Beginner friendly??? Not sure how to explain this to Linux users that post on Lemmy but we’re not the regular pc user and have a very different view on beginner friendly lol
I tried explaining to some of my non-technical friends what a “Linux distribution” is. Most don’t quite understand what I mean by “operating system”. I think we’re in a bit of a bubble here.
Heck yeah. I usually have to explain what an OS is in the first place too. I usually use android versus iOS as an example. I feel kinda fortunate sometimes that my wife’s hobbies don’t line up with my own most of the time because it does keep my brain in check from falling into those bubbles. She appreciates having free tech support on hand of course lol
You need to KISS your explanation. Don’t talk about OS’s or even distros. Avoid the technical stuff, save that for later as they ask about it. Instead just tell them it looks different, but in the end works the same. And it does it without the hassle, bloat or cost of Microsoft.
This entire thread talking about how a distro is better than the next because you “only” have to update keyrings to update so even basic users should get it.
Yeah, one of the biggest reasons people won’t try Linux isn’t necessarily because it is difficult, but because it would require learning anything at all. Never underestimate how much effort a person is willing to make to avoid making an effort.
I recently swapped to Linux Mint and it really was not harder than Windows, and I know functionally nothing on how anything Linux related actually works.
And there is little to nothing to fear. The big bad terminal and command line isn’t needed for day to day use anymore. It’s been years since the last time I needed to compile anything. And if I ever do need to do that again, something is definitely wrong.
Well, that’s my concern. There are plenty of settings that are only accessible via command line.
For daily use, you don’t need the command line. Only in fairly rare instances do you need to resort to it when things go wrong. And those commands are a mere google away. So don’t let the that big bad scary terminal stand in your way. It’s not the stumbling block you think it is.
Oh, I live in the terminal, even on Windows. I like having that capability. Not everybody does though.
Then it’s a habit not a fear. I also am comfortable with the cli since I started with Linux back at RedHat 5 and Mandrake 6. It was learn it or die in those days. But as time has passed, I find myself using it less and less because I don’t really need it everyday. But while I might need to google a specific command because I forgot it, I still remember it’s possible and handy.
Oh I’m not saying that it’s hard for us here. Most people don’t know that Mac and Windows are different if they aren’t in a tech position let alone know that Linux exists at all. I’m talking about the general person on the street, it’s hard to remember that we don’t always fit into that group.
I’m a programmer at a tech company. Last month, I tried setting up two different distros on my personal computer, in anticipation of Windows 10 EOL.
I experienced:
- Total failure of wifi drivers
- Graphical corruption returning from sleep mode
- Inability to load levels in Deck-certified games
- Critical input delays in a reflex-based online game
- Inability to install a particular Linux-native app on my particular distro; not only unavailable by main package manager, but also by its alternative container-based strategy.
- Right-click menus that hid the options I’m used to finding on Windows, with no visible way to turn them on.
- Repeated overriding of my customization of keyboard shortcuts
- Inability to assign Ctrl+Tab as a keyboard shortcut for a terminal app (Tab was unrecognized)
- UI forms altering my selection when I was attempting to scroll past them
- No discernible methods to pin frequently used folders to the sidebar of the file explorer
- No discernible way to remove/edit Application entries (leading to games that I created an entry though off Steam’s install dialog being stuck there even after the game was deleted)
So no, don’t keep telling me I’m staying on Windows out of idiocy. If someone replies to this with a doctoral on why every single issue is actually somehow my fault, it completes the trifecta.
Linux distros need to take a step back for a long, lengthy discussion on good user experience before they rush back to making memes like these.
This. I need to get work done, not work on my os.
I tried setting up two different distros
Would you mind telling what were the two distros you were trying to setup just for reference?
I installed Distro A, and Distro B, and you’re about to reply:
“Oh, well there’s your problem! A and B aren’t great for beginners (even though you read they were from someone else). I’d strongly recommend, C, D, E, or F.”
