The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
I’ve been recommending Endeavour because its “Arch with a nice installer” and it seems to go down well with modestly technical people.
Especially since they can then pick their DE.
Please do not recommend Arch-based distros to newcomers. At some point, something minor or major is going to break, and they’re not going to be able to fix it. Give them something Debian-based to learn the ropes (or not). It’s not going to break down on them as easily.
As a new user I tried all the “easy” distro and they all just fucked me over really hard, they favor ease of use by restricting the user so anytime I went to do anything I just kept running into repeated minor problems. When I tried endeavor it #just works and with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know so there is no reason to not reccomend a Linux distro that doesn’t hold your hand unless there is something suepr specific the person needs that for some reason is the only thing capable of doing it reasonably well.
Never ran into anything like that. I’m hungry for more details.
It sounds you’ve never done that yourself. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not trivial either and may require use of a boot stick, dealing with disk encryption through the terminal, chrooting… and that is not the kinds of hoops I’d expect a newcomer to have to jump through just to fix their system.
I dunno man, less shits broken here than on Ubuntu.
Debían based except Ubuntu, Even Ubuntu flavours like kubuntu are fine just not Ubuntu.
I’m out of the loop, Ubuntu has been broken/unstable?
No but they have been steering towards practices that makes people uncomfortable.
They are slowly replacing part of their ecosystem with proprietary modules or modules with permissive license and people have seen this behaviour enough to know what the end goal is
*yet
How old is your system?
I’ve put endeavour on a bunch of desktops and various thinkpads of a variety of vintages, including very modern.
I dunno man, it just works. I buy conservative technology choices and vendors and shit just works.
The hardest thing in my life is getting WWAN to work reliably OOTB on thinkpads with cellular.
Edit: No, the hardest thing in my life is asking people “Is wayland in the room with us right now?” because I’ve yet to have a machine running wayland.
You misunderstood my question. How old are those installs? Chances are they’re not very old.
Arch-based systems like EndeavourOS are rolling releases with minimal testing. They’ll work fine at the start, but errors will accumulate over time. Breakage is not a question of if, but when, and when that happens, Arch assumes you’re a savvy user who knows what youre doing and able to fix your stuff. If you aren’t (and newcomers to Linux normally fall into that category), you’re going to have a bad time.
Whatever the hype around Endeavour or CachyOS is: I wouldn’t recommend any of them to Linux newcomers for this very reason. Instead, it’s wise to give them a stable Debian-based OS to make themselves comfortable with Linux. Once they have arrived, they may or may not experiment with other flavours of Linux.