That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.

It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.

You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.

I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.

Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.

Bring back the good old days of ndiswrapper.

It depends what packages you need, and what they have to interact with.

If it’s all standalone then no problem until the hardware degrades.

For example I had laptop (DOS/Win98 ) with a pcmcia network adapter with BNC 50 ohm coax network dongle, 9/25 pin serial/parallell ports, maybe p/s2 port, floppy drive and so on.

I can’t think what I’d connect that to I might have a parallell port on my PC, but on that laptop I think I only had laplink so I’d need a linux app to interact with that. I do still hve a floppy drive somewhere, but how to connect that to my motherboard?

So I’d probably be limited to keyboard and trackball input, and audio + (monochrome) video output.

lemmings on black and white, blurry, slow refresh rate would still “work” unless the hdd got corrupted.

Within a lifetime current gen wifi, usb, ethernet etc may all be as rare as 9 pin serial is today - it’s still around of course, but you cant rely on it.

Beta Testing Weenie cough I mean Best Tech Wizard

+1. and yes use the wiki not the install script.

I think theres value to anyone with a genuine interest if they just have a go at an archinstall - I think they can setup most things of interest in a Qemu(vm), or a spare partition, or even a usb or something. Theres nothing to lose but time. I’d recommend the user knows enough about their disk setup and their incumbent boot manager so as not to screw up their main os. Though i’m very tempted to say that’s a rite of passage.

Of course everyone already has a regular backup(s) which contains some sort of list or script for all the software, configs and tweaks they normally do. If not - well another rite of passage.

Why did the hipster burn its tongue?

I hope the conclusion is that annual notifications work.

wikipedia is too much.

Many microcontrollers can be set up for in circuit programming.

They might be intended for one time programming in the factory, but solder some wires on in the right place and supply the right signal and it can be reprogrammed.

Is that a circuit or a computer?

RTFW

lscpu -C

Have you looked at ubuntu touch supported devices?

That might do some tablets - although i guess they’re focussed on phones - and I think have very little resources.

Yeah interesting - I don’t know how many say flatpaks will work on arm. I guess you’re basically able to run most of what a raspberry pi can or whatever is in debian’s arm repos though.

On lineage you can use auroura store too for a less googley halfway house.

The article mentions waydroid - but it doesnt go into that much detail on it. I find waydroid to be very good on a decent linux pc - but does it work well enough on ubuntu touch. I’d not do anything heavy though like mobile games on waydroid - that’d seem wierd.

Is there any benefit/cost though to effectively running your apps via a lineage v.m?

I’d think if there is it might come down to some wierd security thing but probably at cost of startup time or performance, or maybe even power consumption.

I’d like a comparison to lineage OS. There seems to be a very short supported device list for ubuntu, but maybe thats how they keep the install process simplified. Cyanogen always relied a lot on xda-developers community i think - so many unofficial devices supported just by enthusiasts willing to risk bricking devices.

I recently upgraded to a (used) sony XA2. it was a right pain to install lineage os - way harder than previous samsung S3/4/5 type phones. It was mostly just trying every goddamn usb port on every pc in my house until finally one with which ADB would actually flash the bios.

I’ve never bothered to researach exactly what are the security issues with lineage OS , it’s something where a decent bit of journalism might help. I’m not very into many apps though so i suspect that lowers the risk to me.

I’m happy with lineage os too.

I’d like a comparison to lineage OS. There seems to be a very short supported device list for ubuntu, but maybe thats how they keep the install process simplified.

I recently upgraded to a (used) sony XA2. it was a right pain to install lineage os - way harder than previous samsung s3/4/5 type phones. It was mostly just trung every usb port on every pc in my house until ADB would actually flash the bios.

I’ve never bothered to researach exactly what are the security issues with lineage OS , it’s something where a decent bit of journalism might help. I’m not very into many apps though so i suspect that lowers the risk.

Unexpected but entirely welcome.

People do forget this all too often.

Cheaper stuff, use more , value less.

I don’t know what a “synapse link” is i’m sure we’d not be allowed access to that; though I can think of at least one manager who would have parrotted that for a few monts if they’d heard it; “data lake” was also one of those for a while, it seems to have given way to “lakehouse” now. I just want to put on concrete boots, jump off the boat and hope it’s deep enough.

For me, at work it’s more MS sharepoint and MS dynamic (+oracle clod shit of course) that fk me over on a daily basis - that’s possibly due to the way our IT people don’t seem to know how to use them or set them up - and won’t let us query(just SELECT) the dynamics tables directly using SQL for whatever reason. (i suspect we have to pay MS to acces our own data). And of course things like MS excel being used to mangle data by default all the time - yeah i know always use power query import . . . just everything takes six extra steps and the easy way is always the worst way.

W10 is mostly okay. I mean it’s slow and hard to use, blasts the cpu fan all the time, is still annoying with updates, and I have to “right click open with” to open anything in the application that i want (even when there is only one native appllication for the file format). You get used to working around that shit.

That is just not true for sharepoint and other MS apps, it gets worse, and as soon as you think you get used to a workaround for one thing, something else changes or an old thing resurfaces. and dynamic has just “upgraded” the colour scheme of the status colum so that there is no contrast between the background and the text. black text on white background, good enough for every other column, but no upgrade that one to black on dark blue, thanks bill you’re a F-ing-C. how do they screw up things like that as a bajillion dollar company.

So I was going to say that W10 is more or less stable and it is other MS stuff that I hate more. that is probably true. but actually sitting down and writing out the above, W10 is still pretty horrible to . . . whether it’s our IT or MS itself, it’s shit.

I much prefer my home linuxes, it is just as stable (for me) - and just so much easier to use - and most of all it is quieter on the fan. So much more relaxing.

W11 had better be “not worse” or i’ll probably have to quit.

On debian i just comment out all except the main official repos that I want. As long as you have the main deb and security and updates ones i think you’ll be fine.

I tend to go for flatpak or appimage for anything not in those. I’d avoid any testing, unstable , backport sources unless you know what you’re getting into.

I guess you’re maybe using aptitude to avoid cli, but i’d recommend at least looking at the /etc/apt/soures.list file, and any stuff in the subfolder /etc/apt/soures.list.d

This is the list of where it looks for software. If it can’t connect to any of those, It’ll probably warn you about an unavailable source.

https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList