I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.

This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.

Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.

> Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt

This is very incorrect. There's been far more for 35+ years

* apt/.deb

* yum(dnf)/.rpm

* Tarballs

* Ports trees

* Flatpak

* Snap

* Etc, etc, etc

Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.

rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.

> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.

These were designed to solve different problems.

PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.

Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).

Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc

Snap happened in 2014

Flatpak in 2015

So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)

Are you sure that's okay? It has App Store, .pkg, drag-to-install, homebrew, MacPorts, and who knows what else!

MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.

> I'll try Linux again if they ever sort these things out

You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.

Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.

You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.

Snaps are a Canonical thing and is only used by default on Ubuntu and distro's based on Ubuntu. No other distro uses or recommends them.

Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.

If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.

Flatpak is available on every distro.

Ehhhh

Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.

Dozens of SUSE

Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.

So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.

Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.

Snap is Ubuntu and derivatives only which is a respectable but smaller segment of the options.

It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.

Flatpak is available on every distro.

Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.

Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.

I'm in a Signal chat for a bar trivia group for some reason. I've missed invitations a few times cause it silently got out of date. But at least Obama can't read my messages.

You compromised your freedom, then. Signal is a central–server network with a license that means you can't legally modify the client and use it on the network, and it identifies people by their phone numbers.

The two nice features it has. I don't need bots to exist.

I never had a Skype call work properly on the first try, even before Microsoft broke it

I too remember Skype's universal salute: "do you hear me?"

That's known as the millennial pause. Older generations like millennials want to ensure a communication is working before committing information, while GenZ and Alpha just start talking.

It's named after the pause after pressing the record button while you check it changes shape, but "can you hear me?" is the same thing.

I'm gen Z. You had to start Skype with "can you hear me" because the answer was usually no (via text). I now do that with phone calls because forced bluetooth has made headsets less reliable than before.

On the contrary, older people properly announce themself on the phone, while younger people often don't answer at all, and let there be silence, until the other gives up, and asks who has picked up the phone.

I hear people saying that every day in Slack and Teams

Teams is broken too

I must be a lucky one because calls always worked for me on teams. On the other hand, everything else is a dumpster fire.

Ok, do your worst. I got on Discord cause they offered the best free service, I'll just as easily leave if that ever stops being the case. "Teen mode" seems not bad, I need something worse.

You will not leave easily. There's no point to you leaving if all your friends remain. Chances are they could not care less about these issues and would rather leave you instead of mass switching to a less convenient alternative.

I'd leave with or without them if it sucked. They can and will text me instead, just like they do since I left WhatsApp (because it sucked). The communities of randoms I don't even know irl can't, but that's exactly why it doesn't matter so much.

That and my friends probably care the same or more than me about privacy.

Ha ha joke’s on you! I’d need to have friends in the first place!

Yeah, we've seen time and time again that the network effect of social media makes it next to impossible to actually move to a different service. The Discord feature set is great and all, but it's the fact that your communities are there that keeps everyone on it. I'm hoping they get enough backlash / canceled Nitro from this because I don't want to lose the communities I'm in. Already did that with Facebook/Instagram/etc and it sucks.

iPhone is just a solid phone, nothing all that fancy. It's like a Honda Accord, and Samsung is like a Nissan Altima.

There are simply way more super rich people than before. Simultaneously the fastest car tech isn't necessarily the coolest anymore. I see hypercars all the time and don't even care.

Whoever rides a horse might have no interest in sports cars.

I actually don't have to accept it, same with automatic trans. If I'm going to splurge on something impractical like this, it better be awesome. Can't blame Ferrari for their decisions seeing how they want to be the fastest and also stay in business, but nothing after the F430 is exciting.

Well it's exactly that. It shouldn't look different, but the other carmakers decided EVs must have annoying interiors.

If I'm using the right tools for the job, I don't feel like the LLM helps outside of minor autofilling or writing quick one-off scripts. I do use LLMs heavily at work, but that's cause half the time I'm forced to use cumbersome tooling like Java w/ some boilerplatey framework or writing web backends in C++ for no performance reason.