I used to say, if you are not a “computer person” at all, just pick Ubuntu. If you are a bit more demanding and don’t mentally freeze up in front of computers, yet still want a fairly normal and hassle-free experience, choose Fedora.
These days, I’m not so sure about Ubuntu anymore. They have been disappointing in the recent past.
Maybe I should give Linux Mint a try one of these days.
I’ve always preferred KDE, I tried mint and pop at one point, but wasn’t a fan of either cinnamon or cosmic. After that I ran through a bunch of KDE based distros and landed on Fedora as the one that had plasma 6, wayland, and worked well with my hardware. It’s been about 6 months now and aside from small hiccups it has worked well for me.
Kubuntu was an absolute disappointment, I agree that Canonical has lost the plot.
or cosmic
Isn’t cosmic still in beta and still lacking important features?
deleted by creator
Debian Edition, right?
…right? …
As the comic says, it depends. I was going to do DE or MATE for my old hardware, but figured out Cinnamon would run fine. But I knew better than to try Ubuntu. I use it on my main PC that can handle it, but older stuff, no way, it’s got too much going on.
Literally Russian roulette. Every choice is fine except one.
[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf --no-preserve-root / || echo *Click*(Do not run this unless you know exactly what it does!)
(Do not run this unless you know exactly what it does!)
And then, you probably don’t want to run it.
Some of us have several useless play VMs at any point.
And if you didn’t make sure you’re in the right one, you’re going to learn something.
Is that a russian roulette bash command that has a chance of wiping your whole drive?
Yes. And if it doesn’t, it just prints out “click”.
Fuckin A
The mistake here is not just picking. This is why most people who make the switch just go for the big one. lemmy.world, piefed.social, mastodon.social.
You’re gonna have to pick. Pick a username, pick a password, pick a browser, pick between fuckin Amazon or Alibaba, idk. Using windows is also a choice. But yeah I say just use mint and move on to the next one :)
Unfortunately this is not how the fediverse should work either. It’s not supposed to be “all in one” like everyone expects now. The reason google does so well is they infiltrate everything so Normie Joe only remembers their gmail login and can login to everything. This is dangerous, and we know why, but the convenience outweighs everything to Joe.
Unlike lemmy.world, ubuntu isn’t sending propaganda email to explain how Israel isn’t actually doing genocide
say what
Source?
i’ve never gotten propaganda email from lemmy. or maybe i need to check my spam filters whats this now?
Ai slop.
Is it?
Just choose anything. But really, you will be disappointed unless you use KDE on NixOS
Spoiled for choice is a good thing, and it’s one reason why Linux is great. I think the community could do better at two things in this regard:
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Helping new users understand that the choice is not really a major one (relative to making the switch to Linux). Adjust whatever to your needs as you learn, or distro hop.
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Not jumping down new users’ throats if they pick Ubuntu / Mint / Fedora / whatever. Again, the freedom is a plus. A new user picking Ubuntu doesn’t make an older user need to use Ubuntu. Let the new user have that joy of discovery how they want it.
I think if we all focused on these, the community would be better off for it. I’m all for a good ribbing about distros between experienced users, but it definitely can scare newbies away.
Maybe the same reason a 2 party system does well in the US. People are not intelligent enough to make their own choices (and they get overwhelmed) and want “daddy” to tell them what to choose, much like how Windows is just “the thing you use on a PC”. People don’t even want to find their own music anymore, they want the Al Gore Rhythm to feed them everything.
That’s why when people ask me on Linux I just say Mint, use default settings. Because they won’t understand anything else and Mint will likely work fine in 98% of cases.
Choice paralysis has nothing to do with intelligence. This attitude is forever pushing the year of the Linux desktop away.
Read “Nudge” by Richard Thaler. Choice architecture is a real thing that has impact on whether things we want to happen actually happen. It’s not because people aren’t smart enough.
Nice work getting in a jab at the US there lol
Options are great when you can make an informed choice. Too many similar choices lead to choice paralysis and regret, which is bad for first time users.
Not gonna lie, that’s what put me off the fediverse for so long. I was like, “fine, I’ll join mastodon or whatever”. Then I had to choose my server and I didn’t know what that meant and then when I tried creating my account, the server was full or something and I just freaked out and left 😂.
Yup. I’ve been trying to decide and install for, what how long have y’all been watching me dither three years?
Now i just have to get the backup computer working so if i fuck up, we still have a computer that can run all my wife’s work shit. That’s it after today’s errands! Guess i better put my eyes and legs on.
I don’t understand the hate for Linux newbies using the “beginner’s” distros. Hell, I actively tell people looking to get into Linux to use a beginner distro and offer to set up their computer for them.
“Look, this is Linux mint, see how windows-y this looks and feels?”
They don’t need to know more than that, I’ll tell them if they look for installation instructions for something not in the software manager to follow the Debian or Ubuntu instructions and that they should run an update at least once a day but it isn’t painful.
I think the power users have ran into issues in the past and instead of considering the learning journey they went through, I think they say it’s better to shortcut to their solution and forgetting the longer learning process they took to get to where they are.
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Look at all the comments explaining what to pick to an invisible audience. The OP didn’t actually ask a question. 🤭
And this is why Mastodon and Lemmy are too much for your average person.
