Too a certain point. I’ll give you that this applies to the Debian and Ubuntu distro. Gentoo, on the other hand, is a completely different animal and will have a far greater impact on user experience than the DE.
You look at your DE all day and your distro holds everything together. Op didn’t say distro is unimportant and I agree it makes sense for new users to look at images and videos of different desktops first, maybe try a live cd, and then choosing the backend that suits their willingness to interact with.
If your electricity and time are cheap, you want to learn and your pc-system is your playground not a productivity tool, Gentoo is a valid option. In this case, your choice of DE impacts your compile time massively and knowing alternatives beforehand gives you options.
Sway is basically the wayland version of i3. I’ve switched to wayland on my new laptop and learning sway after using i3 for years has been relatively easy.
Yeah, the config syntax is exactly the same. The major difference is the wayland version of various programs can be hard to figure out with out some decent google-fu.
I’m on BSPWM on X11, but have been trying river wm and that is a much less friendly conversion than i3 to sway. I’d convert entirely were it not for certain applications still not quite working on wayland without considerable configuration (wacom tablet drivers don’t work, screenshottung and eyedropper tools are available but still need more work to be feature comparable with equivalent tools on X11).
And I’m using proprietary NVIDIA drivers which are currently stuttering real bad on the wlroots protocol since driver update to 545 (sway/river both stutter bad whenever lots of movement on the screen, I’ve tried many tweaks to my environment variables to no avail).
So…just gonna wait for app, wayland, nvidia devs to eventually make the migrate worth while.
I’m still not fully across Linux because my job requires me to use Windows everyday. That said I’ve been using Pop_OS! On my personal machine for over two years now and its been flawless, requires little upkeep and minimal use of the terminal, the times I’ve needed to install stuff using the terminal has also been flawless which gives me extra confidence.
Whatever gives the least complicated experience and just works with little extra work is what will win out in the end for the day to day user. People generally just want to get on their machine, use the programs they want and not be interrupted by anything else from the computer, barring updates, we have all come to understand the importance of updates as routine maintenance.
Meh, I feel that the only important choice is the type of distro; source, rolling, stable, immutable, reproducible, etc. as that’d impact difficulty to some degree.
Beyond that, it’s not a big deal. Newbies will just pick the DE their most comfortable with. The popular DEs don’t really have difficulties, just differences.
Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.
My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can’t deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are…cough more lenient with their permissions.
There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can’t accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.
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.
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