TL;DR: I wonder why we always have the same 2 posts as top posts of the day.
They appear a bit unnecessary and mildly annoying to me.
Do you think the same? Or do you like them, and can explain me why, so I can change my view?
Please don’t just blindly downvote, writing this post took a lot of time. And if you feel the need to do it anyway, tell me why first.
Maybe I am the only person who thinks that.
I probably am, at least according to numbers.
Basically, I’ve got the feeling that every top post of the day for the last weeks is something like “I’ve freed myself from evil Windows’ shackles and finally switched to Linux.”, or “What distro do you recommend?”.
Don’t get me wrong.
I feel super happy for every newcomer discovering the wonderful world of Linux and FOSS.
I, just like most others here, always try to help them in finding their right distro and guiding them in their first steps.
We all have been there.
And I’m super proud of us all, as a community, that we happily embrace every new member. We definitely have to keep that behaviour, it’s what connects us and makes us strong.
I just think we should redirect them a bit onto the specific communities.
Not by banning or censoring, just as friendly reminder, e.g. by a sticky post, comments like “Hey, check out [email protected]” or something else.
It doesn’t help much if there are the same threads every day, with people circlejerking on hating Windows and recommending Mint a hundred times, just like 100 people before did on the same thread.
I hate Windows too, but it feels like we’re identifying and comparing ourselves with the bitter ex-partner we had a while ago. No, not being Windows shouldn’t be the main reason Linux is great.
There are so many great posts and discussions, that are all going missing in this swamp of “Winblows bad, hehe”.
We should focus on what makes our software great, and not what the “bad ex-partner” did wrong.
Same with newcomer posts.
I think if the posters get redirected to the correct sub, they will receive more help, since the people partaking in the community are there because they wanna see exactly that.
At the same time, I’m afraid this would undermine our openness and friendliness of this community, and result in being as shitty as Reddits’ sub.
!Just as an anecdote, when I was a noob, I posted a question there, and, like 5 minutes later, I got a dozen of non-constructive, offensive comments. 10 minutes later, my post got removed. This was my first contact to the Linux world btw. Guess who switched back to Windows for another half year because of that?
We have to prevent this at any costs.
Anyway… !<
I really enjoy this community here and wanna keep it this great.
I just wanted to ask you, what you think about those everyday-top-posts.
If you like them, please try to change my mind and explain me why :)
Edit/ Additional stuff/ Learnings:
- I don’t hate those “I switched to Linux”-posts, just to clarify. They’re fine for me, they just feel like white noise. But I’ve read many times in this thread that a lot of people enjoy those posts. If that’s the case, I’m totally fine! :)
- I think putting those posts in a weekly sticky thread could be worth an idea? Then everyone could describe their experience of this week of switching from one distro to another, e.g. “My first week of Gentoo” or something like this. Would be an interesting read for everyone.
- I also believe those “Fuck Windows”-posts can be kind of therapeutic for some people, since Windows became really shitty and annoying in the last years. And when you feel the relieve from finally getting rid of it, you tell that everyone. Understandable.
- Splitting the community isn’t the best idea too. We can always learn from each other and I like the diversity of this community.
- Thank you for your kind and constructive answers! ✌️
Maybe it bothers you more because your Lemmy feed is not as well populated with interesting posts as you would hope?
I do wish people would check the post history here before asking “what distro should I use.” Or search the web for “how to pick a Linux distro in 2024” there are no shortage of those, although to be fair to them, you are a lot more likely nowadays to find nothing but AI-generated bullshit.
Like this commenter here mentions, there are pinned posts saying “share the story of how you met your distro.” I would love it if moderators could take posts and turn them into comments on pinned posts like "share. But we don’t have that as far as I know, so what can you do but contribute a patch to the Lemmy software maintainers, or else just deal with the noise.
Not at all. You seem to think there’s a more appropriate forum for people to join the Linux community, and introduces. Where is that? And how do new Linux users find it? Knowing nothing about Linux distros, where should they ask about distros? Distrowatch catalogs 274 distributions - how do newbies navigate those?
