Yeah, I'm always envious of people who can make sense of the info they find on the Arch wiki and forums. For me, it's just a patchwork of solutions I found. Every time I add one, I pray to the computer gods that it doesn't worsen my situation.

we shouldn’t expect new users to be looking for a new hobby.

Infinitely this!

Yes, it's super cool to have control over your own damned machine but for some, the computer is just the thing the lets them work, porn and game.

OK, you explained it well to me with the car example. I am not a car person, all I know about them is they can usually move, but I am not really interested to learn more.

I run slack, alpine, freebsd, deb and mint for the gui testing on various servers personally and professionally.

I recommend kubuntu.

Hmm, when a car has problems, you go to someone who fixes that for you. People under 60 usually don't do that for PCs.

I don't recommend Arch to newbies, but I do prefer it because it's more robust: other distros patch stuff to make it easier, but those patches mean things are farther from the tested upstream version. Arch doesn't do that as much so I run into fewer bugs.

But this view might be outdated. I just remember that before 2017 (when I installed my current Arch system) I constantly had problems with dist-upgrades in Ubuntu

That's actually really surprising to me, bazzite is fairly plug and play, and Debian while slow to update is still very stable. What kind of issues were you running into?

You might just have learned more about how stuff works by now. Arch is very much “you need to make every choice manually, but then you've seen what choices exist”

Try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

It's practically Arch minus elitist culture minus breaking all the time minus having to manually manage anything and everything. Also, it has properly set snapshots by default, so almost any screw-up can be reversed.

I actually thought I was having issues with Debian. I was only getting like 6 - 8 updates when I tried to do them, even after a longer period of time. I kept searching around how to update Debian properly, but found no good answer.
Then something like 2 months later there was a large number of updates at once. So it is working then, huh.

Just FYI, it doesn't need to be like this.

Funny meme btw lolololo

… why are you like that?

Sorry, linux is full, go away.

I can sort of understand this instinct. I am not opposed to new people using linux but I think the obsession with “growth” is the wrong way to think about software tools.

The way most companies make adoption of their software system grow is by making it more convenient to use, then exploiting network effects to force more users on to their platform. For the vast majority of people “convenient to use” means a locked down environment where they have little or no control and don’t have to make technical decisions.

Right now to use a Linux OS you are going to have to do a little bit of learning and make some decisions. The requirement that you actually think about an OS for a few minutes acts as a significant barrier for a lot of people, but removing that barrier results in a product that does not allow the user to control their software. Which I think would be bad.

The internet was a great place before the everyone started using it and the corpos got onboard. I think that's where that attitude comes from.

christ, imagine being so sad a person you build your special personality around a friggin OS.

but when I was on a Linux binge on Youtube, some people in the comments there genuinely just don't want other people to move to Linux.

Probably Microsoft bots attempt at keeping Windows alive.

If Linux becomes common, then they won't be a 'special haxor' anymore. Can't be having any of that you know.

Over the years, I have seen less and less of the 'RTFM noob' attitude and Linux forums becoming more welcoming and accepting of new users. But assholes still exist and won't ever go away. But they do make a good match with the newcomers that expect to have everything work just like it did in Windows or even Mac because they'll be damned if they are going to learn something new and different. And yes, they exist. Why those people even try Linux is beyond me, but you do run into them if you spend time hanging out in forums.

How mismatched for it to cause problems or for it to be enough for people on the internet blaming it on that? In both cases I don't know tho.

I haven't visited the issue in a couple of years so hopefully that's not a thing anymore

Currently my displays work fine too, different refresh rates and bit depth (but not really, dithered 6 bit or smth).

I've seen people being shat on for crazy things, my personal favorite is when the only solution given to a problem is buy something better

LSF is where it's at. it's the ultimate distro.

(kinda joking. kinda being literal as a joke.)

Quiet majority of Linux users when someone starts with Arch:

Audio! I went from stereo to 7.1 and got this intense loud buzz that wouldn't go away! (Fedora KDE). Drove me nuts. Spent hours trying every dang thing. Finally connected it to a Windows machine. Same buzz. My woofer had just ate itself. Nothing to do with Linux at all.

My theory is they want to help and believe themselves capable but when someone asks a question that they don't know the answer to, they either have to admit to themselves that they don't know and aren't as capable as they thought or they have to find a way to blame the person asking for help. Mentally the path of least resistance is to just blame the user and it's also not exactly false to say it's the help seekers fault, it's just a bit of a dick move and unhelpful.

Flatpak is a godsend when you don't want to manage a mess.

Yep, know about that. Set it up back when I tried a few Debian-based distros with Gnome. I'm using Plasma with Dolphin as my file manager now, which has its own thumbnailer that relies on icoutils. I've got the whole thing set up and enabled, it just... doesn't work.

I find that it depends on how niche the distro is.

Somewhat obviously, niche distros don't have as many resources out there to begin with.
This also means you're unlikely to be told to research yourself.

But users of niche distros also made a conscious choice to be on that specific distro and therefore tend to be more enthusiastic. Both, about helping others who made the same choice, but also about fixing problems or at least documenting a workaround for the distro that they plan to stay on for the foreseeable future.

Well, and due to survivorship bias, folks on niche distros tend to also be Linux experts, who can solve virtually any problem, given enough motivation.
If you find a kind soul, they will walk you through hell and back, which is worth so much more than any documentation in the world.

oh, the computer runs when it has to do something like big compression jobs (which reminds me i have a few "linux isos" that need recompressing into a more space-saving format), and i save on heating.

I'm personally allergic to doing anything to my distro other than installing games and VSCodium.

Its why I barely understand the X11 v Wayland discussion. I have no idea how to customize my Linux set up, if a troubleshooting step says "May bork computer if done wrong" I just reinstall the Distro or try another one. It takes like 5-10 minutes to install Linux on most modern computers

To me this is a feature of Linux. "It works on my distro" means I'm using that distro now!