Whether it’s installing a new distro off new recommendations or spending time tinkering to get one of them working right, it’s still the same annoyance, and it’s unlikely to change. That said, if you have read that and will restrain from jabbing back about it or are just genuinely curious:
Distros
Linux Mint 21, then Linux Mint 22, then Bazzite
Thank you for the full disclosure, I think it adds weight to your post and no don’t worry I wasn’t going to argue with you about your distro choices, not at all.
I’m a very average Joe which also when into heaps of trouble when I tried to setup a Linux distro (mainly tried Pop_OS and Fedora KDE) so I feel the same as you 👌
Oh, they have lengthy discussion on good user experience. Have you seen gnome argue with the entire planet about whether the shutdown menu should let you shut down?
(I may be misremembering, maybe they wouldn’t let you log out or put the computer to sleep or something stupid because their only concept of design is deleting features and creating backlogged tickets to reimplement the same function in a new “better” way)
Personally I have experienced most of that too on desktop. I use Linux for my home servers (oops I used zfs cause everyone says it’s good and better than btrfs and now the one dude who runs the arch zfs gitlab went awol so I haven’t updated my arch computer in 5 months).
Look man. I use my computer primarily for gaming, with a little web browsing. The second Linux can support all games without me having to wrangle and worry about compatibility, plus whatever else config shit I have to go through that I’m sure I’m unaware of, I’ll jump ship headfirst. I’m fucking sick of Microsoft’s bullshit.
Linux supports most games nowadays. It will never support “all” games. Just like windows doesn’t support all games. At this point in time, saying Linux is not good enough with gaming is weird…
At this point games that doesn’t support Linux are games that use anti-cheat
Right, BattleEye is hit or miss depending on the game developer.
Another significant drawback I have is OBS compatibility. It technically works, but just having it open drops my framerate by ~30%, and having it record drops it by ~50%. I haven’t found a fix for it yet, so I’m effectively unable to stream or record gameplay on Linux. The same settings used in Windows hardly impacts my framerate.
I’ll continue using Linux, but I haven’t deleted my Windows partition yet.
The part that most don’t talk about is that installing and getting games up and going in Linux that can run in Linux, often takes allot of configuration and trying, but on the plus side it can run many games from older versions of Windows with some configuration.
It is the configuration that one has to learn how to do which most casual users aren’t skilled enough to do. It is after you learn how to do it that between the Linux Native Games and most other games from Windows.
Depending on what games you play it’s anywhere from unusable (games with incompatible anticheat) to flat out better than windows even ignoring all the surrounding bullshit. But many of these gsmes with anticheat are among the most popular games in the world, so there’s plenty of reason not to change just bc of those for a lot of people.
In my experience, Linux supports a handful, maybe even a large handful, but we’re far away from “most.”
If it takes you hours to debloat Windows, you better stick with an OS you do know.
Every time I see a Linux user’s criticism of a problem with Windows, it’s the kind of thing your grandma asks you to fix for her and takes ten seconds 😂
Calling Windows unstable in this day and age is fucking laughable too. If your installation is unstable, it’s either you or your hardware
Tell me you don’t work in IT, without telling me you don’t work in IT.
Yeach windows has problems but stability is definietly not one of them. Likewise linux has problems but in fact it is not harder to use ( in fact it is so easy to use that it is reasonably popular to put some easy distro in some forsaken by time laptop instead of windows for pepole who use browser and literaly nothing else ). Frankly speaking most pepole just dont give enough f about their system. The best i can say about it is that pop os specificaly just looks better ( i am in the apparent minority of pepole that very much likes the looks of gnome ). The best way to populrize linux is to have it by deafult instead of windows on laptops and prebuilds but that will never really happen ( they make insane amount of money on Markup by having windows installed despite the fact that they get it for really really cheap. Its really apparent when you compare some laptops that can be bought without the os preinstalled )
Crowdstrike: “hello”
Ehhh…as a Linux beginner on Ubuntu I disagree… I spent a couple hours trying to get an AppImage application as a desktop icon.
