I’m the kind of user that spends a whole weekend to fix a driver issue for an obscure 2000s sound card, then proceeds to erase the entire process from memory to repeat it from scratch on a new system next year.
I’d say a tinkerer, somewhat of a control freak, and i like the novelty of trying more obscure things. I really liked NixOS, but i didn’t like the systemd part of it. Wanted to stick to Runit-only so went back to Void, but at this point i decided to try GNU Guix. Who knows, i might end up liking Shepherd better than Runit. I think Guix has to be the most obscure distro that i’ve played with so far. Luckily the documentation is great, cause the community is small so it might be tougher to find help from the community sometimes.
Android 16
Ohhh, Google shot in the lungs
Believe it or not, immediate execution :3
That’s right! It goes in the Linux hole.
Gentoo, OpenRC, BSPWM, Nvim, Librewolf, Ortholinear Keyboard.
Casual AF. I’m here to get shit done, not take any shit from my OS, not pay permanent rents to run my computers*, and do things my way. Protecting my privacy, fulfilling the promise of general purpose computing, and lack of DRM are just icing on the cake.
*Totally happy to donate on the regular to the open source apps I use!
I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver for browsing, writing scripts and to slowly customize my own work environment.
I have a Linux Mint DE partition that launchs directly to Steam for gaming. Tried Bazzite but the installer failed to find my SSD.
I also have a small partition that has an image of the LMDE .iso. It saves me from needing to grab a USB drive for when I inevitably fuck up the first two partitions and need a live USB environment to fix things.
I keep all my backups, music, work and sensitive data in a separate partition that’s encrypted so I can easily get back to work after any fuck ups. I’ve had of practice fixing my own fuck ups over the past year.
I have no idea what I’m doing, but also not enough fear to be careful. Running Bazzite is for my own good.
I know you’re not impressed that I use Ubuntu but it’s not Windows, and I can’t be bothered to learn a damn thing about how to operate a system.
I wish Linux distro devs would interview you about your experience. If the goal is wider adoption, we need to understand how to make it friendly for real. Your opinions are very valuable.
I used to use ubuntu but stopped bc i couldnt really game without dual booting to windows anyway.
Would you recommend ubuntu now? I know linux gaming is in a much better place, it just wasnt user friendly as an OS back in 2010
I’m on Kubuntu and loving it. The most I’ve had to go for a game on steam is change a compatibility tool (literally right click and click a checkbox and dropdown). Final Fantasy XIV (MMO) was mostly straightforward, but I had very specific mods and 3rd party tools I wanted, but they all work still after going down a mostly straightforward rabbit hole. Not a lot of weirdness there, just learning how to mod on Linux.
There’s no reason to choose Ubuntu over Debian these days, and plenty of reasons to use Debian over Ubuntu.
For context, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so most of the stuff under the hood is the same, but Ubuntu keeps forcing background decisions about things that are not always in the user’s best interests.
As for user interface, if you’re used to Ubuntu with Gnome, try Debian with Gnome. If Ubuntu with KDE, try Debian with KDE. That way you get a familiar desktop environment and a sensible base OS.Could you translate this to stupid please
I’m no expert, but here’s my working knowledge: If Debian is the engine/frame of the car, KDE and Gnome are different versions of the body/interior. KDE looks more like windows, Gnome looks more like macos or andriod maybe? Standard Ubuntu does aftermarket mods to Debian with Gnome.
That’s pretty good.
I’m gonna piggyback your analogy:Ubuntu is like an aftermarket car company that put in their own engine. They’ve started putting locks onto things, and when you ask them to install certain options, they say “yes, here you go” but secretly put in a worse version of that thing that only they can fix.
Then you take it to a shop and say “please fix this part, it’s one of these” and they say “that’s clearly not what’s in here, you’re on your own”.KDE and Gnome are like different consoles and steering wheel, if you could bring those with you into your next car. If you’re used to where the buttons and knobs are, you have the option to bring the whole thing over into a different car.
So if im most used to windows i should try debian with the kde stuff? Whats wine in this metaphor? Is that the same thing as kde?
