Always remember: Linux is about choice

That is one of the advantages of Linux. Let’s not let it be a liability.

When coming to Linux, it is about “taking that first step”. If you are coming from something else, any distro is a positive move and they are much more alike than they are different (compared to the OS you are coming from). So, start with something safe. I do not use Mint but it is an awesome choice.

Once you learn more about Linux and about what you like, you will learn that you have 1000 choices. Once you know the difference and know which once suits you, you can switch. At that point, you will find switching easy.

The idea that people “have to choose” at the beginning holds many people back.

Any of Mint, PopOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu would serve a new user just fine. I recommend Mint because the UX is familiar to Windows users, it is “batteries included”, and it is conservative (stable). But the others are great too.

One small downside…

This is not in FlatHub and it is not an official part of the VirtualBox KVM project from Cyberos Technology (the folks that make VirtualBox KVM).

This is a project from GitHub user tulilirockz

Well, let’s see. The UK wants mandatory ID because today you can walk in to an hospital and get $100,000 of free healthcare without even proving you are entitled to it. And you can maybe work without paying taxes. And you move freely and safely anywhere in the country.

In the US, if you do not have proof of citizenship on you at all times (and maybe even if you do), you may be snatched off the street, detained, and perhaps even sent to a foreign prison all without due process of any kind.

Wow, now that I say it out loud, you are right. The UK sounds like a hell-hole.

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.

I live in a city where electric vehicles are at least 10% of the cars on the road. I have yet to see an electric vehicle fire, even on the news.

You are accurate. What are the practical consequences?

Gas station fires are devastating. I have not seen one of those locally either so I am not selling my gas guzzler to prevent gas station fires. There are bigger problems.

Implementing old standards does not magically result in unstable software. I can create software today that implements decades old standards using whatever whiz-bang tech is in vogue.

I do lot accept that “old bases” have to succumb to any of the things you suggest either. Refactoring is a thing. You can remove dead code, you can adopt new patterns, you make code modular, you can even extend using new tech if you want.

Linux is 30 years old ( the basic design is decades older ). Should we throw it out? I vote no but allowing Rust into the kernel seems like a good idea. How old is GCC? How old is Microsoft Office? How old is Firefox? This is software you may use every day. Trust me, your life relies on software that is much, much older. How often do you think they rewrite air traffic control systems or core financial software to to make it more “stable” as you suggest?

I mostly hear your argument when devs want to try new tech and cannot justify it any other way. Most often the result is something that is far buggier and missing many features. By the time the features return, the new code is at least as bloated as the original. Around then, somebody usually suggests a total rewrite.

Old architectures are a different story. Sometimes things are not worth fixing in place. In my experience though, this is fairly rare. Even then, in-place migration to something else often makes more sense.

In my view, if you cannot modernize an old code base, it is a skills issue.

Debian-based potatoe Linux is AntiX.

https://antixlinux.com/about/

My guess is that somebody has some important “Windows” application that they need to run that is calling into Cygwin. That means that the proper way to run it on Linux is almost certainly just to port it from Cygwin to Linux native. How do you do this though if somebody else wrote the code?

Pretty funny though.

He is so cool that he is reverse engineering the source and compiling from there.

I would say Mint adds more to Debian than EndeavourOS adds to Arch.

For one thing, Mint has its own DE ( Cinnamon ). You can install this on other distros but it was made for Mint and it is the DE experience out-of-the-box on LMDE.

First of all, this guy is correct that this is a significant reason that Linux is not more popular on the desktop. Desktop Linux is a community of things, not just one thing that people can experience and recommend.

That said, XKCD has a nice explanation about why that will never be solved:

https://xkcd.com/927/

From time to time though, a distro will dominate and. Linux will grow. For a while, that was Red Hat. Then, it was Ubuntu. Both of those moved things forward but were too early to reach mass adoption. There really is no front-runner right now but perhaps one will emerge again and “that” will be Linux for the masses.

In the meantime, things like Flatpak are addressing a lot of the problem. It is becoming realistic for a dev to target “Linux” ( Flatpak ) and have their application run predictably regardless of what distro any given individual has chosen. Freedesktop.org helps as well.

Really though, this problem will exist until most of us ( not all ) agree that one Linux Desktop distro is simply better than the rest and most of us begin to use it. We can then onboard new users onto that.

Sounds like more complexity for the legacy use case in return for less complexity in the expected use case. Probably a fair trade-off.