Last Post About Linux For Awhile
My Linux rant has generated more feedback than anything I've written here. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it's a subject a lot of people in my circles feel passionately about. What is a little surprising is how civil everyone's been: my approach to linux is a bit, shall we say, unorthodox, and I expected some heated comments about my intelligence and perceived naΓ―vete; with one or two exceptions,1 all the feedback has been sympathetic and earnest offers to help.
After my follow-up about linux mint, kami sent a kind response:2
Hii! I just read your response post, and honestly - fair enough.
Desktop Linux isn't hugely popular or backed by giant corporations, so there's often cases where it doesn't 'just work'. Maybe submit a bug report to Linux Mint if you can still reproduce the problem. I totally get If you just don't want to deal with linux anymore, but it would be a nice thing to do if you have the time/patience. [...]
I hope you have a great day/night and I'm sorry things didn't work out with mint.
No worries and thanks for understanding. I get the impulse to want to share the thing that works for a lot of people, and I don't mind the advice. I'd just suggest trying to be more thoughtful about your assumptions.
Mark also sent a follow-up reply:
I think you're holding it right; this is how it feels.
Sorry if my reply came off in the same vein as Kami's. I really empathize that the experience isn't seamless. [...] I acknowledge that this is why it's been "the year of the Linux desktop" for ~15 years+ .... it doesn't get the UX love it deserves.
I think there are some good trade-offs on the other side of the tunnel, if you do ditch windows for good.
You didn't come off badly, and sorry for not giving a more personal response. I appreciate the empathy. I'm still on the "ditch windows for good" train, for practical reasons (can't afford a new computer) but now also ethical ones: Microsoft has always been bad, but their desperation to stay relevant in a rapidly decelerating tech landscape has pushed them past the line of corporate greed and exploitation I'm willing to tolerate. I knew this day was inevitable, I knew it would be hard, but at this point I don't think there's any going back.
If people really want it to be "the year of linux on the desktop"--this has been my opinion since first sampling knoppix in the early aughts and no one has ever liked it--then they should make it look and behave as much like windows as possible.3 Lift as much design language and terminology from windows as you can legally get away with. Make it easy for people to switch. Power users can still have their niche distros for 1337 hackers, but "windows without the evil" is what the average computer user wants, and if encouraging and advancing general purpose computing is the goal, the main distro should try to be that. Make it easy to download and use windows programs through emulation (or whatever WINE is.) For the differences that are too fundamental to make it windows-like, have some sort of on-boarding process or tutorial to explain them.
There's an outsized contingent of FOSS enthusiasts who define themselves as anti-user-friendliness, who wear the arcane knowledge required to use linux as a badge of honor, whose personality is defined by the credo "if I had to learn it, you should too"; and sure, that's an opinion you can have, but if the real-world outcome you want is the normalization and mainstream acceptance of FOSS, copying the proprietary software and making it easy is how you accomplish that. If you don't want that, it's okay, but don't be hurt when people aren't interested in what you're selling. I had a back-and-forth on the fediverse with 20000lbs_of_Cheese that I think illustrates this dynamic. 20K#π§ read my post about mint and was trying to help. They suggested a hard drive failure was the culprit; I said I didn't think so, because the hard drive has worked fine with every other OS I install on it. They responded:
π§: Other Linux distros? What filesystem is being used? Ext3, Ext3, BTRFS, NTFS? There's a ton of variables!
π¦: Not going to get into all that, thanks anyway.
π§: Wait, why not? If you want help I'm happy to, the file system being used the most basic question we can start with if you're needing to reinstall weekly!
π¦: Normal computer use shouldn't require knowing what a "file system" is. That's a thing that should just work behind the scenes. I'm not an operating system developer, so I have less than zero interest in debugging file system errors. I have better ways to spend my time.
π§: All this seems important for game dev, I would think you'd be more interested in where the games live and function (or not, as the case may be)! Again, I'm not a dev, not a programmer, how files are stored on a disk or disc is just a part of learning to use a computer!
π¦: I don't program in C or Assembly, I've never had to think about file systems for any of the games or programs I make. I use development tools that take care of all the low-level stuff for me. My interest in computers is using them to play and to make things. I have no interest in the underlying mechanics, I just want it to work. It doesn't mean it's bad for you to be interested in that stuff, it just means we're different and that's ok.
π§: [...] I'm some dumb shit who couldn't get through school this stuff isn't as hard as game dev!
π¦: My problem isn't that it's hard, it's that it's boring and tedious to me. I don't like doing it. I work full time, I want to spend my free time doing things I enjoy.
For the record, I didn't get through high school (I got my equivalency degree 2 years after not-graduation) and I don't think either of us is dumb. Our brains work differently than other people's, and also differently than one another's. If I cared to learn the nuts and bolts of linux, I could, and if 20k#π§ cared to learn how to make games, I'm sure they could. We just have a different set of interests and priors. I think our differences are cool, people in general, and we should try to understand and celebrate them.
Speaking of differences, Sylvia reached out to cheer me on and share her own recent experiences with two different takes on linux:
Like you, my sister and I also decided to install Linux this weekend. She went with Linux Cinnamon Mint and things went pretty smoothly. Iβm on EndeavourOS, which requires more command line β but I went in expecting this since I wanted to tinker.
Have you considered trying another distro? Maybe itβll be less frustrating.
Then, after reading my follow-up about Mint:
Hi Matt, nevermind my prior email! I saw your update.
