Fair!

But still, an installation process that doesn’t involve a package manager is a bit of a pain, comparatively. Flatpaks may certainly be very helpful, though.

I can absolutely expect Slackware to be solid; my concern is about user-friendliness :D

Not the easiest distro out there.

On the topic of immutable distros, I more or less understood them and kind of managed to work fine with them, but, honestly, I feel all they do is enforce a certain way to interact with the system that makes screwing it up very hard - but on the other hand, introduces a slew of non-standard and sometimes complicated solutions newbies won’t understand (even for veterans it takes a while to get a grasp on them). If you follow the same pipeline on a mutable distro, you get the same stability plus the ability to do a lot of things without jumping through the hoops.

Right now I ended up on classical non-atomic Fedora for this reason. It features a lot of safe practices from immutable distros - system snapshots before updating, prioritizing flatpaks, container-oriented terminal able to work with Distrobox among all other things - but at the same time it’s a mutable distro able to work with everything else.

Yeah, Gentoo puts serious emphasis on that, I have to give them a credit. I liked it.

But yeah, I’d rather not have breaking changes in the first place.

Some functionality (menus, networking) working not as expected, random glitches, bugs, instabilities…also, now coming from the experiences of others (wasn’t there at the time), one time even GRUB had an update that broke it on all systems with Arch, forcing many to halt updates. In my eyes, from personal experience and experiences of others, it got a reputation as a quite messy system.

That very setup is why I do not recommend it to newbies who don’t have someone experienced around. Debian, even Debian 12, is not holding your hand and directing you. You’ll have to figure a lot out by yourself, and this adds to the steep learning curve.

Also, a very slow update cycle means the newbie will be stuck with outdated packages (sure, flatpaks are there, but the base system will be old, like, very old). And new hardware might face issues.

To me, the perfect pipeline is something like Linux Mint, then Fedora, then either Arch derivatives or Debian, depending on what serves you best. Alternatively, if you don’t mind some challenge after an easy entry, start out with Manjaro and then get another Arch. But that one’s more controversial.

Honestly, as someone who ran Arch and its derivatives, no one should be running upstream Arch but the testers.

No amount of experience or expertise will save you from breaking it. It WILL break, and you’ll be mocked for that as well by “Arch elitists” who will then face the same issue.

That’s why Linux veterans are rarely using Arch. It’s good for its purpose, it’s very important both for downstream Arch and for the entire Linux community, but it is NOT the distro you should run on your PC.

Go Fedora. Go Debian. Go to the downstream distros if you’re strongly into Arch, take Garuda for example. Make your machine actually work.

To me, every distro that seriously requires you to read through all changelogs before updating is BS, and it doesn’t solve a basic problem. No one in their sane mind will do this, and the system will break.

That’s why, while I respect the upstream Arch, I’d say you should be insane for running it and trying to make things stable, and mocking people for not reading the changelogs is missing the point entirely. Even the best of us failed.

Arch is entirely about “move fast and break stuff”.

There are two types of thinking about it:

1. There is no point in living. We are doomed to get into the grave, and eventually be forgotten forever.
2. There is no point in living. No higher order, no higher purpose, no higher authority. We are free to live our lives, to explore, to insert any meaning whatsoever into it. We are forging our own destiny.

For me, Mint borked the network after an update. I never got to figure what was wrong - the local network worked, the Internet connection was there and other devices worked through the same router, remote IPs were unreachable so it’s not a DNS problem, etc.

But I might have had an edge case.

Depends on the use case. For example, I actually managed to bork Aurora to the unbootable state while trying to make a VPN work properly a while ago. It didn’t live long :D

If she wants a familiar experience and ease of switching, why not consider KDE or Cinnamon? Both are officially available within Debian.

In fairness, there are attempts to make Nix user-friendly, such as SnowflakeOS, featuring a lot of improvements including a graphical app store etc, but those are alpha and not ready for an average user.

Or Aurora/Kinoite, for a more familiar experience

Now that’s an extreme choice :D

Doing a lot of tech support, don’t you?

That is, if you have experience running immutable distros yourself and are able to serve as a tech support for them should they ever need it.

A lot is different under the hood, and general Linux knowledge doesn’t always help.

I’d rather recommend Manjaro to those who want to start out simple, but then get into the details of Linux.

Unless all you do is browsing, Manjaro starts easy but then has a steep curve because it’s still Arch, with the added issue of practically every Manjaro newbie ignoring warnings about AUR and getting to taste the consequences.

It will require you to work with the terminal, troubleshoot, and get to understand your system. This is not bad - that’s how I got into Linux and never looked back after all all, and I generally don’t join the “Manjaro bad” crowd - but this is not a bulletproof “SO distro”.

That is fucking stupid, but mostly because why on Earth should you drop a valid package format plenty of people use? Forcing rpm out will force people to use dnfdragora for that, creating two different app stores for one distribution.

Flatpaks are IMO good and are a great option for a casual user who doesn’t want to accidentally screw up their system. Fully packed isolated dependencies, permission systems and other features make them great in many ways.

Fair! We just shouldn’t expect Jerboa to be a Lemmy flagship for laymen. Some would like it, though.

Is it available on desktop? Also, the interface is not flashy enough for a Reddit dweller

Lemmy desperately needs to get rid of toxicity of this kind.

It has become a more hostile place, and this negatively affects the experience for everyone, including the OGs.

And yes, if you want to have more lively conversations, you need more people. If you need more people, you should stop calling them morons and help them figure it out in baby steps. Don’t make it harder than it already is.