i’d argue yes. if it’s just a plain linux vps without any additional services, you’re still doing plenty of setup yourself.

i’m having some decent success using cmus and a tiny wrapper script to save some typing.

i’ve had good success doing small edits with libreoffice (design? draw? idk what its called).

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won’t actually move off it.

for teams i’m sure theres projects in development, i just don’t know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there’s lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.

I’m using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.

for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.

for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)… is all stuff that would be convenient but it’s all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don’t know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn’t worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don’t actually know any such distros right now.

i mean… it is massively better, but yes it still sucks. but what do you move friends and family to? last i looked into element it was not an option for several reasons, and i don’t think anyone would switch to basically noname apps like simplex or similar, even if they might be decent solutions. i really want the last few contacts i have on whatsapp to move, but i’m not gonna push hard to get them to use signal just to get it enshittified in the near future. also a few switched to telegram, which while not facebook, is not really better mainly because it doesn’t even e2ee by default.

i’ll second debian but with a bit of a warning: for gaming-related stuff, dont use what ships in the repos. its been a while but last i tried, debian stable shipped a pretty old version of wine (the basis of running windows games on linux) and this is one area where it’s important to use the latest. not sure how best to do that, i invested the time to learn arch linux but that is a bit of a committment (very worthwhile though IMO).

winehq itself says to add their own repo to debian, so that might be an easy enough way of doing it.

luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point…), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company’s funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we’d all save money.

well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.

for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.

knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.

hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).

Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.

way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)

funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i’ll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven’t had nvidia issues in quite a while now.

Once it all lands in debian i’ll consider giving debian another shot on desktop… but that’ll take a while.

while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.

The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.

That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.

i like cmus, but it is commandline-only.

gammastep works just fine for me on sway, and it appears the maintainer is still replying to issues on that repo. i wouldn’t worry too much just yet.

that said, it seems to not work for hyprland, so for anyone using that, look for something else

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why. cat is simpler and works fine.

note: both cat and dd only work for this when the image is made in a compatible way, my linux isos always work fine but a windows iso didnt and needs a more specific tool.

i use Termux and just scp/rsync my stuff around.

ideallyi’d use Unison sync inside termux, but it hasnt been packaged and i dont know the first thing about ocaml, so it’d be hard for me to make the needed adjustments to package it.

most games have never had flicker issues for me on arch/sway with a rtx2070. Steam itself used to be unusable and last i checked was still a bit glitchy, Discord also sucked, but the games always worked fine.

apart from some issues with recognizing the mouse cursor in a few games.