O I am very well aware that switching is possible. I have been running on Linux before going to Mac, I started with running Linux on my desktop 28 years ago. That was well before Fedora was even around…
What made me switch after 9 years of running Linux to Mac back then was the amount of time I had to put in system maintenance.
I never had the desire to endlessly fiddle with how my desktop looks. I want a system that works.
But with Apple Silicon, it is really hard to run anything but MacOS. The problem is that Apple is starting to restrict more and more that I can run on my Mac. And that is an issue!
On paper maybe. Until you want to compile software … if you want to support software on Linux you have to deal with all those different distributions and packages. And FlatPack, AppImage and Snap did not solve the problem.
As a example darktable.
1 download for Windows.
2 downloads for MacOS - 1 for each architecture (and then there is a build for older mac on this forum)
1 download on the website. But if you follow the link to the OBS, you find 34!! packages.
I am very sorry, but 35 packages is insane. Yes it is automated.
But still that is a lot of wasted time and resources IMHO.
And this is only for darktable, there are 1000s of packages out there.
So what are good criteria to choose your distro, in your opinion?
I still prefer Arch Linux. Cutting edge system software, and most applications are kept well up-to-date. I don’t understand why system maintenance is such a concern for many people; it is a breeze for me.
It’s more of an issue to the beginner that almost none of them have been updated in a while. We have alternatives, and we know that there are appimages, or, even if one has never used git before, we can find out the commands to build our own. And, we are people who know that this is the world of FOSS, that much of it is voluntary, people have a life and sometimes can’t keep such things up.
It is not the world of just clicking on an install screen.
Of course, if I had just installed Linux Mint Mate, and wanted to install, say, darktable, I need go no further than the one of the easy to use gui package managers. Only to find that they off V4.something (or did when I last looked) and I’m not going to get the latest goodies I’ve been reading about. Again, there are voluntary chains involved, and as “old FOSSers” we understand, that, and work with and around it. It takes both willingness to do that, and some experience and learning. This is not what everyone in the world wants to do.
That’s fine! There’s one great thing: the best software for Linux is often available for Windows/Mac too. But not the other way round.
With flathub and one of the gui installers it really can be for a lot of programs. Flatpak just needs to get it’s act together with file pickers, program styling (libre office looks horrific) and other interoperability issues.
I have no problem with that, and actually on Mac I install most of my software via homebrew, a terminal based package manager. So it will not hold me back.
But I would like to for my family to use an operating system that is not spying on them as well. But without me running a side family business in it-support.
I see you didn’t quote the part where I said, “it’s easy to read” right before that. I can’t verify whether it’s a thing or not, I haven’t tried them all out, and know nothing of code. But it is something oft spoken about or talked about within the Linux community. I can verify that, because I read it. And that does impact decision making.
Of course we know this, but a new convert from Mac might not. So again, it does effect decision making. How many distros, or articles about distros, have I seen where they market them as having software x preinstalled, or available on their distro, but not on others, due to different package management? Many, rightly or wrongly. For instance, a selling point of all the many debian based offshoots is just how many apps they have available.
It seems like you are looking at things through the eyes of a seasoned Linux user, whereas I am presenting the case of a first timer.
We don’t use Cisco but Palo Alto, but both are supported by openconnect, which is what I use.
(Not linking to the Arch wiki because I run it (btw), but because their documentation is stellar; it’ll be the same for any distro using NetworkManager, which is most of them, these days.)
'Algebra?’ said Madam Frout, perforce staring at her own bosom, which no one else had ever done. ‘But that’s far too difficult for seven-year-olds!’ ‘Yes, but I didn’t tell them that and so far they haven’t found out,’ said Susan.
I suspect the reason why there is so much chatter “on the interent” about the differences between the distros is not rooted in their fundamental differences but in the demand for articles explaining which distro you should actually choose (and the clicks that can be earned there…). Those articles often outline how each distro uses which package manager but these differences are neglible for 99% of the users. Which standard apps come preinstalled is a bit more of a factor IMHO, especially which file browser is shipped as switching those can be a pain in my experience. But that is also highly personal.
In the end it comes down to look, feel and many other non-objective factors. I think it is healthy to pick what one likes at a first or maybe even third glance and not fuss too much about what would be “best”.
About 20 years ago, my first distro was OpenSUSE. Then, at some point, I stumbled upon Debian, spent quite a while using Arch Linux, and for the past few years, I’ve found what’s, for me, the perfect balance: Fedora. And for the past six months, I’ve been using Fedora Kinoite.
Sadly, in the days of AI, and the speed websites can be generated by it, finding authoritative sites and articles is becoming more difficult.
Even with ad blocking and privacy extensions, one seems to end up with a mass of search results. My wife just bought a new tablet and was looking for a screen protector, besides Amazon (which I won’t use), the first page of results contains a morass of sites whose names I don’t recognise.
I’ll never forget the time when I was working as a co-op student (engineering) and learned how to determine how much liquid was in a cylindrical tank mounted on its side, from the height of the liquid in the tank. Of course, I forgot how to do that long ago.
Retired, I now find my mood to be somehow linked to the state of my hobby projects. For instance, I’ve recently spent a lot of time figuring out how to reliably produce a simple parallelogram for a diagonal brace in a carpentry application. During that endeavor, which was highly frustrating given the small set of input variables I had to work with and my fundamental lack of math skills*, but once I understood it my mood improved significantly, as corroborated by my long-suffering wife. Of note, during the endeavor I came into possession of a solution generated by Gemini that 1) I could not understand and 2) turned out to be just slightly wrong. That was entirely unsatisfying; it wasn’t until I received a trig-based solution from someone who apparently teaches math that included a literal ‘out-of-box’ step that really contributed to my learning that my soul-soothet-ed…
*I have three university degrees in computing, with only four math courses total. In hindsight, not my best idea…
