Why wouldn't they? Windows 10+ is a great development machine and Microsoft knows that a lot of developers develop with Linux. WSL is great for all parties - including Linux
I, too, have had the audacity to say WSL is useful on this community and it was also met with down votes. Purists hating and gate keeping, and then they wonder why Linux isn't more popular.
WSL may be fine for a Windows user to get some access to Linux, however for me it misses the vast majority of what I value in a desktop distribution
-Better Window managers. This is subjective, but with Windows you are stuck with Microsoft implementation, and if you might like a tiling window manager, or Plasma workspaces better, well you need to run something other than Windows or OSX.
-Better networking. I can do all kinds of stuff with networking. Niche relative to most folks, but the Windows networking stack is awfully inflexible and frustrating after doing a lot of complex networking tasks in Linux
-More understanding and control over the "background" pieces. With Windows doing nothing a lot is happening and it's not really clear what is happening where. With Linux, it can be daunting like Windows, but the pieces can be inspected more easily and things are more obvious.
-Easier "repair". If Windows can't fix itself, then it's really hard to recover from a lot of scenarios. Generally speaking a Linux system has to be pretty far gone
-Easier license wrangling. Am I allowed to run another copy of Windows? Can I run a VM of it or does it have to be baremetal? Is it tied to the system I bought with it preloaded, or is it bound to my microsoft account? With most Linux distributions, this is a lot easier, the answer is "sure you can run it".
-Better package management. If I use flatpak, dnf, apt, zypper, or snap, I can pretty much find any software I want to run and by virtue of installing in that way, it also gets updated. Microsoft has added winget, which is a step in the right direction, but the default 'update' flow for a lazy user still ignores all winget content, and many applications ignore all that and push their own self-updater, which is maddening.
The biggest concern, like this thread has, is that WSL sets the tone for "ok, you have enough Linux to do what you need from the comfort of the 'obviously' better Microsoft ecosystem" and causes people to not consider actually trying it for real.
Whenever somebody recommends NixOS, I just want to spam the comments with Guix. I prefer configs I can understand, and I think lisp makes that easier. Other than syntax, the only thing I see is people complaining about the free-oftware-only. But the recently hyped distrobox solves that (together with the nonguix repo). Yet nobody recommends guix in all these "immutable" distro threads.
Another user mentioned Guix, which I'd like to try soon to compare to NixOS.
It's hard to compete with how much there is in nixpkgs though... as much as I... a professional Haskell programmer... hate to acknowledge the realities of network effects.
So, I have only ever known Windows, but am becoming more and more Linux curious. I see all these different distros you guys talk about and I have to ask, do all the distros run any of the available software or would I have to try to try to find one that will run what I'm interested in running? If so which distro will run the available music production software? I'm sick of microshaft. Help a brother out?
There's a certain set of us Linux users who cling to the adage "for beginners, distro doesn't matter much." A lot of the differences between distros are things under the hood that you won't notice or care about. The main two things that will change your experience are the DE and the package manager.
DE = Desktop Environment. The GUI, what it looks and feels like. This is a matter of personal taste, you can find DEs that look and work more like Windows, more like MacOS, or neither. Try out a few, pick which one you want. I like Cinnamon because they tend to put things where someone who's used to Windows, but doesn't really like Windows, would look for things. Again your choice of DE is personal taste.
Package manager = app store. Think about smart phones, a major deciding factor is which app store(s) it has access to. My Samsung Galaxy has both the Google Play and Samsung Galaxy stores. If you buy a Pixel, you don't get the Samsung store. If you buy an iPhone, you're stuck with Apple's App Store. Go back to what? 2014 or so and buy a Fire Phone, you're stuck with Amazon's app store. Same thing with Linux distros.
In practice, most mainstream distros will support practically all Linux software in some way. I run Linux Mint, Mint comes with APT and Flatpak, and between the two I can find all the software I want. (Asterisk: video games, for which I have Steam). Other distros will have technically different but functionally similar package managers; on Arch you'd use Pacman, on Fedora you'd use RPM. The Steam Deck uses only Flatpak for user apps.
