If you haven’t heard of EndeavorOS that’s because you are out of the loop. Entirely your issue. It’s a much better alternative to Manjaro essentially.

Also that’s general popularity according to page hits, nothing to do with newbies. Newbies aren’t the majority of Linux users.

Not that there is anything wrong with recommending EndeavorOS to Newbies. The whole point of arch derivatives like that is to make installing arch simpler and easier for the user. Arch is actually a better base distro imo than say Ubuntu for this. It has packages for pretty much anything in the AUR, no digging up PPAs for everything. Likewise it’s all up-to-date too.

I don’t remember MX Linux ever being that popular before, but maybe I am out of the loop.

Yes it does. Your whole display server is your desktop/WM when using Wayland. Using the newer versions you get things like VRR, HDR, fractional display scaling and so on.

Beat me to it lol

Sudo actually has very granular permissions, just almost no one and no distros use them. You might as well replace it with doas for most people.

Why not UBlue or Nobara?

I have an Nvidia image and haven’t had these issues. I can run Wayland just fine. I believe they include X11 as well.

6.5 is not a new kernel though. I am on 6.9. Maybe they should move the normal release to 6.5 and make edge use the latest stable kernel or something.

Screen tearing hasn’t been a serious issue in X11 for years now, unless you run XFCE. It’s just not an issue in Gnome or KDE.

I run Wayland+ optimus and it worked on PopOS just fine. Took a slight bit of tweaking on Universal Blue, but nothing major. Mainly it works with gaming on Bazzite but not Aurora for some bizarre reason. CUDA worked fine in all of the above.

Arch is actually reasonable as the foundation of an easy to use Linux OS, provided you don’t care about stability. It’s up to date with all the latest stuff, has support for many apps and packages without having to add extra repos, and it has fantastic documentation. All that’s really missing is the GUI installer and stuff to help newbies. Projects like EndeavorOS and Garuda provide that.

If you actually need stability though, which lots of new users would appreciate, use Fedora or a derivative like Nobara or Universal Blue.

I daily drive Nvidia plus Optimus, but it’s easy enough to switch back to X11 just using a menu on the login screen.

Ubuntu isn’t the most popular and hasn’t been for a while. It actually has a lot of issues new users are likely to run into, including lots of spurious error messages. Apparently the top 5 according to distro watch is: MX Linux, Mint, EndeavorOS, Debian, and Manjaro.

So essentially debian, arch and ubuntu derivatives.

This is where Universal Blue and Nobara come in. They are made to be plug and play versions of fedora inc. media codecs, Nvidia, steam, and so on.

I daily drive Optimus plus Wayland. Doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

Why the fuck would you try Gentoo as a Linux noob? I am guessing no one told you it was for advanced Linux users only. Fedora and OpenSUSE are nowhere near as difficult to install as Gentoo, as they are made for normal users.

What about Lutris?

Most countries Primaries don’t exist at all. Getting to choose who represents a given party is a luxury.

If you start with something like PopOS, Linux Mint, or Universal Blue the learning curve shouldn’t be too high.

I have been talking about application support this whole time, not the Linux infrastructure itself. You keep carrying on as if I am talking about the distributions or the kernel, that’s why my comments aren’t making sense to you.

For someone who uses Linux you are awfully negative about it.

Given there are quite a lot more people using Linux than there used to be I imagine a fair bit. That’s only going to increase as Linux users keep increasing. Linux users still buy things like Video Games, Spotify subscriptions, and potentially other software products too like Jetbrains IDEs.

It’s a combination of a few factors, developers are pressured into not asking for donations (users need to actively find their website to donate), the vast majority of Linux software is free of price, and people don’t want to pay money for their operating system.

I am talking about businesses supporting the Linux desktop with software, not about the OS devs themselves.

They make money because they’re proprietary, sell peoples info, and because of that they represent everything the free software movement fights against. I use Linux because it supports the free software movement, not the other way around.

This is the reason why most businesses don’t want to support Linux.

It used to be about 1%, so actually huge gains have been made