i have a question, where is her second hand?
Below the frame looks like to me.
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I think it started with Linus and Luke of Linus Tech Tips doing a 30 day linux challenge to see what it’s like daily driving linix. Jeff of Craft Computing did one recently as well.
Linus uninstalled his desktop after ignoring the warning that said °hey, this will uninstall your desktop.°
Which is his fault, but also this would never happen on Windows. The power and lack of hand-holding of Linux is a great advantage for power users, but with great power comes great responsibility, and many people don’t need the responsibility.
For sure, which is why I only use Mint anyway. I need my hand held. But Linus was doing power-user things without power-user reading. You can’t really claim the car is no good when you opened the hood and started swapping hoses without checking to see what goes where.
Yeah, I feel like Linux needs the equivalent of Administrator accounts on Windows. Root is the equivalent of the System account on Windows, something even power users might never encounter, because it’s a level of power you shouldn’t ever need.
We need users to have permission to install software and do other administrative tasks, without having permission to do very destructive actions like uninstalling core system packages. Aunt Flo should be able to install Mahjong from her distros package manager GUI, without needing dangerous root access.
Well, no, not exactly. Most accounts on desktop linux distros are admin accounts. The way I would define that is whether or not the user has sudo permissions, either by being in the sudo group or sudoers file. Some distros do ask if you want the user to be admin. And that’s pretty analagous to being admin on windows and getting a UAC prompt for an elevated process.
Yeah, but there is no separation between being able to do day to day administrative actions like installing software, and being able to do destructive actions no one should need to do unless in exceptional circumstances.
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You think LM being “too old” is a problem for newbies? I’ve been running some distro or other since RedHat 5. I it took me 6 weeks of waiting for Fedora to sort out most of the issues, (and I STILL have some minor ghosting issues and I ain’t no gamer), and 4 tries to get Fedora 40 to successfully take the nVidia drivers for the GTX1650 chipset in my laptop.
You think a new wannbe convert is going to put up with that?
I agree with @[email protected] here. Could you describe what issues are people having? What is their user profile (programmers, writers, …)?
@Magnolia_ I drive Fedora on laptop without any issues, and I reaally like Wayland and Fedora. X11 still better for normal people. Also UI and UX similar on Mint to Windows
I don’t understand why people don’t go for something like ZorinOS or Nobara. Both work great out of the box with support for like everything.
To be fair the nobara website is very “pet project” both in the design and also in the frequent warnings about using it for anything real. Is a good distro tho, having said that.
As someone who daily drives Mint, wut.
@Magnolia_
Cause Mint is an easy to use community distro.Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.
That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.
I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.
We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.
I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.
AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.
Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.
Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.
For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.
Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.
On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue. But most people don’t and for them Mint will work just fine. If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
I do want to add that new games can also require new packages, the way Alan Wake II did at launch. Even on Arch you had to compile the development version of Mesa for it to run.
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue.
No, thanks to Valve’s efforts for Steam Deck all RDNA2 hardware directly benefits for upstreamed improvements.
Any distro will “just work” if used correctly…
If you have to tiptoe around to use it “correctly”, it doesn’t “just work”
I never said anything about “tiptoeing around”, but what you said here is correct…
If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
These don’t seem like competing needs. When I think “just work with minimal hassle”, I don’t think “I need to restrict myself to outdated hardware”.
I’m perfectly happy running old packages in general. I’m still on Plasma 5, and it works just as well as it did last year. But that’s a matter of features, not compatibility. Old is fine; broken is not.
I think Mint is mostly for the “I have a PC that’s a few years old and want something easy and reliable to replace Windows with” crowd. Because it works great for that. It’s the perfect beginner distro.
Yeah absolutely zero newbies are going to buy a new computer in order to test out Linux.
The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!
The thing is that Linux has gone mainstream, with young adults and teens trying it out for Gaming and Streaming. The target people has changed so recommending Mint is not suitable anymore.
Not even close to approaching mainstream!
It’a close. Isn’t it at 4% market share? That’s higher than Firefox.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say it’s gone “mainstream” since you still have to be moderately nerdy to know about it. I get your point though. This is one of the reasons I am so happy the Steam Deck exists. Before Valve released the Steam Deck nobody wanted to make games for Linux, so Valve said “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” and proved it was not only possible, but a better experience overall. While not all games work, having 78-80% of your game library work on Linux, with no Windows OS performance tax, is a great experience. Even with the Proton compatibility layer games generally run faster than on Windows.
this video from last month has 600k views. Ive seen several recent linux videos with 150k+ views. Brodie, Horn and the Linux Experience constantly pull 50k to 200K views on some of their videos.