So go with a fairly mainstream distro that has Flatpak support either out of the box or easily installed and you'll be okay.
Did they think about how far I would have to move my hand to type it? Sudo is only in two easy to reach places on the keyboard, run0 is 4 separate areas of the keyboard, one two rows from home and none on the home row.
Yeah for some reason lemmy just discards any formatting (including line breaks) when parsing website content. But I think that's because Lemmy has a very weird way of dealing with line breaks in general.
I know that, but it uses some weird Markdown implementation where new lines aren't actually new lines for some reason. GitHub Markdown doesn't have this issue.
Yeah I just started using Linux half a year ago and tried a few distros and DEs, but GNOME "disks" is just the easiest way to set up auto mounting and is available on any package manager I came across so far.
On Wayland, KWin can now be configured to pull color profile information from the monitor’s EDID metadata where present. Note that color profile information in EDID metadata is often wrong, so use this setting with caution.
Can anyone speak towards why the EDID metadata is often wrong?
I don’t know about color profile data, but I can vouch for the EDID potentially being totally wrong sometimes on even basic data like physical size or even logical size (number of pixels).
As for the why, I don’t know, but following Occam’s razor I would guess that it’s cheaper when you just don’t care and leave it as somebody else’s problem.
I think a part of your positive experience is also thanks to Linux. Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big and definitely not as big as between Windows and Android. Though Waydroid rocks anyways
I also started with tumbleweed in December, but it didn't play nice with my desktop for some unknown reason so I switched to Fedora. Also didn't make much sense to run a rolling release on my laptop so I just moved to Debian on the laptop and it's been great.
I hope you enjoy your experience. Plenty of very helpful people here and forums to find answers to questions you might have later down the road (or tomorrow if you're anything like me).
Linux mint Debian edition. I just wanted to properly try cinnamon since I know GNOME isn't for me and I really like KDE. Other options strike me personally as mostly just downgrades to KDE. It's been very easy, absolutely nothing to complain about.
And the best part is I don't update 2000 packages every time I use it lol (it mostly sat in a drawer collecting dust).
I don't know that there's really much difference use wise aside from the lack of updates. Everything largely looks and feels the same. Debian doesn't have YaST obviously, but I never actually used my laptop enough to appreciate it so idk what I'm missing out on there.
No harm in trying stuff out, especially if you don't use your laptop much like I do.
They are a video creator first and foremost, not a writer for a blog or a magazine. It's like demanding a janitor to make and serve you a meal just because they work in a kitchen.
And then asking the janitor why they're a janitor instead of a cook. Like, if you don't like videos that's fine, but what is the point of commenting on one saying "god I hate videos."
It's especially funny that they said that everyone defaults to videos when, at least with Linux related stuff, thats definitely not the case. This guy is one of the few not terrible Linux content creators, there really aren't many Linux dedicated content creators to begin with, so what's the harm of this? Go read the arch wiki or a blog if that's what you prefer, but don't needlessly shit on a different format that others may prefer or enjoy.
Wow, thanks for calling me stupid man, really appreciate it. Lemme know when/if you're interested in having a civil conversation instead of spewing insults every other sentence.
Back then I read an article about how M$ is crippling the ability of other office packets to read their docx and xslx formats which are supposed to be open formats, but in reality are written in a way never to be fully integrated by competing products. More information about their pseudo open standard: https://fsfe.org/activities/msooxml/msooxml.en.html
Munich in the past have used Linux PCs for quite some time until eventually switching back to windows. Back then they were citing the same incompatibilities to open and read and display M$ office files correctly. So Microsoft is definitely abusing their position as a market leader and trying to cripple competition as much as they can.
There was criticism at the time, but the people who had to work with it every day. welcomed it after a very short time. The end of the Limux project happened all by itself, because Munich's mayor is an MS fan boy and said so openly at the time. It was not because of technical problems or anything else. It was just a huge kindergarten child.
