I read it as AI somehow making more people sick therefore more of them needing to go see pharmacists, therefore pharmacists seeing more patients

Same, as soon as I have to scroll in order to navigate my tabs I just instinctively go on a closing spree

My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.

The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.

Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.

Arch isn’t a bad choice for a new Linux user who was a power user on Windows. You get to actually know what’s installed on your system which can really help during the inevitable troubleshooting, though it’s definitely a trial by fire when it comes to manual install and setting up the environment.

Recommending Gentoo to a new user though is a war crime.

99% of distro hoppers quit before finding the perfect distro

It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:

Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.

To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.

:w before ZZ just to make sure

Yeah I used it as well, but I was missing a couple of dependencies and realized that I have to move the loadorder files around in order for mods to be loaded. Was pretty annoying but it worked in the end.

me, trying to setup Skyrim mods to play Skyrim CO-OP with friends and constantly failing to setup a mod manager:

I know this is quite unprompted, but did you install correct video drivers? You gotta install proprietary nvidia drivers and its 32-bit libraries instead of nouveau

but NASA isn’t commie, they are glorious capitalists 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪

there’s no way they use commie software

I’ve been using arch for 2 years and I’ve been regularly using the forum to troubleshoot issues. The vast majority of posts, at least from what I have seen and experienced were just of people trying to troubleshoot the issue, asking for command outputs, providing suggestions or just wiki links to people who have missed things in the installation or forum links if the issue was solved previously. Sure there might have been some toxicity in some threads, but that’s bound to happen in an open forum.

Maybe I’m super lucky but that’s my experience with the platform. Most of the toxicity I’ve encountered on the internet when it comes to arch and Linux in general was on reddit and lemmy, where people just try to push other distros down and make their own look superior.

Nothing, I didn’t think much of it or cared if something was open source or not. It’s when I started to become privacy conscious I started to care, though one program in my childhood that I actually thought was cool but not necessarily because open source was 7-zip - it’s free winrar that worked better for me.

Just works is definitely something Linux should strive for, but at least in my experience and in experience of my friends, “just works” has always been a poor experience.

What I’m talking about is how you install a just works distro like mint or garuda, and then some package refuses to work or maybe hardware such as a sound card or multi monitor setup, so you gotta go troubleshooting, which isn’t very “just works”. What’s worse is that some of the issues aren’t talked about/documented, so you pretty much have to rely on making a post and wait for potentially hours for a response to get help. It’s also very hard to troubleshoot the system by yourself if you don’t have experience, as you don’t really know what’s running under the hood as in what came prepackaged by the distro.

A few years ago I switched to Linux and I pretty much was like this: I saw a friend who didn’t use Linux and tried to evangelize it, saying how it’s superior, how everything you do on Windows is doable on Linux, how Microsoft harvests your data and how bloated Windows 10 is.

That didn’t really lead me anywhere except pushing people away from Linux because I was practically forcing it onto them. Average experience would be me helping them install Linux and troubleshoot some things (usually via googling for them), but as soon as they hit some roadblock that required more extensive troubleshooting to fix (say, a rarer issue), they’d just quit, resulting in time wasted on both ends. If you don’t want to drive people away from Linux and be their dedicated tech support for hours and hours (assuming it’s a friend rather than a stranger on the internet), then please don’t evangelize it without being asked specifically about it. It’s okay to suggest, but let people decide if they want to make the switch themselves.

This isn’t specifically targeted at OP or anyone in particular, it’s just that this type of mentality seems to be literally everywhere when it comes to Linux corners in social media and this meme reminded me of it.