You don’t have to run linux to watch a video about linux.
It mean to say its not an obscure thing anymore, Id say its becoming mainstream.
people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
Elementary OS. Hassle-free, elegant and polished, distraction-free.
I’d give it a shot if i was on the lookout for something new, but I see absolutely no reason to switch from Mint.
Yeah there’s no need to change if you’re content with what you’re using.
Linux users can’t even agree on what distro is actually beginner friendly, so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
I know its one of the strengths of Linux, but I can’t help but laugh that the response to “you can’t agree on one, how can I?” is for several people to suggest several distros.
Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.
@Default_Defect @Magnolia_ The best Distro for beginners is the one, a friend or family member can give support.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in my circle who even knows what Linux is.
You are on the path to be that family member or friend for someone else.
You are on the path to be that family member or friend for someone else. Welcome.
Linux is a niche. Picking any distro that isn’t the most popular is going one step deeper into a niche. A niche, within a niche.
Just use the most popular distro… Ubuntu
Problem solved.
Ubuntu isn’t the most popular and hasn’t been for a while. It actually has a lot of issues new users are likely to run into, including lots of spurious error messages. Apparently the top 5 according to distro watch is: MX Linux, Mint, EndeavorOS, Debian, and Manjaro.
So essentially debian, arch and ubuntu derivatives.
I’m sorry, I can’t believe that MX Linux and EndeavorOS are popular or recommended. I’ve never heard of those or seen any recommendations for that.
I’ve seen Mint recommended.
People pushing arch on newbies? Wtf?
If you haven’t heard of EndeavorOS that’s because you are out of the loop. Entirely your issue. It’s a much better alternative to Manjaro essentially.
Also that’s general popularity according to page hits, nothing to do with newbies. Newbies aren’t the majority of Linux users.
Not that there is anything wrong with recommending EndeavorOS to Newbies. The whole point of arch derivatives like that is to make installing arch simpler and easier for the user. Arch is actually a better base distro imo than say Ubuntu for this. It has packages for pretty much anything in the AUR, no digging up PPAs for everything. Likewise it’s all up-to-date too.
I don’t remember MX Linux ever being that popular before, but maybe I am out of the loop.
Linux is a niche
idk it seems pretty popular to me
Just use the most popular distro… Ubuntu
well linux is a extremely general component, and there are many linux based OS’s for different applications. Ubuntu might be user friendly on server(not sure) but on desktop is pretty trash for example (no flatpak, bad support for newer hardware).
you need to pick an OS that is user friendly for your usecase, there is no way to have one single OS to fit all possible needs. doesn’t matter what kernel it is based on.
I fucking hate Ubuntu. Mostly because you’re right.
The solution is to not be cconfident and remain open minded. You can switch any time
The thing is, I don’t care to distrohop and experiment with this or that. I just want to use my computer. Until I see a distro that can convince me that switching will be actually painless (not ‘long time linux user painless’, but ‘casual new user that does more than just web browse’ painless) I’ll just use windows.
What would you need for convincing?
Specifically? I don’t know. It would likely help if the conversation around new user distros was a bit less of an argument or if the number of suggested distros was a bit less. It would help with the decision paralysis aspect of it at least. I see enough threads of experienced users troubleshooting more than I really want to deal with, I stopped maintaining my modded skyrim installation because I was fixing when I could be playing and I don’t like the idea of my whole computer being like that because I chose the wrong hardware (I have nvidia)
The simple way is to dual boot or even simpler, set up a Linux distro in a Windows VM.
Let’s you play/see if the distro works for you.
TBH, I’ve got 1 machine where Windows is more problematic than the Ubuntu that is setup to dual boot… Can’t bring myself to do a fresh install of Windows lol…
That’s really depending on your use cases, for example if I want to install distro for my grandma use Mint, for a graphic guy (as in this example) use Arch or Fedora (or even OpenSUSE), etc.
- Find a distro, run into problems
- Ask for help
- Get asked why the fuck you chose that distro when it’s obviously for super brains
- Repeat
I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it’s more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.
wait Mint was (and still is) out of date?
The kernel is too old for newer AMD gpu drivers to work, but switching to a newer kernel isn’t too hard. I had to when I built a new computer last winter, but I have also used various *nixes for a good long time.
Knowing how to discover you need a newer kernel is a bit tough for recent convert, though.
I wouldn’t call switching kernels that hard. It takes a few clicks and a reboot to do. However, they kicker is that you need to know to do that. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Exactly. As far as Linux has come in terms of ease of desktop use and hardware compatibility, there is still a barrier in knowing how to know which flavor is right for you and, almost more importantly, why that flavor is right.