I’d say Debian with KDE would perfectly fit your use case and level of experience.
Not sure this metaphor can be stretched enough to shoehorn wine into it.
Wine is just an application and it’ll work in any desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, etc), and it allows you to run Windows applications. Think of it as an application that lets your system pretend it’s actually Windows
(and for the pedantic neckbeards: yes I know this sounds like I’m calling wine an emulator, which it isn’t)
Debian is your most basic Cheerio cereal. Cereal in a bowl with milk and a spoon. Ready for you to eat.
Ubuntu came along and is all that plus berries, bananas, sugar, and many other toppings. They also give you a fork and knife if you want to eat using those as well as a napkin.
If you like bananas on your Cheerios and nothing else, I mean, sure you can go with Ubuntu and get bananas on your Cheerios with milk and a bowl and spoon, but many people prefer to just go with Debian and then add bananas on top on their own because they don’t want everything else that comes with it. They may not hate it, it’s just going to be a waste of food to get all that extra stuff and have to remove it after the fact.
For some people that only want bananas, they’ll go with Ubuntu because adding bananas on your cereal involves opening the banana and using a knife to cut the banana into slices. Ubuntu may use a machine to cut your bananas into perfect, equal slices, so some people want to go with Ubuntu for those reasons, whether it be because they’ve done the legwork or because they did it in a way that is the most clean method whereas you doing it ended up with you needing to redo the process 3 times and now you have little bits of excess bananas from your past failed attempts and not doing the best job cleaning it up.
TL;DR: Ubuntu took Debian and added a bunch of stuff on top of it for their users. Some people like Ubuntu because of that and it makes it easier because Ubuntu included everything whereas some people want the source Debian because they will add their own stuff on their own the manual way.
I gamed on it when Proton magically made it so games I bought on Steam worked. Otherwise I just gamed on an Xbox before that. I only recently switched to popos, (still gaming on it). I started on Slackware 3.4 and switched to Ubuntu in 2006-2007. I think as long as you aren’t on the LTS version, you should be good. In any case, it’s not a permanent decision and seems like every distro is crazy fast at installing these days. Worth a go whatever you try or where ever you land.
Currently running cachyOS and have almost no problem running games besides having nvidia 1060 3GB so just old hardware not for modern games. But I can probably run anything and what’s not for Linux just use wine, that works much better now than I remember. Also I’m very much a noob that just can use a search engine.
Shoots you and rolls you into the pit of bodies.
See? That’s that I’m talking about. Good ol’ red-blooded Linux user.
If Ubuntu works for you then keep rocking it
That’s Linux and I say it counts :3
You’re not meant to operate the system. That’s what the operating system is for, silly
i thought it was to operate the computer
Lubuntu brother reppin’
My poor 2011 laptop is begging for the sweet release of death, but not before Linux keeps performing CPR on it.
My university had the head of cyber security for a bank over to talk about pen testing, and one of the questions he got was “What Linux distro do you use at home.” He said Ubuntu, because he wants a system that’s stable and has support. If it works, it works.
insanely based
Um, the POSIX kind?
Are there options to choose from?
a few
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg and more.
https://distrochooser.de/ & https://distrowatch.com/search.php can help choose.
I appreciate the effort, but I meant for the question “what kind of Linux user are you?”
Ah. Heh. Same as gist as my reply to the OP.
Spent so long reading the other replies about kinds of distros the linux users use, that possibility escaped my attention.
After breaking opensuse tumbleweed I ended up on bazzite KDE. I think if I leave bazzite it will be for another immutable.
I’m a Mint user, because I don’t want to use Windows 11, and I realized that about 95% of what I was doing on Win10 was FOSS. The only thing I miss is Notepad++.
good time to go exploring others… e.g. emacs1, neovim, mcedit (from mc (midnightcommander)), geany, kate, nano, or even go crazy and write your own (… no kidding. I did, last year. fin)
1 probably best avoid emacs, unless you want it to take over your computing and your life.
Writing a good text editor is something to be proud of, so that’s awesome!