The software etc. continues to run. But as an official project of the state, Limux is dead and so are the subsidies etc. How far it will still be maintained is questionable. However, this does not mean that the topic of Linux and Open Source has become irrelevant. But even now, with the future plans, I strongly assume that something like this will happen again.
But who cares.. But it's only the taxpayer who has to pay for it anyway...
LiMux Client version 6.0 is based on Kubuntu 18, KDE 5.44, GIMP 2.10, LibreOffice 5.2.8, WollMux 18, Google Chrome 80 and Firefox 60 ESR and 68; Okular is used as a PDF viewer instead of Adobe Reader, which was discontinued for Linux.[44] Like the previous versions, it was not multi-session capable. First rollout was done in April 2019 and is estimated to be fully rolled out in 2020.
I generally have 2 recommendations for beginners who don't want something specific, one of which is a community favorite, the other is my own favorite.
The community generally recommends Linux Mint for new users. It's based an Ubuntu, so it had a lot of great support, but it has the enshittification of Ubuntu (snaps, tracking, pro subscription ads, etc.) removed. It's a great, simple distro for beginners that generally works all around without tweaking. It's basically the #1 recommendation for new users, and I gladly support that recommendation.
My personal favorite recommendation is Fedora, through I understand why there may be frustrations for those with Nvidia graphics cards who need to install their drivers. The process to do it on Fedora isn't very complex, and can be looked up easily, but new users tend to feel intimidated by the command line, and I must admit that the installation of Nvidia drivers and media codec are more difficult than something like Linux Mint (for Fedora, this is a copyright issue, since their main sponsor is Red Hat, a private company). In every other area, I'd say Fedora is great for beginners, and provides a great way for users to get new features quickly without having to worry about any of the instabilities or quirks of something like Arch.
You couldn't go wrong with either, but you're certainly going to see more recommendations for Linux Mint in general (especially on Nvidia hardware).
Just stay away from Manjaro, Gentoo, and Void (there's a long list of complex distros, but it really isn't going to help to list them all). Gentoo and Void have their place, but are not a great place for a beginner to start. Manjaro simply has no place, just avoid it like the plague.
My personal pick that is gonna get downvoted into oblivion: Manjaro.
Manjaro is an actual "Arch for your grandmother". Combining rolling release with two-week checking period, taking the speed and customizability of Arch and wrapping it in a noob-friendly, everyday system - it's Arch that just works, is sleek, welcoming and easy.
If you want easy Arch, recommend EndeavourOS. Manjaro is a pile of steaming garbage just waiting to break itself. EndeavourOS is easy for beginners, doesn't break itself constantly, and gets all the features of Arch from mainline Arch, not the Manjaro repos. I strongly suggest you revise your recommendation to EndeavourOS; there's very good reason behind why this community dislikes Manjaro.
Nope, EndeavourOS to me is a useless project from the start that doesn't really simplify everyday operation of Arch and just cuts corners on installation and minimal quality of life.
If someone needs pure but accessible Arch, I'd go with Garuda, though it has all the issues of pure Arch as well.
Manjaro is still my choice. A good majority of Manjaro haters just hear about AUR issues and never go there, although they are fairly rare and can be resolved, or you can rely primarily on extensive repos that probably do have what you need. Some others just blindly use solutions for Arch, and while Manjaro does allow for it, it shouldn't always be done, as devs themselves warn. If you won't treat Manjaro like mainline Arch, it will not break. But as any Linux system, it does allow you to shoot yourself in the foot.
The difference is - in Arch, noobs destroy their system and power users (kinda, usually) do not. In Manjaro, it's the Arch power users that don't know the difference and blindly apply their experience that get rekt, while noobs do just great without even knowing stuff that can break it.
Also, backups and snapshots are a must for absolutely every Arch system, that is just the reality of it. Arch does break, as anything bleeding-edge. Manjaro helps with that - granted, by introducing another issue that can easily be circumvented.
