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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Sometimes a good way to 'learn Linux' is to use a WM (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have been using Linux for about 5 years and although I don't consider that I know much, I know enough to fix my own problems and that's usually enough for me.

Since Plasma 6 was announced I wanted to test something other than XFCE, Gnome or Plasma (or any DE) so I give it a try with ArcoLinuxD i3wm and is increible the amount of things I learn the 'hard way' because there was no GUI to do the things I want to do, or maybe I was too lazy to do it with the terminal since there is always the 'easy way'.

Things that might be very easy for a lot of people, but I never take the time to learn, like mounting drives, running programs from startup, setting environment variables, creating desktop entries, and a lot of other things I didn't even remember. I even learned to use things that used to give me a headache just looking at it, like Vim, xdg, the Archwiki (that is super useful) and the manpages.

It's ironic because something that started as an experiment is now my daily drive, and now that Plasma 6 has been released, I don't want to leave i3 behind.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that "the easy way" will only ever get you 1% of the functionality of your computer because computers are inherently complex machines and you can only make a tiny part of what they can do easy enough to make it accessible to people who are too lazy to learn anything past one or two clicks in a short menu list.

[+] [email protected] -5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Doing something as simple as installing Steam is an absolute nightmare.

Because Linux advocators does not expect you to learn yourselves. In 4% of desktops how many Linux enthusiastic (I mean people that can read man pages and figure out the problem themselves and willing to do programming) there are? I don't think it reached 0.5%. And those people would soon switch to BSD, only some who believe in Linux decided to stay and write some great software that gained popularity (when writing this I'm thinking about sbctl but I have never used such software yet)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).

I don't know what distro/de/wm you're using right now but what you're saying doesn't need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The discover store comes with KDE nowadays. GNOME has a similar store. Most recommended distros will preinstall one of those two. Ubuntu has a similar snap store, I think.

I guess the steam flatpak is unofficial. Works, though. Very simple, lazy solution. Could have gone through the fedora repos, too, where they've gone through the effort of repacking the deb for their users.

Dunno what your package manager problem is. Don't even know what you're running. Mine works fine, and certainly better than the windows store 🤷

Appimages sure aren't recognized as system apps. They're basically like an exe on windows. I'd rather manually add my rare appimage to the menu than go through the installer hell windows has.

Your point seems a little silly because, honestly, my experience is that developers have largely made the Linux desktop experience so simple and stable that it works better than any windows machine I've used in the past decade. I'm sorry this hasn't been your experience, but in the last couple of years I've pretty much only needed to open the terminal because I want to, not because I need to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

my experience is that developers have largely made the Linux desktop experience so simple and stable that it works better than any windows machine I’ve used in the past decade

And their user needs blogs and posts from itsfoss, tecmint, ... to instruct them how to use their package manager, even need people to teach them how to type in the search bar(?).

When they switch to BSDs they always complain about "lack of documentation" because they are not willing to read pkg_add(1) nor pkg(8) and they want documentations to give them the ability to copy pkg_add php-8.3.3 php-mysqli-8.3.3 maria mariadb-client mariadb-server.