Debian is amazing, but you’re right that they are far from noob-friendly. I recently switched to Fedora due to the fast availability of new packages (e.g. KDE Plasma 6.1 with fixed Nvidia drivers), and even the arguably easiest option - Ublue images - had some issues I wouldn’t have been able to fix without deep Linux experience.

But there definitely has been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and I’m sure that will continue. We just have to be mindful of not participating in creating the next Microsoft. Ubuntu is already seen as the default Linux distribution - the further it gets entrenched, the worse for all of us.

But why move people from Microsoft to another company that is implementing more and more user-hostile “features”, when there are alternatives like Mint? If all the new Linux users are herded towards Canonical, it’s just giving them even more power to extract profits in the future.

It’s far easier to have them start with a community-led project on the same basis. Imagine Ubuntu being enshittified and forked - how should they decide which fork to use, and how can they know it will still exist in a couple of years?

So you’re saying we just have to add a “horse farm” minigame that has to be played every time the units are used?

I don’t even finish a 30 pack before expiration

I’m pretty sure that the Ublue Surface images are using that modified kernel, at least I don’t know what other initramfs they are loading, or why they would offer specific Surface builds and not include the biggest project for that specific purpose.

No, it’s not just about stalkers, it’s about harassment in general. But even if it were, even stalkers are still people and don’t work fundamentally different.

Feel free to show any research proving me wrong, but unless you find any, the reasonable position is “humans work the same on this topic as on others”.

I know, but it still didn’t fully remove it.

Sure, but it doesn’t have to be fully removed to have an effect.

The thing is that there really is no price, nor was there ever one. Your suggestion that you think there is demonstrates that the way blocking worked gave people dangerously wrong ideas.

Sorry, but you don’t get to redefine how humans work. There is a price, because friction reduces the likelihood of people following through. Removing that friction increases the likelihood of people following through. You might not want to believe this to be the case, but please read studies on the topic - it’s just how humans work. You don’t get to dismiss negative effects because you don’t believe in them.

/etc/ is not immutable, you can change whatever you want there. Unless your software is going against Linux standards, you won’t run into any issues here.

Universal Blue has special builds for Surface devices with modified kernels.

Twitter massively reduced visibility for logged-out users, so just logging out doesn’t help, you have to log into a different account. This additional fraction reduces the amount of harassment a lot. Not sure that being “more honest” is worth the price, especially when an info box could achieve the same without making harassment easier.

Well, did you get any for her? She couldn’t be more clear!

(I don’t know if shrimp are safe for cats, check before giving them any)

Cat

She finally allowed us to extend past ball-shaped chickens in a vacuum.

You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding my point, as I didn’t mention the average person’s intelligence in any way. All I’m saying is that minimizing the effort required to really try multiple distributions is a terrible way of introducing people to Linux. It will only lead to frustration and rejection. Choosing your bread doesn’t require investing dozens of hours.

No, it absolutely is hard, and those are bad comparisons. Growing up you interact with bread and cars, and you build a preference based on what you’re taught and what you experience. If I go into a new store and see a dozen types of bread I’ve never eaten, I can still make inferences about their taste, texture etc. This is not the case with Linux distributions - if I’ve never used Linux before, I literally don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

And it’s absolutely unrealistic to expect your average person to try a few out. They won’t be able to decide on technical grounds, and they’ll have to use the distribution for some time to build enough experience for a preference. Going back to your car example, it’s like suggesting people buy a few cars and decide which one they like (since they don’t have the experience to make judgements based on short test drives) - you’re asking them to invest a lot of time for something they don’t really need or want.

People learn how to do that while growing up. The same doesn’t apply to software, people usually choose what they know.

It’s 2024 and this guy still can’t read.

Do you have an example where Rust devs wanted to break backwards compatibility? The complaints I’ve seen were mostly “I don’t want to learn another language, so your Rust stuff will be broken by us”

I’m not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.

Ah yes, the old “I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere” defense

Who said this, and where? Are you sure you’re not throwing together the bcachefs stuff with this Rust topic?