"You need to try Linux"
"You need to try Linux"
Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there's a good argument the author's concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
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Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It's maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
Edit: Opting for Mint.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I'm on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it's common even for 'experienced' folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn't play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it's perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don't give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don't want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how "experienced" I get, that's always going to be the case. Maybe I'm just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I think it's overblown for the most part. Yes, the OS should just work... but it does, for 99% of users, on windows, and linux, and probably macos, which I haven't used so can't speak on.
The ones who blow up their systems are either techies who like futzing with stuff, or are using a 'bad' distro for their needs. If you're switching over granny, you set her up with a long term stable kernel, a vanilla distro, and a browser. The few other stories are when people switch from windows and want something specialized to be the same. Those will need a customized solution, but it's not much different than windows when something breaks. Whoever is playing IT gets to poke at a stupid amount of settings, registry edits, or esoteric drivers/dependencies.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn't seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their "customisation" of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell.
And GCHQ isn't also really trustworthy, with them being part of 5 Eyes
That's part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is... not super appealing. Ubuntu server that's just CLI/headless though, that's pretty tits, imho.
Ubuntu server is okay, but I've come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don't want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it's doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like... competing standards happens. It's part of life and always will be.
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What's garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It's a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop's components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the "USA bad, so product bad" rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
It's not “USA bad, so product bad”, it's the concern that the US government can do a lot more to US based projects and you probably wont know untill it's too late.
That's really not the case, there's no proprietary parts to inject this into, and pop is one of the most heavily watched distros for a reason.
The minimal things they add to their particular distro are essentially just theming, and it'd be really obvious if they injected something malicious into it.
It would also NOT be too late because they're a stable distro and have regular releases, it'd have to be a completely last minute unexpected change for that to be the case.
They can still sanction your country and then you can't get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It's just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
FOSS has no country lines.
Try out CachyOS