• 17 Posts
  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Obligatory “this some young people shit”.

    Young people do and say stupid shit to come off as edgy and the vast majority of them don’t actually mean it and regret it later in life.

    As to your question, that’s why you date people, to see if they’re good, for you and otherwise. You don’t go “red flag!” -> napalm!!!, you evaluate contexts and repeat occurrences of perceived wrongs.


  • I have a ton of the bottom three laptops, wanna trade for the shitty one up top?

    My thinkpad is also light in the connectivity area and I absolutely adore the $30 dock I got for it. Click the laptop in place and LAN, displays, audio, power, keyboard, mouse, external storage are connected instantly; if I had to connect each one separately, multiple times per day, I’d go insane.





  • this isn’t addressing the technical side per se, but consider your user’s rebelling factor, i.e. them passively resisting using the stuff you provide and sticking with corpo-crap.

    not to go into details, but I’ve got a number of opensource solutions in place for various clients. we have huge some issues with users who need to be corralled and coerced into using the provided messengers, web portals, and such. some resist out of habit, other’s because they prefer the infinitely more polished UX of assorted spyware as opposed to the janky feel and rather rudimental features of opensource alternatives (think gmail vs roundcube).


  • I realize this is a rant but you coulda included hardware details.

    I’m gonna contrast your experience with about 300 or so installs I did in the last couple of years, all on btrfs, 90% fedora, 9% ubuntu and the rest debian and mint and other stragglers, nothing but the cheapest and trashiest SSDs money can buy, the users are predominantly linux illiterate. I also run all my stuff (5 workstations and laptops) exclusively on btrfs and have so for 5+ years. not one of those manifested anything close to what you’re describing.

    so I hope the people that get your recommendations also take into consideration your sample size.


  • here’s a combo reply that doesn’t need to be there, but people have issues reading titles, I don’t know…

    first off, do you realize where we’re at? normies don’t frequent lemmy, you have to put in considerable effort to find it and interact with it. your average lemmyst’s tech expertise is way, way above the average user, compared to say reddit or, heaven forbid, facebook or such.

    I’m not answering dudes (no gender inferred) who are like “X years linuxing”. have you read the title of the post? can you deduce who it’s directed at? you’re seriously suggesting endeavor and arch and friends to people who’ve opened the command prompt a total times of never and don’t understand what regedit is/was for?

    this is a post directed towards people transitioning from windows and macOS. people who have issues comprehending bootloaders and kernels and DEs, WMs, etc - and frankly, it’s 2024 and they don’t need to. people who close the laptop when they’re done and open 'em in the morning, basically people who don’t do a lot of sysadmining in their daily lives.

    when was the last time you handed over a laptop with a fresh install to a linux illiterate being? I did so three times this week, and that’s below average; can’t get cheap SSDs right now to upgrade the the discards we get. my point is, I know what they come back with in terms of problems and grievances and none of them include “spending more time tweaking xorg.conf” or “learning systemd”. they have issues printing and sharing files and laptops sleeping/waking when they’re supposed to and counter-intuitive touchpad gestures and the like.

    I’ve also had my share of devs trying to convert their issued laptops with fully functioning installs to this weird rice after reading DHH’s blog and the amount of lost time and productivity spent undoing that crap is staggering.

    linux has this problem of experienced users raining downright useless and often counterproductive advice on noobs. the shit that works for you doesn’t work for them and you know that; the same way a racing car driver’s advice is useless in everyday traffic


  • this is not a “which distro is better”, this is which is appropriate for a noob. you want something that has a lot of attention devoted to preventing issues and that when you search “distro + problem” you get a solution, or close to it. it’s way more likely you’ll succeed with ubuntu than with opensuse.

    once you’re an intermediate user and don’t need the kiddie wheels no more, you’re free to wander further, replace DEs, rice, switch distros, whatevers. but a noob will have his hands full with the transition and doesn’t need the extra baggage.

    a user doesn’t discern user-facing and system apps, to them it’s a notification asking for a “software update” and that shit pops up daily. the mess that’s Gnome software, a horrid creation that’s OOB configured to prompt for reboots for every tiny little thing, because it updates system shit along with apps, is the number one complaint generator for converts; they’re used to a couple of those per annum (macOS) or per month (windows).

    flatpak apps settings are in ~/.var/app and as such easy to include into backups.


  • I can’t tell if you’re serious, but if so - you’re the literal opposite of a noob transitioning and making their first steps. if you’re like any of the things you mentioned - arch, nvidia, xfce, let alone all of them combined - is something a noob should even entertain of doing, then I don’t know what to tell you.

    the post is aimed at people a) transitioning and subsequently b) doing actual work, based on a bunch of people I’ve converted over. the input of dudes like you, while welcome, is in no way indicative of the path they should be taking.



  • if she can do the blending at home and everything else on the move, your options expand dramatically. namely, you can equip a laptop with an eGPU so you can attach a desktop GPU to it.

    an ultralight used convertible 2-in-1 in the sub$200 region is plenty powerful for everyday use, drawing, whathaveyous. a $50 eGPU slot, a $15 PSU and a used 8 GB GPU in the $100 region will blow out of the water anything new for up to $1K and possibly beyond. double the budget for the graphics and there’s nothing comparable but the top of Apple’s line-up (no drawing on those, though).






  • the distros you tried were… adventurous, to say the least, none of those would even occur to me. the my rule of thumb is:

    1. fedora - for the newest hardware, you qualify big time, especially if RH was an initial choice for you
    2. ubuntu - middle of the road, best for the majority of users, excluding newest or really old hardware
    3. mint/debian - for older hardware

    everything else is for hobbyists and/or special use cases, not for people expecting to do actual work.