Spent an additional hour or two to mount NAS drives. Fstab?? Wtf.
My secondary monitor flickers to black randomly for a just couple minutes after startup and there’s no way I’m going to dig through Wayland to figure out why. Monitor orientation is incorrect on startup and I again don’t want to dig through Wayland or whatever cfg file I need to open…yet.
Still needed to browse at least 5 different sources for answers.
I’m glad Firefox doesn’t crash at 500 tabs or w/e but Linux still has issues with some primitive tasks that windows has well figured out.
It’s funny because as somebody that’s been using Linux full-time for over 10 years I actually really really really really hate that Ubuntu is considered beginner friendly because I often find very very simple tasks incredibly frustrating on it.
I know that everybody disagrees with me but I genuinely think that something based on arch like Endeavor OS is genuinely more beginner friendly. You don’t have to fight with repositories to get up to date drivers, virtually any piece of software you could ever want is either already in the extra/community repo or available through the Aur. And while yes it is possible that an update could end up causing an issue on your system Pac-Man is just way way better about not completely destroying the system and it is pretty easy to roll back. Even in a really really bad worst case scenario booting from a live USB and rolling back with chroot is easy enough I’ve actually walked people through it before.
Meanwhile the amount of times on both Debian and Ubuntu that I have had apt completely eviscerate a system just trying to do basic updates and then just bail out Midway leaving the system so broken that the terminal barely functions anymore is frustrating. And there’s no particularly easy path to fixing that because dpkg is a fucking nightmare. Yes in the majority of those cases the system was multiple years out of date but that’s no excuse I have updated art systems that were upwards of almost 10 years out of date and other than me having to manually update the key ring and reinitialize the signatures it was able to Simply jump right to the latest just fine.
True, even user-friendly Linux distros have their pain points. The real difference between Linux and corporate OS products is that you don’t periodically need a new version because of a product churn schedule.
🤔not sure if it is true frustration or just a great meme
Do you have to use Wayland? If something’s buggy in Wayland, I always switch back to x11. Wayland’s finally gotten to a point where I can use it without bugs, but that’s taken many years.
Android and iOS already replaced Windows for normies.
It’s mind boggling to me how many people don’t even use desktops anymore. Or do “serious” things like buy plane tickets on their phone. The younger generation is almost entirely phone-only.
Big purchase. Big screen.
True - remember Windows phones? Me neither.
i’ve seen someone installed Ubuntu LTS on his gaming pc. he said he has been spending hours to use it, in the end he decided to reinstall windows 11.
Another day another cope post
This one makes a lot more sense.
It should be flipped, tho. In my opinion, any “beginner distro” consumes more time in the long run run, compared to the “lightweight” ones (I bet my Arch is way fatter than many beginner distros, lol)
As a Linux user for a few years now I have to disagree. My friends who still rely on Windows only software for either school or their jobs use Revision OS and installs it with a tool called playbooks which takes only a few minutes and automatically disables feature updates; only allowing security updates to go through. This makes it so all “system updates” are through the playbook app which is pretty cool, it pretty much makes it a Windows fork and won’t revert or break anything when updating
1, Revision OS is awesome, and good on you for sharing it!
2, I don’t think that’s you disagreeing really, just offering a “third path”.
I use Ubuntu and don’t know anything about technical stuff 😋✨
I love Linux, a lot. I’ve distro hopped and tinkered to my hearts content. But I can’t let windows go, which is why I dual-boot with Windows 11 and currently, Bazzite.
Windows doesn’t have the ghub for my logitech mouse and headset. I can’t use my plugins for elite dangerous or extra software, like EDMC. Many games don’t work for various reasons (anti-cheat, or many other reasons). Can’t say, “well don’t play those games.”. Well, I want to. I like those games, and they don’t work on linux.
There is no AMD Adrenaline for my AMD GPU. I can’t use frame gen or many other features my card has. Battle.net games just refuse to work for me, try as I might to follow every tutorial ever (I just wanted to play Diablo IV T_T ). Those features are important to me.
