Pardon my ignorance, fellow Linux user. I just happened to mention the ones I heard of.

Will check these out and include them.

At this point I don’t know if you’re arguing in good faith. Later you’re discuss switching from Edge and not Safari.

Yes, I’m trying to. The point about Macos/Safari was rhetorical sarcasm.

We are of course switching from Windows and the main point is about the OS change, but that doesn’t limit the fact it will make people wonder if their workflow be taken towards it. People might just be used to their tools/apps that Windows provides them by default. And WHY do they switch? One reason is of course, Co-pilot, which I mentioned. So, it implicitly doesn’t just stop at Windows. Those who are frustrated with everything M$, including the apps, will be glad to see that alternatives exist. So, that’s just a kickstarter.

If they don’t like my suggestions, they are free to try what they want.

This is the reasoning behind why app suggestions also can help.

write a comprehensive guide about a single distribution aimed at new users

Why would I do that? If people made up their mind about a distro, they can just go to the distros’ website that have their own documentation and most of them are good enough.

For specific cases, Arch Wiki helps, which I’ve already mentioned with an example.

You have installed. They didn’t have to do anything.

Seriously? Installing a browser is hard for regular computer users now? In most distros, you just go to the App Store, search for the browser or even go to the Browser category and one-click install from there. You seriously think I should include that in the already big guide you seem to be complaining about?

But there are of course people(usually old ones, not to be ageist) for whom things have to be setup. This guide can be helpful for those who are helping setup systems for people like them too.

Because that makes the text coherent. If you don’t decide who your target audience is, the text becomes useless for anyone. This is true of any text. If you write text for someone maximally patient, someone minimally patient won’t read it.

Okay, fair enough.

Thanks, fellow tux comrade.

Duly noted. Someone else also suggested this. Let me edit and include it in the original post.

I could have also pointed out some powershell scripts that help with debloating Windows, but I’ve also learned that Windows has been consistently trying to force bake Copilot into it, and eventually, it might be a slowly losing battle if not already the case.

It could be simplified with an overview at the beginning.

I should maybe have done the overview.

Format USB, burn iso, boot to usb, test, repeat if necessary

Exactly why Ventoy was suggested. To avoid repeating the formatting and burning ISO over and over again.

If they have already made the decision, no reason to list replacement programs

Oh, I see what you mean. I should have asked to skip to Step 2 after 1-A. Edited it now. Thanks.

you might get some better results if you dropped it into AI and asked for a summary.

Yeah, no, a lot of people don’t like slop.

who hates Firefox’s features?

Apparently, a lot of people don’t like AI shoved down their throat.

Yeah, just stay in your privileged cocoon and afford not to be paranoid.

Thank you for bolstering the point, my good fellow.

And Valve themselves discourage it. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.

I’ve pretty much had first hand experiences of Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kinoite, Arch, CachyOS, Tumbleweed, Secureblue, PopOS(which I didn’t even include), but mentioned Cosmic(which I’ve used as a Fedora spin).

The only ones that I mentioned and not used are: Debian, SteamOS and Aurora(failed to install cause of an error). And I’ve only parroted the major descriptions of them.

Thank you, Sir Cricket. It’s only on looking at experiences of people like yours on social media that I mentioned that.

I had an issue with Balena myself too, but at one point, I wasn’t quite sure if it was something wrong that I did, but others’ input like these validated my stance.

You’re writing a guide how to switch to GNU/Linux. If you want to discuss browsers, do it in another guide. If someone wants to switch operating systems, confusing them with browser choices isn’t helping.

Switch from what? Are we talking about MacOS or OpenBSD? Did I say switch from Safari?

Of course, some people who switch from Windows are going to consider if they want to move away from Windows based apps. And M$ Edge being Windows’ native browser is one of them. I’ve seen some teachers/professors who just use the browsers that is there by default.

You seem to be vehemently butthurt over the fact that I just didn’t leave it at the native Firefox/Chromium that a distro might provide. And I already explained my reasoning and I’ve in fact suggested a more privacy-focused alternative. If I suggested something like Brave that has a history of silently injecting affiliate links and is bloated with crypto, you’d have every right to be angry.

I’ve installed Librewolf on some really old, non-technical people’s systems and they’ve not complained. Not one bit. Until I hear someone complain about this affecting their usage, I’m going to keep suggesting it.
And yes, I should have included the bit about enabling cookies so their accounts don’t get logged out.

You’re also saying the guide is for people who recently got interested in switching to Linux. Those people don’t need to hear about Arch.