I don’t use any version of Commander on this machine, and I don’t plan to. I used the original from Norton back in the day, but when Windows 3 hit, I used Norton Desktop to improve it (basically into what Win95 became), and never looked at a Commander interface again - if I want two side-by-side directories, I have a windowing system. I’ve tried emacs and vim briefly and they’re well beyond what I’m ever looking for. geany is an option, but gedit seems to be doing the job. I’ve never heard of kate before this thread, I’ll have to look it up. Never looked at nano, but I heard of it.
Based on the interface and what I’ve needed it for, gedit works, and so does Sublime Text. Honestly, Notepad++ was/is my third-most-used text editor on Windows, behind M$ Edit (I have FreeDOS Edit in DOSBox) and M$ Notepad (replaced with xed, except the .LOG function, which is sorely missed). Npp is the one I use for editing HTML/XML, Excel functions, the odd Excel macro; and subtitle files, transcripts, and scripts (where line numbers matter and I need fixed-length lines). FocusWriter is #4 on both OSes.
Writing a good text editor is something to be proud of, so that’s awesome!
Well, proud of my accomplishment as I am, …
I never said it’s good.
It’s merely usable.
And even that may yet prove debatable. ;)
I don’t use any version of Commander on this machine, and I don’t plan to. I used the original from Norton back in the day, but when Windows 3 hit, I used Norton Desktop to improve it (basically into what Win95 became), and never looked at a Commander interface again - if I want two side-by-side directories, I have a windowing system.
First time I recall anyone responding to my suggestion of mcedit in a way that looks like they know what I’m talking about. :)
gedit seems to be doing the job. I’ve never heard of kate before this thread, I’ll have to look it up.
Kate is to KDE, like gedit is to GNOME. It’s been a while since I used gedit, but Kate recently [(well, a couple years ago]) inspired me to add one of it’s nice features (the minimap) to my emacs.
Never looked at nano, but I heard of it.
M$ Edit
Just remembered, there’s now also M$'s edit (iirc that’s the name “edit”) available for windows, that’s basically notepad for the terminal user interface.
My “fin”'s similar (and simpler ~ because I’ve yet to get back to padding out its [even basic] features), in that it also uses cua keybind model (ctrl+s = save, etc).
You should be able to use Notepad++ with Wine.
The only way I interact with Wine is through Bottles, honestly. It just doesn’t seem worth the trouble to go through all that for a text editor.
Totally fair. I generally try to avoid it when I can. And it’s pretty rare that I can’t find a native Linux alternative that works for me.
I have it running with Wine on LMDE6. Only thing that doesn’t render properly are the individual document minimise/maximise/close buttons.
It works, but it’s a lot slower and clunkier. And looks worse. Probably could improve with some tweaking, but I don’t use its special features and addons that much, and gedit works quite well for me.
I’m surprised it has that much impact. I try to avoid wine when I can, but when I have used it I haven’t generally noticed it slowing anything down.
You could try Notepadqq, which is similar and runs natively on Linux
Edit: just learned this isn’t actively maintained anymore :/
Honestly, I think gedit might be the best play.
True, or Kate, definitely solid
I’m using Mint too, and have tried installing Notepadqq and Kate. Notepadqq just crashes immediately even with the fixes I found online.
Kate is really good, just be aware that the version in the Mint repo doesn’t save the session automatically. It can save it, but only manually, and only for saved files. It doesn’t recover files that haven’t been saved yet like Notepad++ does.
That’s good to know, ty for the info. I’m a nvim guy so these reccs are from limited experience, i appreciate your firsthand knowledge
I was Gentoo for a long time. I ran LFS for fun in college. I optimized and over optimized until every bit had purpose.
Now I use mint because kids take up all your time.
I run whatever works for me. Been through most of the big variations (Debian, arch, rhel, suse), and a lot of flavours. Every once in a while I run into some issue. Sometimes I manage to fix it, and sometimes I end up reinstalling or distrohopping
So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.
*Matt Daemon
He was called Meth Damon during the Breaking Bad days. Great actor though.
May have started that way, but he’s legit a good actor in his own right
He’s unsettling in all his roles and that’s a mark of a good actor. If you feel uncomfortable just because they are present in the scene, then they are doing their job.
