This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn’t get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.

What’s nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn’t constantly changing a million packages a week that you don’t even know the function of.

Gotta wonder how many state actors have been using it for years.

Yes! The whole “lawyers are evil money grabbers” is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it’s unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation’s actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.

They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.

Oh right, sometimes I forget people have computers other than old thinkpads

IDK if thats true in 2024. Debian 12 isn’t much harder to setup than mint or Ubuntu, and the version of gnome it ships with is perfectly fine. I’m not a beginner anymore, so maybe there’s something I glossed over.

Oh wait, I just remembered the thing I glossed over. Needing to install sudo would definitely throw a beginner for a loop. (Iirc, you only need to do that if you give a root password during install). And that’s the problem with trying to learn Linux. Someone will tell you the thing is easy, but they forgot about some arcane step

The APA “welcomes” the warning, so I’m eating my words. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2024/06/social-media-youth

If the major psychological/pediatric organizations come out in support of this, I’ll eat my words. [Edit] words: Eaten

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2024/06/social-media-youth

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no.

The problem with the cli is you need to memorize a whole bunch of new words and syntax in order to do anything. You also need to memorize what not to do so you don’t accidentally erase your system while using rm or cp or whatever.

Even something as simple as copying and pasting, which works the same in every single other program has new rules in the terminal. I mean, think about that. If you’re just learning bash, then the first thing you’ll be doing is copy pasting commands. But even that has the hurdle of 'oh, I guess this is the one program where ctrl-c means something else

Like, how do you look at sudo, cat, man, and apt, and think ‘yeah that’s intuitive’. And forget about multitasking, new users won’t even know how to quit most programs (is it ctrl-q? Just q? Esc? Ctrl-c? Ctrl-d? Wait how do I undo that, is it ctrl-z? Wait where did the thing go

I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.

The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.

It’s not logical, it’s ideological. It’s the ideology that allows corporations to run a dangerous experiment on the public without their consent.

And where’s the LIDAR again?

My Thinkpad touchscreens were useless until I switched to wayland.

The only drawback is I have to manually edit the qgis desktop file to start qgis with x11 instead of Wayland. I had to do the same to a couple other random experimental apps, too.

The two genders: engineers and architects

This would’ve saved me so much pain if I knew this when starting Linux. Sooo much pain