Install Gentoo, it’s easy and updates are simple
can we just appreciate
looks like they’ve already found one mouse!
The big smol
This is pretty accurate; there are quite a number of furries in FOSS.
yep, you got to love all the, Arch BTW or Linux Mint FYI.
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?
stop slop btw
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.
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
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.
I miss the freebsd handbook
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.
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.
wait you did? aww writing bootdisks was my favorite part of the 286 era.
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.
Wait most people don’t have to do this still?
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.
Is this all proton applications or have you only been playing one or a few games lately?
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.
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?
Reddit fucking blows
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.
LFS, Slackware, and Gentoo are the only complicated distros in 2026 and no one recommends those.
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!
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.
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.
Car people talked shit about how using an automatic transmission wasn’t really driving
… we stopped doing that? D:
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.
Cachy btw
What’s the value of this advice? You can google the same thing in about 2 minutes. People usually expect real-world experience.
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.
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.
because some people are assholes
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. :-]
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 hunt buffalo, btw
Goddam that almost killed me. 🤣
but are you also a buff anthro lion?
Sorry to be that guy, but arch = deer.
Buffalo = nixos / gentoo / hannahmontanaOS
Ehh, having used all 3 Arch and Nix are about the same level of difficulty, Nix just doesn’t have documentation (or at least didn’t when I was using it). Flakes make it more complicated, but those are 100% optional, and I didn’t use them
Gentoo is a notable step up. Shit actually breaks there, horrendously. Still love it tho.
HMLinux does, in fact, scare me. I’m debating doing LFS, but I don’t think I could handle the difficulty that HML would offer
LFS is actually a pretty good learning experience. But that depends on whether you’re interested in topics like kernel configuration, filesystem organization, the boot components and boot sequence, init system, common app resources, compiling apps, and generally how a Linux system comes together. It gives you a solid grounding that’s applicable to any Linux distro (not super-specific like Arch/Gentoo/Nix tend to be). But it’s pretty dry stuff and you have to be really fascinated by Linux to dig into it.
On the cool side once you get through LFS you should be able to put together your own mini Linux distro and see how small you can make it and still boot and do something useful.
Yeah, I’m very interested in the user side of Linux, less so what’s under the hood. There’s some degree of it there, I do use Gentoo, which is more manual than any other distro I’ve come across, but that’s about as deep as I want to go for a daily driver. I am a little tempted to do LFS on a VM once I have a computer that can handle it again
Sorry to break it to you, but Gentoo is a penguin.
You fucker, we’re all pingus
A quick search did not yield me a Hannah Montana penguin, I’m severely disappointed in this community.
This is more accurate anyway.
Here, have your downvoted. We both know you wanted it.
You don’t hunt buff, buff hunts YOU! (Gentoo almost made me cry back in the day).
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
The landscape has changed a lot.
When I first was trying to get into Linux 15-20 years ago, this is pretty much how it was. I can remember being very frustrated that very few people I encountered seemed to be willing to assist at an entry level; there was all this presumed knowledge which I didn’t have (and if I’d had it, I wouldn’t have been looking for help in the first place).
Today there is a lot more entry-level help and assistance. There are more user-friendly distros and a lot more information online that is accessible to the average user who hasn’t memorised every GNU/Linux man page.
That said, there are still situations where getting help or advice is a real challenge.
Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.
Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.
causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback
Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.
If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.
Yep, that was exactly the case back then, and getting the drivers to work was an awful experience, especially since they really didn’t play nice with the iGPU. I for sure was way out of my depth at that time, with just enough linux experience to know that instead of “dir” i have to use “ls”.
I’m pretty sure that most Linux environments that I’ve been in have had
dirfor a long time.checks
Okay, I’m on my phone right now, so Termux does, and it’s not an alias. The manpages say that it’s part of GNU coreutils, so it’s probably like that on all the distros.
checks the git mirror
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits/master/man/dir.x
The
dirmanpage file was added to GNU coreutils in 1998. Could be that it even predated that—I didn’t go see whether the repository layout changed at that point. But it’s at least that old.Even that was not known to me at that point. most of my knowledge was years old at this point, and i do not want to say that what i knew at that point was even remotely actual.
Not at all my experience, I started using Linux in 2005, and Ubuntu was part of an explosion in available help for new users,
but also many smaller distros had it, like for instance PC Linux which I think back on fondly.
Beginner friendly distros was as much a thing back then as it is today.
The biggest difference is more that Linux has become better, and some things are a lot easier today.
Even Arch has an easy installer now!Ubuntu Forums have solved all my problems, past, present and future.
What gets me is when I search for the solution to the Resistance 2 installation issue on Ecosia, the gamfaqs snobs are like you’re new we can’t help.
Yep, I like the meme but the landscape has changed a lot
