You and me brother.

Which machine did you choose? I went for the Lelit Bianca, never regretted it.

Don’t know if it’s better, but for free, Firefox Focus includes an ad-blocker for Safari.

My ADHD brain panics if I need to catch a scheduled train and if I’m not actually there at least 1/4h in advance I melt into a puddle of anxiety.

But city trams and metros are absolutely fine. If I don’t catch this one, there’s gonna be another one in a few minutes. No worries.

Busses that are scheduled every half hour at most drive me mad tho. Did I miss it because it was 10 mins early because fuck schedules or is it gonna be 15 mins late?

Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).

I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.

But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.

Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.

Same. Old DB2 base from the 80’s that was migrated to Oracle in the 90’s then to Postgres in the 2010’s.

And the people there know all the column names by heart 😅

Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.

Yeah there’s no confusion in French because “étage” literally means “floor above ground”, so calling the ground floor an “étage” makes no sense. It’s called “rez-de-chaussée” (“at street level”) or RDC for short. Same as “sous-sol” (“under-ground”).

Most proper denim pants are sized in inches, even from non-US countries.

But of course vanity sizing is a thing so a size 36 is closer to 38in unless explicitly specified, and most online retailers provide true sizing in cm anyway, so there’s that.

A legitimate salvage

It’s like scrolling on your phone, where the content on your screen follows exactly your fingers movements. On Wayland you can do the same with a trackpad, like for example when scrolling, switching workspaces or invoking the activities overview. It feels much nicer, more immediate and more natural than on X.org, where gestures are just triggering a shortcut after a set distance.

X is not going to die, X is already dead.

(great write-up btw ;) )

“Finland happiest country on earth” factoid actualy just statistical error. average Finn is happy 0 times per year. Happys Antti, who lives in cave & is happy over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more “mainstream” ones?

Puppy Linux’s main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn’t need to be installed to run. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.

Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most “universal” documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.

Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.

I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.

Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.

Thanks for this great writeup about what makes Ubuntu its own thing rather than standard.

Thanks, if you know who to lobby for it, please do ;)

I’ve updated my post with “I heard conflicting stuff over the Internet and now I’m scared” and an introduction. Those are legitimate questions for people who, like me, do a lot of research before committing to something. Some of the discussions here and in other communities might scare people off, as they might feel they’ve done the “wrong” choice or are afraid to do the “wrong” choice.

I’ve ran my gaming pc on Manjaro for about 2 years. There were too many issues to list here, but the one huge problem for me for new users is updates.

You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly. This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro. I mean, those posts are great, but all other majors distros update without intervention.

Also, I always updated from the tty as there’s a weird “never update inside Gnome” policy.

I’ve edited and merged the Snap paragraph with Flatpaks. After all, they serve the same purpose.