’re running shit a business literally relies on to exist, you don’t play games with it.
Fortunately m$ are shooting themselves in the face, which is driving a lot of vendors to rethink their software., but it’s still a slog.
It’s scary. Straight up. You don’t know if changing it will put you into a situation where there is no one there to help. All your information is on these machines and Windows for all it’s faults is a bought product with customer service.
Making a change without a safety net or someone to walk you through it is ballsy. Research is important and no offense, hard to find for Linux. Sure there are many “how to” videos and scenarios. But what if I play a game and I cannot absolutely live without it. And all of its plugins?
Not unless you’re a business customer lol, don’t get me wrong they do support but the quality really isn’t much above a community Linux forum (at least where I live). Not that the average Joe knows that so the claim is still a valid reason why people don’t switch.
I went to MS forums for remembering how to write “sfc /scannow”, “Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth”, because it was often the first answer on a post. How-To’s concerning “bootrec” and “diskpart” were always to be found somewhere else. At least with sfc and dism it was always pray and hope it does something useful under the hood.
With an unbootable Linux partition (which seldomly happens) I mount it, chroot it and then have a plethora of fixes I can try, tools I can use and logfiles I can check instead of putting my self in the hands of 2-3 blackbox-apps. Manual fixing under Windows is possible but nobody can tell me it’s feasible with the repair console.
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