can we just appreciate
And the cat computer the tiger has.
looks like they’ve already found one mouse!
The big smol
This isn’t limited to Linux. There’s a ton of “why would you want to do that?” Type unhelpful comments everywhere.
When I wanted to write my own game engine in 2015, people just directed me to Unity. Some people even said that unless I want to work for some company that actually develops the engines, I don’t need to learn API or anything like that. It took a while to people to point me in the direction of SDL for input and displaying a framebuffer (back then I used CPU rendering, as almost no one cared about pixel alignment, hence why my engine is called PixelPerfectEngine).
I can’t understand why there’s so many people suggesting newbies something really complicated distro, when all they need is to start with a something really user friendly, like Linux Mint. User can then move on to other distros if they want to when their skills improve. I use Arch BTW.
Because otherwise you don’t have the “true linux experience”, whatever that means.
I work in IT support, and you can’t imagine how completely computer inept the average user is. Like, they start crying when a button has moved 2cm to the side.
These will never be able to use a command line, let alone install their own operating system.
Yet some of these Linux evangelicals think everyone was born with a UTP cable up their arse. So they recommend what they see as “easy”, but don’t understand that it only looks easy to them because of the decades of experience they already had.
As long as the Linux community can not decide what distro is the best for newbies, it will never be the year of the linux.
Gatekeeping is a big problem with anything - especially as it becomes easier.
Film photographers balked at people going digital and about color grading and retouching with lightroom and photoshop.
Car people talked shit about how using an automatic transmission wasn’t really driving.
PC gamers got pissy at console gamers in the 90s and 2000s for just wanting a game to fucking work without having to chase down a conflict caused by a random printer driver that made their game crash in any map with water (my actual lived experience with Battefield 1942).
Lots of old-school 3D printing enthusiasts get upset when new users don’t know when to adjust their pressure advance or can’t read gcode.
Doctors who worked three 30-hour shifts a week in their residency think new doctors should go through the same rite of passage.
Football players who were taught to lead into a tackle using the top of their skull think new rules implemented to prevent neck injuries and TBIs make new players pansies.
We need to understand that part of making the world better is that the next generation of professionals, hobbyists, and people in general will have it easier than us, and that’s a good thing.
Car people talked shit about how using an automatic transmission wasn’t really driving
… we stopped doing that? D:
PC gamers got pissy at console gamers
This is also stupid because before the tail end of the 2000s, the types of games you’d buy a PC for were different than consoles. Not to say there were no platformers on PC, but you were going with console if that was your biggest interest.
true linux experience
gatekeeping nonsense
When I recommend Linux I always recommend Mint because it can be installed and set up by anyone who can read and follow half a dozen instructions. I don’t often recommend Linux though, because the average user won’t even read an error message before giving up.
When I recommend Linux I always recommend Mint because it can be installed and set up by anyone who can read and follow half a dozen instructions. I don’t often recommend Linux though, because the average user won’t even read an error message before giving up.
because it’s pretty hard to recommend anything you don’t use. Seeking advice on a distribution in geek forums, therefore, is a losing plan right from the start. It’s smarter to install whatever you want and then come to the forums with your problems.
“I heard distro xyz is really beginner friendly, i didn’t use it though so i can’t give you much advice on that.” is pretty simple.
Maybe adding “…i’m using distro C btw” at the end if you truly want to feels important.
What’s the value of this advice? You can google the same thing in about 2 minutes. People usually expect real-world experience.
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It gives people place to start with, and since you’re in that comminity you would very likely heard some recommendation. There were a time Google will recommend people PopOS where they’re undergoing changes that makes the OS so buggy to use and not user friendly at all, as a human person that participated or heard discussion about it, you will most likely tell new comer to steer clear from it. Google won’t do that.
“Just google this” is definitely the worst way to treat people who just want an easy recommendation in a sea of choices.
That’s alright, I’ve used them all. Don’t ask me about Fedora cause I will shit on Red Hat for the rest of my life. This also includes stuff like Bazzite by extension.
But distro C isn’t actually easy you should use distro F for a really good new user experience!
Lol
Nah, adding “I use Arch BTW” is something you’re seeing in Reddit all the time. I found it hilarious, didn’t realize how literally it was taken here. I would add that actually I have used Mint for ages, but I don’t want to make you think that I want to feel important.
That was mainly a joke, but i see it’s hard to tell from that tone, my bad.
Cachy btw
Because most Linux users online are posers who only use their computers to run update commands.
Nah, poser was my teenage self installing it on my first gen iPod nano despite not knowing so much as what cat or mv does.
