Someone using Linux Mint would be a good guess as I don’t think they default to Google.

Then you use DuckDuckGo like I do. Not every search engine has gone to complete shit. Google was just an example. Obviously it’s not the current meta in terms of search engines.

Are you honestly telling me there aren’t people asking basic questions that could be solved with a google search? Don’t get me wrong the kind of question you are talking about does exist, but that’s now what I am discussing here.

Yeah unfortunately this is a real issue. I also think it’s an issue that experienced users don’t really want to help newbies, especially those who can’t or won’t do research by themselves. Ideally experienced users would be more helpful, but at the same time that isn’t their job. There are many who learned Linux more or less on their own so it’s understandable they don’t want to help given they didn’t use any help when it was their turn. I think now that the community is growing this might start to change a bit, as the newcomers are more likely to have had help and be willing to help others.

I sometimes try to advocate for using Linux, and I don’t mind giving friends advice from time to time. That being said I don’t want to be stuck answering stupid questions all the time that could have been solved with a google search or a YouTube video. I have my own stuff to worry about both technical and otherwise.

That’s why I think teaching new users how to access resources like man pages, gnu info pages, google, and so on is the correct approach to take. It is empowering having the skills to work through your own issues. That being said I also think it’s important for experienced people to give advice on more complex questions.

I don’t think this is strictly true. They do tweak parts of the kernel such as the CPU scheduler to deal with new CPU designs that come out which have special scheduling requirements. That’s actually happened quite a bit recently with AMD and Intel both offering CPUs with asymmetric processors with big and little cores, different clock speeds, different cache, sometimes even different instructions on different cores. They also added ReFS not long ago, which may have required some kernel work.

I can understand though if they have few experienced people and way more junior devs. It would probably explain a lot to be honest. A lot of Microsoft stuff is bloated and/or unreliable.

Yet it doesn’t work on Sync for Lemmy

To be honest it’s probably the only program actually doing something at that moment

Yeah exactly. Chances are it would have worked provided they installed CUPS - which isn’t hard or slow on arch after all it’s not Gentoo. But if it didn’t at least you have defused expectations while showing you are still willing to try. Something like: I don’t have it setup on this laptop but I will try and get it working quickly, but no promises.

I would have tried anyway. Sometimes Linux works better with printing than Windows, some times the other way round. It just depends what the printer is and how you have your system setup.

NixOS isn’t immutable though. It runs on normal writable ext4 by default.

Also, you say it’s more reliable but you can get bugs in anything. Version x.y.z of the kernel can have bugs whether it’s distributed as part of an immutable core or as a package.

The whole point is you can roll back if something breaks.

It starts getting blurry when you get to things like systemd and over-reaching when it gets to desktop functionality.

Systemd is a core part of the system as init always has been.

Honestly though I don’t think you actually understand the difference between declarative and immutable distros. Unlike what some people think they aren’t actually the same thing. It would be nice if people stopped limping them together.

What’s wrong with being British?

Afaik Nvidia Optimus works fine on arch if setup following the wiki. It’s mainly other distros that have Nvidia problems.

Gentoo isn’t immutable or declarative afaik

What is a better implementation than NixOS? Guix is held back by the fact that it’s GNU only by default, and that it also compiles everything on your machine by default. You have to go out of your way to add a binary cache and speed up the install. That’s after you go out of your way to enable non-free packages so that your hardware can actually work with the right firmware. If someone made a version with those enabled by default things would be way quicker to setup and use

That explains why Nix despite being parallelized takes a long time to install packages and rebuild the configuration.

The first i7 came out like 15 years ago now. i7 came out before i5 or i3 as well.

You can also rollback changes on arch using snapper.

How unstable is the unstable branch exactly?

Says person who thinks Visual studio is the best IDE