Yes, recently because of the end of support and enhanced enshittification of Windows. Why would I want to decide who’s going to be reading this? Anyone ranging from having maximum patience to minimum patience could be reading it. And I clearly mentioned that fact about Arch requiring enough time and patience. If I just said, “Hey, just get on with Arch”, you’ve every reason to be concerned about. You just have your own set of people in mind to target. I’m just informing everything. People with decent reading comprehension will understand the implications of what I’ve advised.

A comprehensive guide for that target audience should focus on comprehensively describing one or two distributions targeted at that target audience.

To quote from ‘Big Lebowski’, “That’s just like your opinion, man.”

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

Someone already rebutted you on this on how people will get frustrated with their installation if they didn’t know that HDR/VRR don’t get supported on X11. And I’ve also been talking about gaming. So, yeah. A lot of them care about GSync/FreeSync and 10-bit colour.

Describe Mint in detail, especially pointing out differences they can face between Mint and Windows, and mention that other distributions also exist if they want to try them in the future.

Fair enough point about pointing out the differences. Will try to make notes about that sometime.

I reckon converting would lead to more lost data than just using NTFS partition. This also locks users into using the drive under Linux. I just don’t think this is a useful recommendation for someone who is just switching from Windows.

More lost data? How so?

But yes, it does lock users using the drive under Linux. I’ve tried with some third party tools to access ext4 on Windows and it was really slow.

And I’ve already mentioned about exFAT if they still want to share files across OS along with its potential risk.

No. When someone wants to switch to GNU/Linux, don’t also shove your other opinions onto them. There’s nothing wrong with Firefox or Chromium, which often come preinstalled.

I said this was my experience and there is a reason why I started using/recommending these apps. A lot of people would just simply disagree with you claiming that Firefox or Chromium have nothing wrong. People already hate AI features being built into Firefox and don’t want google’s tentacles around their neck on chromium.

This whole section is way too long. Here’s what it should say: Use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. Or if your entire focus is gaming, use Bazzite.

Again, this has been my experience. And the title does say ‘comprehensive’ guide. Not a quick guide.

No new user gives a fuck what Linux distribution is. They don’t care what atomic distribution is. And talking to them about Arch can only lead to disaster.

I’ve been asked in Bluesky about what a distro is by some people. And I had to explain it to them. So yeah, they do care.

No. Do not recommend unsupported distribution which doesn’t work with the most popular GPU brand to any new users.

And that is exactly what I meant. Are you sure you’re reading it correctly? I included it and explicitly did not recommend it so that people don’t get misled from posts online making them believe that SteamOS will bring about the Year of the Linux and so on.

This section unnecessary since the previous section should already direct the new user to either Mint or Bazzite.

Mint is great. Bazzite is great.

But not everyone will be looking for X11 support and therefore Mint. And wrt Bazzite, not everyone will want to use an atomic distro.

I see you want to simply stuff and just ask people to resort to one or two things. But that’s not going to stop people. They’re going to experiment different things. Hence the ‘comprehensive’ guide. People reading carefully and having good reading comprehension will already see that I mentioned Mint to be the most friendly and popular, and also explained in detail about how one can rollback from a failed state with Bazzite.

That would already point the users, who want things to just work, towards them.

There should be no ‘if’. A new user should not do manual partitioning. If they are interested in doing it, they’re already way too advanced to read your tutorial.

I asked people to ignore it if they don’t want it. And once again, this is a ‘comprehensive’ guide.

Uh? Why? Let them use NTFS if the drive is in NTFS

I’ve explained what goes wrong with it and I’ve also stated for people who dual boot that NTFS can get corrupt and how to resolve it. For those who are only on Linux, I’ve been told that running fsck(file system consistency check) on a corrupted NTFS drive may not go well. Hence the reason I asked them to convert it to ext4.

If I’m wrong on this, please do shed light. I’ll correct myself on this.

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Just rolling with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

It was news. Also, I think the malware package was included additionally to the normal package. They just changed the name by including “patch”, " fix", etc.

Other packages like MS fonts, Google chrome were also infected the same way.

They can both be installed and can be swapped in the log-in session.

I second that you use Librewolf, which is a hardened fork of Firefox.

But beware of using any recent firefox, zen, and librewolf packages from the AUR. They supposedly contain malware.

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Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don’t know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let’s see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.

Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the rpm-ostree install <name.rpm> command. However, Portmaster installs, but won’t work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.

Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing.
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don’t think I’m qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.

And I don’t know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it’s a read-only file system. For now, I’ll have to live without my favorite firewall.