OBS is much crappier on linux than on windows, due to no AV1 encoding support. As a streamer, AV1 looks MUCH better than whatever linux obs uses.
And lastly, Windows (even Windows 11), just works with everything. Any software you want, you just install it. On steam you don’t have to check proton.db, you’re 100% guaranteed for it to work. Any software you see, it works on windows. Any peripherals, just work. All their associated software, works.
I know not everyone games, but it’s the highest grossing entertainment market, so it’s important to more people than not.
According to a report by SuperData Research, the global gaming market was valued at $159.3 billion in 2020. This includes revenue from console games, PC games, mobile games, and esports. To put that in perspective, the music industry was valued at $19.1 billion in 2020, while the movie industry was valued at $41.7 billion. That means the gaming industry is making more than three times as much money as the music industry and almost four times as much as the movie industry. source
And lastly, Windows (even Windows 11), just works with everything. Any software you want, you just install it. On steam you don’t have to check proton.db, you’re 100% guaranteed for it to work. Any software you see, it works on windows.
This is not my experience at all. I was recently trying to play Command and Conquer: Tiberian Firestorm, an older RTS on Windows. I own the game through Steam. On Windows, the game wont open. It crashes immediately on launch. If i run the game in XP compatibility mode, it launches but when playing the game there is some sort of microstutter: every unit is blinking, the mouse cursor is blinking, and the game plays at a crawling pace. Also everything freezes whenever you move the camera.
When i boot into Fedora on the same PC, install with steam and launch with Proton, the game works fine. I was even able to install a resolution patch for windows to get higher resolutions available.
I find this to be a pretty common experience for me when trying to play older Windows PC games. There are quite a few I cant seem to get working (or playable) on Windows, but that work fine on Linux. I mostly play older games anyway so for me, Linux is more of a game console OS.
Sorry to hear Battlenet doesn’t work for you. D4 is another one i play only on Linux, in thas case because i get some weird graphical artefacts when playing on Windows. I haven’t bought the new expansion yet though, maybe after the holidays are over.
I can’t use my plugins for elite dangerous or extra software, like EDMC.
Why not? The github page even says it will work with wine. I’ve not played ED for a long time. But, I am sure I had EDDiscovery at least working with it in linux a few years ago. Other games like WoW I have external tools that interface with it working fine, some within the same wine environment, some even external. You just need to make sure the drive is mapped (you can always go via the Z: drive too) where the app expects it.
From my experience, I have steam working and pretty much every game I want to play has worked. I don’t play games with kernel anti-cheat even in windows, so I’m not missing anything there. Battle net runs fine even with ray-traced shadows in wow. Pretty much everything else I need works. The only things I miss are the games that are part of XBOX/Windows store, but that’s hardly Linux’s fault. Maybe visual studio too. But I do have the OSS “Code” to cover most I did in VS so…
I have dual boot, I’ve not used it to go to windows in weeks. Almost everything just works fine.
Battle.net for me wouldn’t install in steam as an extra app, it wouldn’t work in heroic, but lutris was happy to do it, and the performance is excellent. Linux mint.
Battle.net games just refuse to work for me, try as I might to follow every tutorial ever (I just wanted to play Diablo IV T_T ). Those features are important to
Battlenet games just working on Linux and not working on Windows is what drove me to uninstalling Windows
And lastly, Windows (even Windows 11), just works with everything. Any software you want, you just install it.
How did you get Mac apps to run and the Metro desktop on w11? I suppose you can get Gnome Web to work through WSL
What I have heard on coding shows is making the Windows game available for Linux is clicking a check box for export/compile for Linux. And companies don’t.
Urm. No. In a few cases thats true, but for most complex systems, or even just ones that rely on non-default engine extensions (a category that includes nearly all games), they really do need work invested into them. Steam and proton are are making this better but its really not at ‘just check a box’ levels of ease yet.
Just conveying what coders say, can’t comment on which engines. But since Linux doesn’t care what binary it loads into memory to execute it doesn’t seem hard to support a translation layer.