Lemmy isn’t too much. It’s just that the people using it right are the types that will tell you how to build a clock when you ask what time it is. That might be the problem with Linux too.
If you want to love linux, then pick a distro and love it until you find you’d rather love another. There’s no right answer, just enjoy the journey. And back up your data.
It’s like a partner really
Yep. All of my tools, and by extension all the people who make them, are my partners and I love and appreciate all of them ❤️.
Just start with Mint. It’s easy enough. Later you’ll be more informed to try something else.
In my case I started with Mint, then Arch/KDE and finally Debian/KDE.
50% of Linux is being free to choose. The other 50% is knowing what the correct choice is.
The other 50% is knowing what the correct choice* is.
* Notice: whatever choice is made, half the encountered users will say it was the wrong choice.
Math checks out.
ai slop
Genuinely curious, I haven’t followed AI generated comic strips. Is there a tell or are you trolling?
I remember there was one much more obvious one under the same name. This one still looks weird so I assume it’s AI generated and manually fixed a bit afterwards.
E: dude’s on lemmy https://lemdro.id/post/34046399
I think trolling, AI isnt good at text. You ever see a shirt for sale with like a dumpster fire of a sentence on it? Decent example of AI generators when it comes to words. Usually there being actual words inside of images and coherent at that I take as a sign of being made by a human.
It’s hard to tell because the actual crime that has been commited here is saving this comic as JPEG instead of a PNG.
Ultimately I’m not very confident, but I think I agree. The text and layout look very human to me and it’s looks all pretty human to me. There are some inconsistencies in the ports and the linework on the inner age between the three laptops on the left, but I think that’s just the artist doing some touch-ups on it after already having copied the laptop across the panels.
The tell is the ports in the side of the laptop
They look weird and distorted and aren’t consistent between panels
Debian with LXDE is great on computers with older hardware.
tbh I’m boring and just use Ubuntu (with whatever DE they default to, used to be Gnome then they switched to Unity, and now it’s Gnome again, lol) - it makes it easier to find solutions to things because so many other people also use Ubuntu, I want the easiest experience.
I’m with you. I ran Qubes for a while for security reasons, and it was just too much of a pain in the ass. Ubuntu is easy.
Choose the DE, not the distro.
… Well also don’t take advanced distro either. Train on easy distros, then switch if you want
this one! the DE matters so much more than the distro itself
so true
so I was tinkering the other day and I found a great example of what arch doesn’t do that makes it difficult for new users. it doesn’t make default configuration files, even when you have it up and running just fine.
so I’m like why isn’t this working as I expected, reading some Ubuntu documents showing that someone edited their config and that fixes it. i go to the directory and it’s only got a .example file. i copy it so it’s a .config and remove the # from the line that is supposed to correct the behavior and what do you know, it’s working now!
that wouldn’t be something for a new user to resolve and gave me a fresh understanding of the difference in approach and why arch shouldn’t be a newbie system
I noped out of arch during setup. It expected me to partition the drive for swap/os/usr. It’s not 1996, I’m not doing that today.
Swap is only necessary if you have low RAM or use most of your RAM in memory-heavy processes or multitasking.
If you’ve got more RAM than you’ll ever need, you don’t need swap. Although, these days maybe that means swap will become more necessary again.
Also, you don’t need a swap partition, you can make a swapfile that works just as well.
I don’t know what the point of separate partitions for OS and userspace is, but whatevs…
You need swap for hibernate.
I don’t know what the point of separate partitions for OS and userspace is, but whatevs…
Some folks like to be able to reinstall the OS while preserving /home. That’s the only reason I’ve seen for doing separate partitions. (I’m not someone who does that, but it’s the explanation I’ve seen)
That makes sense. I would personally just back up /home and then recover it after reinstalling, but if I were doing all that anyway then I guess I would partition the OS separately in case I need to do it again…
archinstall has an automatic set-up, it’s fine but if you’re concerned about hardening you want to create /tmp and /var and /home on separate partitions. Bonus of /home on its own partition is for if you want to distro hop
Please forgive my ignorance, what is a DE?
Correct!
Desktop Environment, the software that controls the windows, icons, and menu.
Their comment is basically saying the experience of two distros using the same DE will be closer than the same distro using different DEs
it depends
yeah the DE is honestly more important. I started on Mint, stayed on it for two weeks, then switched to CachyOS. Now I’m on NixOS and I just distrobox all the other major distros.
Either fedora and kde/gnome or Linux mint. The rest is noise.
Having choice is bad?
There’s this little thing called choice paralysis.
Analysis paralysis.
Many people are overwhelmed by too much choice. It’s called “choice fatigue”. I think path of exile 1 massively overhauled the skill tree to be substantially smaller in the early game in order to not completely overwhelm new players.
I am not against having somewhat complicated skill/research trees, but I think the early stages should be simple, then becomes more complex as the player has had more time in-game to learn and make informed choices on the higher tiers.
Which gives me an idea… why not include the skill tree in the difficulty setting? Easier modes would simplify the tree, and kind of “package” skills together.
Having choice is hard.
I guess you’re right. I stress out when a menu is too big
Choice is amazing, liberating and empowering - but only when you are sufficiently informed to know which choices are appropriate.
For beginners in any field, too much choice can be paralysing.