Played lots of Tik-Tac-Toe. Ai played nearly perfect games everytime.
Yeah, I totally agree. The only thing I can guess, aside from people just being assholes, is that someone with many years of experience is only thinking of what they liked after gaining that experience.
For example, if someone learned with Debian and then moved on to Arch, they think Arch is “better” and I think they are telling others to not waste their time on Debian. They are totally ignoring the fact that they spent quite a bit of time learning before they moved on and they are advising that a newcomer skip to what they perceive as “the end.”
because some people are assholes
LFS, Slackware, and Gentoo are the only complicated distros in 2026 and no one recommends those.
I think you overestimate skills of the average computer user. Most of them don’t even know how to install operating system, even that Windows which came with their own computer. That’s why you shouldn’t recommend them any distro which is easy for average Linux user. They need something very simple and easy for the start up.
Even Debian is a lot harder to use than Mint if you want things like the login page recognising your external monitor and realising that it should be your primary monitor before logging in, especially if a KVM means that it wasn’t attached when you first booted. Or wanting that setup to persist after an nvidia driver update. There’s just so much stuff that a user-focused distro can make easy that most distros don’t make easy!
In the mailing list and usenet days, people would tell you to RTFM if your question was answered anywhere in the documentation, and Linux was a thousand times harder to install back then. Never mind DMAs and IRQs, you had to manually write config files specifying the geometry and refresh rate of your monitor.
people would tell you to RTFM if your question was answered anywhere in the documentation
Modern day internet techies will snear at you for using AI assist tools when setting up an environment. But by god, do these agents not save me endless hours of trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls of system configuration.
RTFM only works when the documentation is high quality and easy to follow. Better yet, if you know the manual so well, just link me to the damned chapter I’m supposed to focus in on. I’m trying to set up an *arr stack, not become a sysadmin team lead at a Fortune 500 company.
Never mind DMAs and IRQs, you had to manually write config files specifying the geometry and refresh rate of your monitor.
In fairness, a lot of those config files were relatively easy to write. I’ll take that over hunting through forty different nearly-identical screens in a custom configured BIOS.
You can search the ancient scrolls for an eternity or consult the all knowing shoggoth that may melt your brain or lie.
Listen, I’m not saying Ya hai kadishtu ep r’luh-eeh Nyogtha eeh, s’uhn-ngh athg li’hee orr’e syha’h. But I get it.
K’yarnak li llll kadishtu, ngnah ah’lw’nafh Iiahe azathoth?
More and more people in hooded robes with star-symbols on their foreheads are saying it.
Shoebody bop
that is why openbsd is valid for treating people this way, because they work so hard to keep their manuals high quality
I’ve been using a local Qwen3.8 model as a NixOS sysadmin lately for a non-critical VPS. So far, it has been working surprisingly well! I guess it’s easier for AI agents to gather context when the whole system and apps are defined in code, and immutable when applied.
I’ve been wanting to do this, even as a testbed. I just want computers to do cool shit, and am getting tired of being a Linux sysadmin in my free time. How large of a model do you have assigned to this?
Just Qwen3.8-27B. That little model is surprisingly smart.
NixOS also gives you the ability to roll back to previous config versions. I have not needed to do that (yet), but it reduces some risk.
“Just” and a 27B model don’t exactly belong in the same sentence if you ask my wallet. 💸
Yeahhh sorry 😕
I was fortunate to have bought my graphics card almost a year ago, and for a nice discount (a Black Friday sale, IIRC). I’d love to buy another, but they now cost >2x the price I paid.
FWIW, you can probably run it on CPU if you have enough RAM. I assume it will be really slow though.
Might also be worth trying Qwen3.6 35B-A3B. It’s not as “smart” as Qwen3.8 27B, but can be much faster on limited resources.
I miss the freebsd handbook
you had to manually write config files specifying the geometry and refresh rate of your monitor.
Ahhh that brings me back to 2005 and my first time installing gentoo
Later you had to uninstall pulse audio so sound worked. And recompile WIFI drivers with every Kernel update. Today though I can very much relate I don’t want my OS to need more attention than maybe rebooting for updates once a month. That’s what made macOS successful. Linux Desktop has become usable in that regard, now even vsync sometimes works.
MacOS has the advantage (that the other OSes don’t) of being developed in house by the same company that designs the hardware.
And here I am rebooting windows every few days because it gets unstable. Meanwhile the Linux VM I have running on that very same windows keeps on chugging like clockwork.
I’m in the openbsd mailing list and they still do that, it’s fantastic
A little while ago I observed a discussion between some GhostBSD user and some FreeBSD user and I genuinely couldn’t tell if they were being assholes to each other or if that’s just normal way to handle communication for them
wait you did? aww writing bootdisks was my favorite part of the 286 era.
Wait most people don’t have to do this still?
This is pretty accurate; there are quite a number of furries in FOSS.
have you considered this weird breed of mice which has wings and really sharp teeth
Linux Mint with sway.
you throw the holy hand grenade on it, obviously…
Did you know that 20% of mammal species are bats?
Do you want rabies? 'Cause that’s how you get rabies.
I’m glad I often see people recommending Linux Mint for newcomers. Maybe I didn’t understand the OP.
Yah, like, it’s not perfect, but no average user is going to brick their machine trying to use Linux mint, and they’ll be able to figure out how to do everything most people will want to do.
It is really good for that, a sort of ‘just works’ variant of Linux. I honestly sometimes consider replacing my main box Kubuntu with that, I have a few older boxes with Mint.
Reddit fucking blows
Except the “big cats” are actually hyena and by “hunt deer” they mean that they fight over a carcass.
Tbf hyaenas do a lot of their own hunting. I believe I’ve read that lions more often pillage from hyaenas than vice versa.
Down with lion propaganda, I say!
Install Gentoo, it’s easy and updates are simple
I’ve been meaning to give PikaOS a try cause I’m generally a Debian preferrer, but one thing we really need is a Mint that’s been given the Cachy-style treatment. Most new users right now are doing it for the games, so combining the most user-friendly distro with gaming optimizations would be pretty much ideal.
I mean, my main machine that I play games on runs mint and I don’t have any real complaints about it. Like, maybe I could squeeze a bit more performance out of it, but most things are running smooth enough for my taste.
Plenty of people are more picky and insist on running things at 240 FPS at 4k for a title that just came out, but, I think most people probably wouldn’t notice a significant difference between games on mint or games on catchy. Maybe a few cases where something peculiar about a specific game makes it chug.
In my experience there is a pretty noticeable difference, but it probably has more to do with my specific setup. I was running Debian 13 with Gnome previously, and kept noticing weird performance hiccups in Final Fantasy 16. So I gave Cachy a try with Plasma, and the performance was a night and day difference.
I probably could have tinkered with things and gotten the same results in Debian, but the point is that I didn’t have to.
It’s too bad Ubuntu went to shit, because there is one thing that’s nice about choosing it as your first distro: their version numbers are the date, which makes it really easy to remember exactly when you first started using Linux distros. April 2010 in my case.
But no, just go with Mint these days. Everything good about Ubuntu, none of the bad.
Another nice thing about Unbuntu was that searching for “Ubuntu your-problem-here” usually gave good results. Sometimes it could be a 10 year old forum post that was still relevant.
Searching for “Linux Mint your-problem-here” is more likely to give less relevant results.
True, but Mint is close enough to Ubuntu that what solutions work for Ubuntu will likely work for Mint as well with little or no modifications.
Mint might be easier to recommended in their next major release, but being stuck on x11 when all the optimisations are being made for Wayland (not to mention features a lot of new users might expect like HDR and fractional scaling). They’ve also recently had a problem with shipping outdated packages and leaving the repo/support links as is, leading to users reporting bugs which were fixed months or even up to a year ago.
They’re working on all of that to their credit, and their next release should fix most of those problems, but I’m hesitant to recommended Mint right now
Chat, I need help. Since a couple updates ago, CaxhyOS isn’t focusing on Proton applications properly. If I click on a Proton window, it doesn’t actually focus it unless I first minimise all applications, or then minimise another application. It’s super annoying for alt-tabbing fullscteen games, since I have to go to the desktop before going into a game.
Curiously, I don’t think it happens with Bitburner, which lately I’ve had running all the time. So maybe it’s only happening with the second game I launch at a time? Not sure.
What WM/DE are you using?
(i have no idea if I can help you but this is probably a helpful question for someone who can)
KDE Plasma with Kwin
Didn’t KDE just start accepting vibecode?Try running the applications inside Gamescope. It uses a separate toplevel window that shouldn’t be affected by whatever Proton is doing.
You could also try either enabling or disabling Wayland in Proton: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#Wayland
It could also be a quirk of whatever Proton version you’re using. Try GE-Proton, Proton-EM, or an older version.
Damn. It didn’t work.
Long shot, but Steam games, including Proton games, will typically have the Steam overlay up. I don’t know how they implement the overlay, but if it’s via some kind of floating transparent window, maybe it could interact oddly with focus in Kwin. Maybe try toggling the Steam overlay off, see if that does it?
Alas, that was not the answer
Is this all proton applications or have you only been playing one or a few games lately?
It’s happened with Skyrim, Starcraft I, Omnibus, and Big Walk.
I’ve had more bad experiences trying to enjoy new things in new communities than good experiences. I think that is more to just how shit my luck is, but it still sucks when I’m just trying to enjoy something with others online. :-/
I don’t think it’s just you. That seems like how most people are online these days. Aggressive gatekeeping vs. first timers asking “did I do basic thing right? :3” for pretend internet points.
Thank you. It seems so hard to find like-minded people on the internet for me. I’ve tried and tried and tried over the years and just never felt welcome anywhere online with others who might share my interests.
Couple this with IRL issues finding those people, and it can be lonely at times.
Thank you for your comment, it’s hard to not feel like a “me” issue, but comments like yours help to alleviate that feeling. :'-]
No worries! It’s not just you suffering from that kind of thing. Always happy to chat if you need it
Definitely not a universal experience. I hope you have a better one here!
Are you just new to lemmy or Linux or something else?
Thank you!
I have been here on Lemmy since Reddit killed Apollo (3rd party API fiasco), and for Linux I have been using it mainly for gaming since 2024 I believe?
I moved over to Linux when I saw how good the Steam Deck was running emulators and thought “Why the hell not try it out on my desktop?”.
I started with openSUSE, but learned last year near Christmas that maybe it was a little too bleeding edge for a newbie like me who just wants to game as their only real use case for the gaming desktop.
I’m on Fedora now almost a year in, and am enjoying it more that it isn’t as bleeding edge as SUSE, but still more updated than Debian for my more modern games that I like to try out.
How about you? If that’s okay to ask? I realize a comment section on a meme page may not be the ideal place, but conversations are always welcome. :-]
Oh I’ve been self-hosting since 2009, switched to Linux in 2011, finally ditched Windows as a daily driver last year when I picked up a Legion Go and got it loaded up with steam OS.
I’ve distro-hopped quite a lot between then and now, but funny enough I ended up landing where I started when recommending a newbie friendly distro: mint with kde plasma. That’s my desktop daily driver now. I’ve tried bleeding edge in many different flavors and always end up finding I can start from a stable baseline and customize the kernel and modules as needed. Now I’ve got all my favorite emulators and recompiled games working flawlessly, and I’ve started working on a decomp of my own for an old Windows 98 game. I’ve already successfully ported it and fixed a few runtime bugs, trying to get it fully stable before I start remastering it in godot.
Server-side, I tend to stick with either Debian or Rocky and build on top of those.
How was Linux back in 2011? I first tried Linux in about 2012 or so with Manjaro (LOL) and then moved over to ElementaryOS as the laptop I was trying Linux on was old and thought it would run better. It still borked eventually as did Manjaro, but that was probably more to do with me definitely not understanding anything I was doing!
I think Mint will be my next distro if anything goes wrong with Fedora, which again, would probably be due to my newb skills with Linux more than the software itself. If I wanted to game on Mint, and play games such as the new Witcher 3 remaster or say the upcoming Fable game, how would I make sure it is capable of playing those games with the kernel and modules you mentioned? Just for future reference!
I’m intrigued by the Win98 game! What game is it? I think it is VERY cool that you are decomping and then remastering on the Godot engine. :-]
It was definitely a steeper learning curve than it is today, especially wrangling drivers for audio and Wi-Fi.
Depending on your hardware steam OS might actually be a better fit if you’re willing to do a little tweaking, because of the gaming mode. I find I really enjoy having the ability to switch to a desktop experience when I want it, but dedicate all the system resources when I’m gaming. Really makes a huge difference in performance.
I’ve also been reliably informed that CachyOS is also reliably good as a gaming distro.
All that being said and to your question specifically: there’s a few resources online like the wine community and gamingonlinux that compile compatibility lists and instructions on how to get things working, but lutris is probably the easiest to use and check.
This is the game I’m decompiling
And the repo: https://git.circuitforge.tech/pyr0ball/havoc-remaster/src/branch/main/dev
For a normie like me, i stick with Bazzite.
Bazzite is the best
I’ve been at this Linux thing for maybe 20 years now. I’ve tried more distros than I can remember.
And after running Kinonite and Aurora for almost 2 years now, I tend to recommend any Atomic based distro or spin for newbies. They are stable and solid. While still allowing for users to easily choose their own software and install it with very little worry of burning the house down.
And Bazzite fits right in there. Easy install and it works well for gaming. Or choose Aurora if you are looking for a “regular” desktop experience, (that’s me). And they take care of your video card drivers because you choose your video card when you download the ISO.
Mint is nice and I will recommend it also, but Atomics are the way forward for newbies and those that either don’t want to tinker anymore or those that aren’t at that “Lemme see what it takes to break this” point.
Same here! I started with Lycoris back in 2003, I’m very experienced with many different distros. The universal blue distros (Aurora, Bazzite) are my preference these days. You get the benefits of the atomic host and they aren’t actually restrictive at all once you get comfortable using containers for software that you can’t easily install with flatpak or brew.
Yeah I just booted my main PC first with Gnome Bazzite (oopsies) and then again with KDE version… Works well, no notes. All my games, musics, discs, whatever, works. LMDE is great on my old-ass laptop tho.
I don’t really want to be the tiger but what do you do on immutable distros when you want to e.g. compile a C program from source (say, an SDL game). I always thought being able to easily install popular libraries from package manager a huge advantage of Linux over windows and mac.
Are you asking an average user to compile programs?
If they can’t be downloaded fully functionally from the internet, they do not exist to them.
I bet most newcomers wouldn’t even know what that means
Well I can see a newcomer finding a program they want to run on github and there are instructions for compiling the program for e.g. Ubuntu which if they were Fedora user they would be able to adapt to themselves without much trouble. But since they are using a distro that decided that installing packages globally is bad for some reason they are very much on their own. Sure I think it’s possible and there are methods documented somewhere (and maybe it’s even better practice than installing dependencies from package manager), but it seems unlikely that anyone in the program’s community can help unless they have experience with immutable distros.
I just wonder what are the benefits for which people are chosing distros that so deviate from what most other Linux users use.
It’s easy enough, it’s just a pain in the arse to update anything once changed. The simple answer is that most users never run into that situation. The average Bazzite user would still be on windows if it didn’t actively get in the way of just playing videogames, so they’re not even exploring the Bazaar, never mind compiling something from source. Steam and Firefox come preinstalled, they might install Discord and Heroic, and that’s them set. Immutability means they can just play their games without disturbances.
Bazzite users that do have problems with its immutability just move to a mutable distro, but most computer users who need a mutable distro are already on Linux. The new wave of OS migration is coming from Linux being easier to engage with than ever before and Windows being the worst it’s ever been, not people with a particular interest in the OS and computing. They want something that Just Works without the Apple price tag.I chose bazzite because it had all the gaming shit included and I wanted to get some experience with a known good configuration before I tried starting from scratch. So far I haven’t ran into any problems other than the install script someone made to get my 3d printer working with cura doesn’t work. I think I can manually put the files where they need to go but wasn’t able to figure it out when I tried a few weeks ago.
It’s a good question, and it has a definitive answer: Distrobox.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Distrobox/
You can also run applications from within the container. I have a Debian based container (but you can use whatever you prefer, I just happened to find a guide for getting jetbrains IDEs working well with a Debian one) with the Jetbrains suite installed and all of the development tools I need.
Since getting comfortable using distrobox, I prefer to use it for dev environments even when I’m not using an atomic distro. It doesn’t add any additional friction.
Bazzite can provide a full user experience for 99% of the user base, who just want to get rid of Microsoft. Probably most of them would need to search the web to find out what it means to compile programs.
Bazzite really does “just work”, it’s so awesome.
I wish I had that experience, but I suppose it serves me right by being a complicated dude, I’m used to my stream deck software and I just got myself an xlr microphone, setting up all the broken out streams of audio was a bit of a mess and some of it I have to repeat every time, like Everytime I launch overwatch I have to replumb it to push audio to the game sink instead of system, while all other apps generally know their place on restart, then there was a bunch of work I put towards trying to read from my xlr stream using some plugin off of GitHub but the sandboxing is giving me nightmares because it needs hardware access to the audio stack. I just left that part alone for now because it already cost me an entire evening wrestling it when I was looking to have fun, I’ll get back to it eventually. Meanwhile my Gentoo server, my 2 Ubuntu servers, and my Linux mint machine(for my wife) all were fairly no muss no fuss.
I had the same complaint about auto mounting internal drives and the stupid KDE wallet system, both of those things got fixed at some point. Given enough time I’m sure your issues will be figured out as well. I will say that audio support does really suck at the moment though. I gave up on using my surround sound system for the time being.