I’m very curious what those coders meant! For what it’s worth, what you’re describing is essentially Proton and it has been extremely difficult to develop and requires a great deal of ongoing support. Cross-compiling is super hard, its the reason Android runs on (essentially) the JVM and that windows implemented UWP, and its the root cause behind driver compatability issues. I’m just not sure what you mean, I guess.
I assume since the Linux kernel doesn’t care what executable code gets run in memory, it was an engine that adda info for system call translations. Could be wrong, they did not elaborate.
Straight to advanced Linux. Rip the bandaid off now. It’s only going to hurt more later.
Unless you have an Nvidia card.
I’ve been on linux for years, I work the Nvidia libraries all the time, I alternate booting wayland and X… I even use my AMD IGP as output these days, instead of the Nvidia card.
And I STILL hold my breath wondering if I’m going to get a blackscreen, and have to go into tty mode or boot from a usb stick to investigate and fix it.
I… have had an NVIDIA 2080ti since they are sold (so… about 6 years?) and use it daily, gaming, using it for selfhosting AI a bit with CUDA and… just works, from gaming to tinkering. I don’t get those comments. Sorry you had such a bad experience, it’s not mine.
Same thing here. There was a big update earlier this year that made it so I can use Wayland, where before that, it was impossible. At this point, I can’t tell you the last time I’ve had any GPU related issues. Further, I believe that Nvidia is now working with Linux for driver support, so it should get even better going forward.
IF you are a distro hopper try openSUSE, nVidia maintains a repo on their own servers for the SUSE/OpenSUSE drivers. I have not had any GPU issues for 7 years.
Works pretty well on pop!_os (with X) barring some oddities that I’m not even sure are specific to Nvidia cards (like the compositor losing its shit when I try to pop out a video from my browser and put it over a game’s window)
I’ve been lucky then, only problems I’m having (Wayland + NVidia) are:
- Steam menu corruption, mostly on friends window (can be solved by maximising window)
- Maximising browser on my second screen results in not all the screen being used, but buttons react as if they were using the whole screen (so you’re not clicking where you think you are). Solution is to resize window to maximum manually. Minor annoyance.
Oh and I disabled stand-by entirely. It’s was 50/50 if it would return from it. I think most problems are because I have mismatched resolutions (1080 and 1440).
That 2nd monitor window thing sounds like a DPI scaling issue, especially if your main screen has different scaling than the one causing issues. I get this a lot at work because of my setup and the software I use (on windows btw) and I got so used to manually moving the window and smashing it against the top of the screen to maximize it that I don’t really mind. But maybe the term can help you troubleshoot it further
I thought that too, and things got better when I set 1x scaling on both (it was 1/1.5) but it’s not stopped the problem entirely.
Yeah some softwares are also just bad at handling this stuff on startup I guess. Visual studio fucks up the code window’s scaling all the time for me. UE4 used to literally never open a window with the correct scaling on my second (smaller) monitor window too but it got a lot better with UE5
And nothing sops you from starting a X session for a specific game, anyway
I fear top commenter lost patience just a tiny bit too early
Just out of curiosity, how would one do this (in general terms)?
I hope I never have to because I’m sure I would not figure it out lol
In the screen, where you type your password to log into your computer, there is an option to choose which of the installed desktop environments / window manager you want to use.
On gnome standard login screen, it is down in the right corner, but there are many of this “lock screens” available and each can place the dropdown(or dropup, lol) anywhere they want. Just search your screen where you have to type your password to login for options.
I’ve yet to have an actual game dislike wayland. But you’re right, there is always the option to swap.
I had issues with minecraft, last time, I tried, maybe it just workes by now 🤔 I think it was an issue with java and xwayland
User-friendly Linux distro is a myth.
I guess it depends on the user… I have more problems (if at all possible) configuring and maintaining a windows installation than linux. That’s why I ditched it completely, as thankfully the last thing that kept a windows installation on my PC is basically solved by Valve…