I do think having a “which distro” stickie or sidebar would be handy, but I don’t at all mind the “I ditched Windows” posts. It beats random venting, ranting, and flame wars.
I don’t mind them. If this type of social media had existed when I first installed Linux 24 years ago, I would have probably done the same thing.
I’m working on phasing out windows in my office as much as I can entirely because of the end of win10 and the dumb requirements of windows 11. I’m still running it on my main home PC though because I’m insanely busy and like to game for like 5-10 hours a week and and want to spend zero hours getting games to run. If I buy a game on steam and it doesn’t work I instantly I refund it even if I could probably figure it out.
It feels like a common and repetitive theme that doesn’t bring much discussion to the table. I might be an old grumpy fart, and I probably would’ve done the same posts back in 1997 when I left Windows NT 4.0 in the rear view mirror.
I’d much prefer to keep the discussion on Linux and not other operating systems. I enjoy AmigaOS and MorphOS as well, but I can’t recall anyone every comparing those to Windows on the forums.
Perhaps we can make a new community here: c/ditchedWindows, for example.
Personally, i would prefer it if the linux 4 noobs community would be brought back to life, or if we have dedicated threads here where we can discuss newbie stuff.
If we would go the route of threads, some helpful people who have a lot of experience could decide to help out and others could just skip the thread.
And if people would want a new community, i would hope that it is not called something like ‘ditched windows’, because that sounds like a recipe to make it a community to complain about windows. For me as newbie, i’m looking for 2 things; info and howto’s and suggestions about everything linux, and the knowledge that there are others who are also new and ask things that would be interesting for me as well.
oh yeah, it’s been annoying me, too. I haven’t subscribed to read countless blog posts of people who set off on the exceptionally unique journey of installing Ubuntu and liking it more than Windows.
Can’t have linux without a hint of elitism.
“Im much better than all my other friends who are still using Windows … yuck”
Yeah. I deleted windows, too.
3+ years ago and I didn’t make a post about it.
Yes.
These posts are the “I voted for peace” decorative lapel button of the '60s and '70s. These posts were the leading edge in the '90s and a little of the '00s.
Now they’re tiresome. It’s like people who’ve come late to the party and want their fanfare; people who came last in the race and proclaim themselves the leaders. The race is over, the banners are down, the spotlight’s off and the newsmedia’s gone home. No need to proclaim victory, nor virtue-signal inclusion in a group that isn’t exclusive.
How about we make a dedicated community for “I deleted Windows” posts?
This is a Linux community, so of course people will be moving away from other operating systems and installing Linux. I don’t see why everyone that does it needs to post about it. It’s like the people that make a big deal about leaving a party instead of just leaving.
It’s annoying. Maybe there should be a separate “SwitchedToLinux” community for these posts.
Maybe we can just fire up a new community specifically for that - /c/linuxevangelists or /c/linuxplunge /c/linuxswitch or something conceptually similar, and then direct posts of that nature to that community.
Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing more people get into it, but I’ve always thought of /c/linux and adjacent/similar communities as community technical support, so I just tend to ignore or hide “wooo I switched to linux” posts.
I think of ‘Linux’ as more general, unfiltered, anything-linux. But, maybe we should make a ‘linuxdailydriver’ or something.
Really, I think it’s a missing feature in Lemmy.
Have a meaningful separator, and allow subcommunities, where all posts are included in the larger community unless explicitly filtered out by the user. Also mods could configure that the more general one doesn’t receive posts, and you have to select a subcommunity when posting.
So, subscribe to linux and you automatically see all subcommunities (including ones created after you subscribed to linux) linux.tech, linux.support, linux.newusers, etc. …but not those you’ve filtered out.
Holy resurrected thread, Batman!
Holy shit, you are so right. I must have been sorting by something whack that put this near the top.
For me I’d rather people post something over nothing even if it’s the same post to us it’s clearly something the poster felt was important to them.
I don’t remember seeing a single one, so they’re probably not annoying me.
Exaggerated complaint posts about non problems there are way to many, though.
