This is so much better than the click bait bullshit on Reddit. I love people like you who put effort into quality posts like this, and this ecosystem in general that supports it!
I actually shudder with how much time and effort and content and moderation I gave to Reddit over such a long time. I am so much happier around here :)
Thank you for at least attempting to treat my ADHD! I didn’t realize I could concentrate on anything more than a few minutes, let alone the hour or so I spent reading this.
Thank you! I know some people don’t really care for it or consider it spam so i’m thankful that i’ve been allowed to do these by the mods. I really enjoying doing these
SteamOS is a nice modified version of Arch, however and for good reasons it has its limits regarding installing new packages/software. I am not sure this is the best for linux newbies.
I would argue that using an image based system with flatpak is one of the best ways for newbies to transition to Linux. Whether that’s SteamOS, Bazzite, Bluefin or Aurora, that doesn’t matter all that much.
Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Thanks, that was some great insight. Especially the drawbacks regarding cinnamon. Those are 100% things no normal user should ever have to think or worry about.
Just a small update, I made the switch to EndeavourOS /w XFCE4 about two weeks ago and so far everything works perfectly. Even modern games on Steam w/ Nvidia graphics card. Thanks again.
My biggest issue with Discord is that they have become the default hubs for issues and fixes. Over days, weeks, months and years those fixes get buried and harder to find, but the worst offender is that they are unindexable by default.
Quite a good move from them, although the whole support through Discord is a botched concept per-se.
I'll check the bot too for The Gamer's Tavern, we have a few threads about Linux VR gaming and other Linux gaming/audio stuff worth (maybe?) of being set discoverable
I didn’t even know this, but it does work!!! …apparently.
edit - why the downvote? I’m all ears, please please please just comment why you’d feel me replying with this link (which I didn’t even find, a helpful person elsewhere in the comments found this method for RSS) was a bad thing?
Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.
I guess it counts because you are not grinding, the factories are grinding for you. The problem is that it’s a niche game and not many of my friends would play it
It’s the defacto automation game, and can get pretty wildly funny with multiplayer co-op. Players slot into niches and ted to focus on building out X or Y and when these things meet can be hilarious.
It also has a versus mode where you race to build bases on a shared map and kill your opponents first.
I typically do use my Steam Deck as a Steam Deck and not a GOG Deck, but every time I’m on the go, forgot to explicitly put my Steam Deck in offline mode, and get hit with a license that needs to be reauthenticated, I wish I’d stuck to GOG instead…or that GOG offered the game I’m playing at all. Also, BioShock Infinite is fantastic, and whenever you hear about it now, it tends to be from people who really want you to know that they didn’t like it.
Lately I’ve been playing the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance still, and this one is via GOG. I got to a point where I can do some side quests, so the main story is taking a back seat for a little while. I am enjoying the story and characters, but I do wish they’d made different choices in things like the combat and some of the “realism”-related tedium.
I just beat the base game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel last night, before moving on to its DLC in my attempt to play through this entire series ahead of Borderlands 4. There are some good levels and bosses, and I liked how my class that I selected works, but the writing is just atrocious. It definitely tried to be funny but rarely had anything that could even be classified as a punchline, as though they’d never actually heard a joke before but heard about jokes.
And then my wife and I are still playing through Blue Prince. We’re making good progress, but I do find myself agreeing with the criticism that the RNG is bringing down the experience. I think if you could draft from 5 rooms at a time instead of 3, it would do wonders for the experience.
I found KCD II made huge improvements over the first. I mean, that’s natural and kinda stupid to say…but it felt more ‘complete’ to me. The first actually had me a bit overwhelmed - there were too many options, too much to do and see. The second while actually expanding that aspect…well it just felt a bit more focused. To me, anyway.
I did install a lot of mods also, to remove some of what I find tedious, but others adore.
It’s weird, because even though I support the idea of modding as you the customer doing what you want with the product you bought, I also usually refuse to do it for a first playthrough, because I want to evaluate the thing that the developer actually delivered when I have an opinion on it. So even if some mod out there removes the tedium, I want to see what the game is like, start to finish, with the tedium included.
The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.
Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.
A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.
If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.
I recognise that for almost any one task, Linux has a solution that works better than Windows. My issue is just getting Linux to run not only one specific thing but all the dozens of programs with each having their own dependencies and possible quirks without losing my mind, weeks of my life, data or all three.
If Valve (or really any other large entity capable of handling this for tens of thousands of users) stepped in to act as the guide for setting it all up in a safe manner and such that it just works without constant need for tweaking (unless you want to stray from the “installation wizard”), I could see Linux gain a big surge in users.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne