You have to understand, it just wouldn’t be fair to put inclusion over exclusion ! You care about equality, don’t you?

“If we allow your flag, then we have to admit also other similar political flags, both supporting and opposing diversity.”

Consider the following: no, they don’t.

To answer the main title question: it definitely can get better, especially if you’re using common hardware with maintainers working to improve the code to handle them.

I’m one of the people with a mostly smooth Linux experience on my devices (I have similar values to other nerdy programmers and naturally purchase more similar or popular computers/parts, and I haven’t really had brand new bleeding-edge computer parts, so that might give me better odds at a smoother experience), no weird audio/WiFi/GPU issues that you often see here. The only issues I have are so inconsequential they’re not worth mentioning. And I’ve used the two OSs you’ve used.

If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

That’s alright, and I’m also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.

I’m not sure if you’ve come across it yet, but there’s a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.

Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.

Desktop Linux is far from it’s only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can’t simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!

I don’t care much about the OS people use

On a surface level, same. On the other hand, I do believe that more users, if combined with certain design and documentation choices, can enable more contributions and fixes and software support, and I believe this has already been a huge factor in recent improvements to the Linux experience like Proton.

Can’t possibly be more vulnerable than Windows

The linked article provides many examples where security techniques lag far behind Windows. Vulnerability isn’t as simple as being ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘less vulnerable’, it’s a complex concept, and both GNU/Linux and Windows have design decisions which make each better than the other in various ways. We need to understand security in a more nuanced way than “x is better than y” if we actually want to protect ourselves from threats.

A Linux installation can be set to run root with no password or prompt. A Linux user can choose to never update their software - one could argue that Windows forced OS updates are an improvement here. The argument that the typical user has more technical understanding is a weak defense (as in, we really really really should not rely on that) and also irrelevant when we’re talking about Linux gaining a wider audience.

Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.

Average users aren’t installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.

A few years outdated, but relevant: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

Much better than I’d expected, that’s great to hear! The minor bugs are always annoying, but like you mentioned, the speed boost hopefully outweighs it.

Definitely update us on UE, I’ve haven’t explored the EU or Unity on Linux, and it would be nice to know if they work, because “you can use Godot” doesn’t work for everyone.

Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.

Is this just an automatic suspend after inactivity? Because if so, I think it the inactivity timeout can be disabled in the settings menu, as a workaround until you can figure it out.

I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.

Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it’s a nice experience.

Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.

Yep, crack economics. Give product out for free until they’re dependent, then ramp up the price.

Here are three variants of Linux Mint with different Desktop Environments: (click their example image to make it larger)

• Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition) - the default, I’d use that until you have a reason not to
• Linux Mint (MATE Edition)
• Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)

All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don’t like something about Cinnamon.

Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think “wow, this person’s a hacker”, where they’ll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the “best of both worlds” midpoint is a dynamic WM? I’m not sure. hyprland is an example of that.

Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you’re doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I’d also make a list of things you’ve installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they’re all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.

The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they’re both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.

Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn’t have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.

Yeah, props to the Nanoleaf team for helping the author out. Win-win. The author says at the end that they intend on sharing it around more once it has more polish, so I hope they upstream it properly and demonstrate to Nanoleaf that helping out volunteers helps their product reach more customers. (I know it’s iffy to suggest it’s ok to neglect Linux and let us sort it out ourselves, but if we get open-source drivers in the process with the help of the company, I think that’s a net win)

Good to hear. I was very very slightly disappointed when I read Pelican was a Python tool. I’m also a Hugo user.

Take pride in a minimalist webpage.

Last week I was thinking of making a meme pointing out how all the famously ultra-minimalist http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and its many rebuttals are really put to shame by this one. Also, you’ve reminded me of some of those little webring banners people would put on their site bragging about being minimal, which are fun.