If anything, I'm a happy Manjaro user for 1,5 years, and I'm just alright.
I used Manjaro for about 6 months, never used AUR or made any real modifications to my install (except for troubleshooting), and had to fully reinstall 2 times and fix config issues on files I've never touched a handful of times in that 6 months because a standard update broke everything. I then went on to use EndeavourOS for a year and never had a single issue the entire time I used it, so my problems were not related to Arch, it was Manjaro. Similar stories are constantly echoed about Manjaro, and I have a hard time believing that the entire Internet is astroturfing a Linux distro for no reason. I, as a quite experienced Linux user of over a decade, have never tried any distro that has been anywhere close to as bad as Manjaro. I've had an install brick itself once outside of Manjaro, and that was due to an obscure hardware bug that got through QA. I've never had to spend as much time fixing a distro as I did with Manjaro, and it was on a laptop that I only used for browsing and schoolwork. I didn't even bother to change the wallpaper because I only had it there to try out. So no, nothing that happened was related to the packages I installed, the (nonexistent) changes made to configs, or the use of the AUR. That was a perfectly normal Manjaro install breaking itself for absolutely no reason. You can feel free not to trust my anecdotal evidence, but almost everyone I've seen in this community who has said they've used Manjaro has echoed similar stories. This isn't a unique or rare experience.
EndeavourOS has great value to users new to Arch that don't want to set everything up from scratch. It is basically vanilla Arch without the setup hassle of vanilla Arch. I don't see why that wouldn't have value, and I don't really understand why you'd recommend Manjaro over it. The 2 week freeze that Manjaro does on packages doesn't actually help stability. It does nothing at best, and makes things worse in most other cases.
I haven't used any of the 3, but from a look over them superfile looks a lot more user friendly and has a nicer overall look.
Edit; the install process is rough though, complains about missing glibc but searching for that package in apt doesn't show anything promising. It also seems to require some kind of third party font that isn't included? I gave up lol that's too much for me to deal with.
It's definitely a big learning curve with how complex installing things on linux is haha, I'm still used to windows just open the exe installer and that's it.
Yeah I hear that. I will say aptitude made my life a lot easier in terms of installing things with its recommended fixes. Also good software documentation should have a "Getting Started" section that gives you step by step instructions for each OS/Distro of how to install it. If it doesn't... Well maybe that software isn't worth installing anyway 🤷♂️
I mean there's that, but it's a lot of work for a dev too.
I would rather Linux just be able to detect what's missing and install it for me. In the case of a lot of missing components, what it says is missing will be named completely different from the package you need to install which makes it really hard.
It was always nice with windows installers because they would come with the needed components, or windows would just prompt to install them automatically.
That's what aptitude does. It says "these things are dependencies that are missing. Do you want to install them?" And you can say yes, no, or ask it to try to find a different fix. And idk what you mean by that's a lot of work. If a dev can't be bothered to tell people how to install their program then idk how they expect people to use their software.
I would rather Linux just be able to detect what's missing and install it for me. In the case of a lot of missing components, what it says is missing will be named completely different from the package you need to install which makes it really hard.
That does happen, but Linux doesn't have anything to do with installing packages, your package manager does. If this package was installed through apt for example, it would also download all of the dependencies. But this package is using a makefile to build and install, therefore it has nothing to do with your package manager.
Tldr: use the package manager, and don't use DIY packages if you don't want to DIY
Additional package managers like flatpak and nix solve different issues:
dependency mismatch: let's say libreoffice and this package require a different version of glibc -> flatpak downloads both versions and symlinks them in a different location in order for each package to have the correct version while not impacting your system and the glibc your DE is using
newer packages: Debian freezes packages for 2+ years, flatpak gives you a fresh version
easier packaging for developers: you can package for flatpak instead of having to maintain packages for every popular package manager and distro
I had to install Golang and build it myself to make it work with my version of glibc. But in the end the themes aren't rendered properly. In other words, proper Linux experience.
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