It starts to feel a bit like going to university. Maybe 10% of the ones you try out will be total misses, maybe even discourage you on the search. But chances are, 90% of the options are perfectly suitable for your uses, and everyone will end up feeling a bit of faithful loyalty to their destination of choice.

I mean, isn’t that how package managers work too? Just relying on the default repo of each one, since most users won’t work with new sources.

When I tried it, it didn’t feel all that great for gaming. Several games I tried had issues, and whatever tools would make it more compatible weren’t readily available for me. When I eventually tried CachyOS, much of that was fixed; my theory is that it was using more recent, less proven packages for some feature support.

I’ve been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; “Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?”

Joke’s on me, the motive is hardly there - and it’s a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.

I’m glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn’t specifically built to rely just on tip jars.

The problem is, I feel like more recent MBA lessons tell people that the “rising tide that lifts all ships” is a business death sentence, for reasons unexplained. Many of them now would rather sink the whole ocean if they believe that their business will sink a little bit less.

I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you’re making very much makes sense, but it’s so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.

I’m sure many people could point to hundreds of dangers around open-source programs relying on government funding. Yet, I can’t argue that it seems to be a necessity.

My current plan is to try, how you say…CachyOS?

Mainly, I want a clearer idea of what the “fork bases” are, so that when I inevitably run into some problems, I can google “How do I prevent window docking in Plasma” or “How do I prevent window docking in Arch”. Not, “How do I prevent window docking in ObscureCachyFork875”.

I think I’ve had several attempts on “simple” distros, and unfortunately I think the trend of trying to simplify things for me has just cut off customization options that irk me to no end.

Note that my post said “old drives” - plural. Mint was being installed on a secondary, formatted drive, and refused because that drive was not GPT-formatted (that record exists outside of the filesystem formatting). At the time, the BIOS was not set to force UEFI, so this was Mint’s decision, not the BIOS’s, and I don’t understand it. I left Windows alone on a different drive.

Believe me, I did plenty of reading up on BIOS UEFI settings just to resolve the issue. I still don’t claim to be a master, but I at least know enough to express how annoying the reconfiguration can be - independent of which OS you’re choosing.

I believe your anecdote, but my Linux Mint install also took multiple days, BIOS visits, and lots of documentation searching. It’s a factor of how much the OS makers anticipated the specific hardware configuration and how out of date the partitions are configured.

My main point is that both can be frustrating, and there’s nothing consistent.

I’m not sure what you mean by an existing Windows install. If you mean going through launch screens on a new device that’s configured the OEM setup, then no, I have experience (granted, now in the past) with doing Windows installs from blank drives.

Not to make a “Gotcha”, but Linux Mint was the other distro I tried, as I’ve complained about before. The first release I tried, which was less than a year old (on a 2+ year old computer) didn’t even run the wifi, audio, or bluetooth drivers correctly.

And, I had that same type of UEFI setting on Linux; Mint wanted to install on a GPT drive record, when my old drives (on Windows) used an MBT. It’s a conversion process both OSes will help with, but Mint gave some errors with it, and it was honestly easier to use Windows’ tools to get it done. Not even sure why Mint was insistent on it. Oh, and a mostly distro-agnostic annoyance: While attempting that conversion and making extra space for the GPT format, I ended up wiping more of the drives than needed during conversion because the partition manager used on several distributions uses bad messaging, and incorrectly refers to an individual partition under /dev/nvmesda0# as a “device”.

Installing any operating system is often a hassle. This comes in part from my own experience trying to understand the unguided partition recommendations of a Bazzite (basically Fedora on low level) install. I got through it, but it was certainly no easier than Windows.

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:

And yet still manages graphical corruption from sleep, and input lag in games on a tailor-built ISO!

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.

Oh, no argument from me on that. And it’s horrible that Microsoft is starting to make people choose between having a secure system and avoiding their adware bullshit.

Much as I always feel Microsoft has made some horrible missteps around automatic updates…I also think many many users are vocally and unabashedly following horrible update policies.

The biggest one is “Fuck you, Microsoft, I don’t ever want to update.” A simple truth about Windows is that it is currently the most popular operating system in the world. If that OS was Unix-based, the resulting truth would still be true: The most popular OS is going to be the most common target for vulnerabilities, hacks, malware, and exploits. Far more than an antivirus, keeping that computer up to date is the most important step for keeping it secure.

This is true not just of computers used to manage your bank account and nuclear launch codes, but of the swarm of “convenience” computers sitting inside a campus network that could spread a virus to everything on the Wi-Fi.

So, looking at this image, it’s a shame on Microsoft moment if this update came from nowhere, or they once again blatantly ignored the configured update time. It’s a shame on the campus moment if someone was repeatedly closing the “Time to update” popup.

If you want to support that, a good first step would be to improve TFM, because much of it is far too dense to actually read. Technical writing, knowing how to summarize things through human knowledge, is a critical skill for tech businesses, and most open-source programmers lack it.

I guess a better metric might be the Steam Hardware Survey?