Well, for example, upgrading between releases is done by manually editing sources.list and some other steps, and there’s no easy tool for that. This is not difficult, exactly, but for people with little experience it’s a bit daunting. Debian in general isn’t the most new user friendly distro, in my experience. Distros like Mint and Ubuntu make the Debian experience slightly easier. Not that Debian is some esoteric system.

Well, what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle, maybe, but if you have prior Linux experience, you’ll be fine.

“I don’t blame President Trump. I love him.”

He said they’d be sick and tired of winning. I guess he was right.

So, hey, Americans, your president is openly threatening genocide. You might uh, want to do something about that. Just a thought.

GNU Guix System is independent I think. Interesting distro, but not for the faint of heart.

There’s the Mandriva successors: Mageia, OpenMandriva Lx, PCLinuxOS and ROSA Linux. As far as I know, they are completely independent projects, even if they started as Mandriva forks.

It may be a lot to take in at first, but seems to me you’ve got it!

A repository (or repo) is a server that hosts program files for your distribution. Distributions host their own repositories from which you can install software with your package manager, like APT or DNF or others. If you only install software from your distribution’s repository, there’s likely no clashes with software versioning and dependencies, and the packages are about as reliable as they can be (which doesn’t mean there’s never malware). If you add third party repositories for software not available from your distribution’s repository, it’s more likely there will be issues, because the distribution doesn’t guarantee the packages work well together.

For example, Debian and Arch don’t retrieve and install their software from the same source. They have their own servers (repositories) hosting software compiled to work with their particular distro and to be used by their chosen package manager.

Flatpak (or Snap or Guix) is a separate package manager that handles it’s own dependencies and doesn’t clash with your distribution’s own software manager.

Does this help?

I want to be mean to her, but unlike her compatriots there, she has at least some insight. Good for her. Now stop being an idiot.

What a nakedly thin skinned and insecure little man.

Very little. If I’m being honest with myself, I have a slight preference for how DOS/Windows handled mounting drives. I’ve never been a huge fan of the UNIX directory structure anyway. I’d like to see some sort of filesystem hierarchy reform for a clearer format.

But of course, using Linux is a relief in most ways. There’s no going back.

Flash was trash that made the web almost unusable for a time. I was glad it died. Shit never properly worked anyway.

Oh Kent, no. No Kent, no. Kent.

Perhaps Kent, being such an apparently difficult personality type, is just so lonely he has to think at least his chat bot loves him.

Kent is obviously a talented programmer, but that guy doesn’t seem to be right in the head.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.

I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.

On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.

Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!

Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.

Is SteamOS even available for desktop PCs yet? I don’t think it is.

From the SteamOS page:

We expect most SteamOS users to get SteamOS preinstalled on a Steam Deck or device that incorporates SteamOS. The only devices officially supported on SteamOS right now are Steam Deck and Legion Go S. We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other AMD powered PC handhelds has been improved.

Until this changes, which I think is in the works, I recommend using some other popular distro.

Right? Like, this should be obvious to everyone. Why don’t people immediately see this? It’s crazy.