Wow, what an experience with Mint. We'll keep that in mind and keep an eye on it...
Thanks for sharing your experience! I look forward to reading how it works out for you. EndeavorOS is one I haven't even heard of, and I'm enjoying reading about your different setups. I did end up using a different distro, which I'll discuss in a bit.
Honestly, I would probably still suggest mint as one to try if someone asked. My own experience was horrible, but I'm obviously an extreme outlier, because plenty of people use it without the issues I had. There was some X-factor, some fluke of hardware and software specific to my setup that ended in catastrophe, but there's no reason to assume it'll happen to someone else. Also this was a couple years ago, so whatever it was might be fixed now. Still, first impressions are important and the impression mint made was bad enough that I'm happy to look for something else. But there's certainly no harm in trying it as long as you back up any important data, which people should be doing anyway. I hope it works out better for your sister than me.
Finally my pal and fellow raccoon on the fediverse prokyonid read about my plight and offered some advice. Based on my needs, they suggested the same setup they use (on an even older laptop than mine), Debian XFCE. I installed it yesterday, and my experience so far has been pretty good.
I've always sort of assumed that there's something wrong with Debian that makes it unsuitable as a "daily driver" OS, that it must be a nightmare to use, because why else would they need to build Ubuntu on top of it? And why would they then need to build Mint on top of that? Surely all this wouldn't be necessary if people could just use Debian, right?
Well, I'm here to report that my experience with Debian so far has been extremely normal. Having just experienced the quirks of XFCE with Fedora, I was quickly able to replicate the UI changes I needed to make, and much about the experience has been exactly the same.
Sidebar: some people have rightly questioned my decision to stick with crusty old XFCE instead of a sleeker, more popular desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. The reason is pure practicality. I researched the options, and my understanding is that XFCE is the best compromise between performance and usability. I want to squeeze as much performance out of my 10-year-old laptop as possible4 while still having a relatively normal desktop experience. I could go even further down the rabbit hole with DSL or Puppy Linux, and if I had the time and inclination to tinker maybe I would, but for my personal needs, XFCE seems like the best bet. Sidebar over.
Debian has fixed a lot of problems I had with Fedora and introduced a few new ones. Windows no longer have the annoying tooltip in the middle! The normal version of VLC works! Archipelago is working! I haven't yet actually started a game, but I think every element of my streaming setup is working, which is a big relief. It's still not recognizing all of my gamepad buttons, but I can work around that.
One annoyance is that I'm back to having to type in my password every time I install software or make a change to the system. Thinking back, the Fedora installer gave me the option to create a "root account", which meant every action I took had "super user" privileges by default. I didn't have to type "sudo" before every action and I only had to type my password at login. Debian didn't give me the option on install, but it may still be possible to set it up that way. I'll have to look into it.5
Neither Fedora nor Debian has an "app store" in the modern sense, so that experience is unchanged. Instead of duke nukem forever I'm using apt and synaptic, which should be familiar to anyone who's used mint or ubuntu. My understanding (per 20K#π§) is that it'd be possible to install the ubuntu software center, but it's not really designed to work with XFCE and would require installing a bunch of dependencies I don't really need.
I'm becoming more used to installing from the command line, and I've been finding software by basically googling $thing+Debian. Which, if I break it down, that's how I always found software on windows too, it just feels natural because I have a 20+ year history and already know the programs I like. I'll establish a repertoire with Debian too, it'll just take some time.
I was surprised to learn that Debian doesn't include drivers for Bluetooth or transferring files from Android, both of which are daily essentials for me. But googling and installing the required software didn't take long, and so far, the bluetooth seems much more stable than it did on Fedora. This might simply come down to Debian having a more conservative attitude towards software updates. The version of the driver in DNF might have been updated in a way that breaks compatibility with my hardware, and apt might stick with a solid, tested version that's known to work for the most configurations. I'm speculating about the driver, but I've learned this is a core philosophy of Debian, and that alone is a reason to pick it over Fedora, in my opinion. I've always been anti-update.
Anyway, that's a lot of words about linux, and I think I'm done writing about it for awhile. Huge thanks again to prokyonid and everyone else for your advice and support. Feel free to keep sending feedback, but I'll probably respond via email. Barring any catastrophic failures, I'm ready to settle into Debian and go back to using my computer to do things, instead of doing things to use the computer π¦
Edit: I should cap things off with the traditional screenshot. This is the excellent Bluecurve Revival theme. Look how pretty!
Click here for full size.
The least helpful response was from fusednix, who writes: "just get a mac :p". Thanks, clearly the only reason I haven't bought a new computer is that I simply haven't tried hard enough to decide to. I'll get right on that.↩
All correspondence in this post has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.↩
There are distributions with this exact philisophy: a few people have recommended ZorinOS and PopOS, and if I found the design language of Windows 10+ at all appealing, I'd probably check them out. I admit that I'm making things harder on myself by insisting on a "classic windows" experience. If you're an average Windows user who thinks 10 is fine but wants to jump ship before 11, perhaps one of these is right for you.↩
I mean, I'd try to squeeze out as much performance as possible no matter what. That's just the kind of critter I am.↩
Some security nerds may take issue with this, and if you have evidence that suggests training myself to robotically type my password over and over will make me more secure than thinking carefully about what I do, I'm happy to take a look. (edit: I was wrong, use a password. See Stuff I Was Wrong About.)↩