No, APT is the past 20 years.

I’ve said it before, I think Cinnamon is a middle ground between Gnome amd KDE. If you almost like both, go for Cinnamon.

I wrote a thing about this earlier: Fedora has apparently been infected with an advertising department. Their website has a lot of branding and buzzwords and wanketeering and very few technical details. It never says the word Gnome anywhere. You just have to know “Workstation” and “Silverblue” mean Gnome.

Based on my experience migrating from Mint to Pop!_OS, the next step is migrate back to Mint.

Well yes, largely for the same reason people are driving around on bald tires, paper thin brake pads and three drops of oil in the sump. It’s because the education system has failed them in one way or another.

I have noticed two trends over time:

You’re increasingly likely to be told to edit the registry to customize a Windows machine. Back in the 98/ME/XP days, you just didn’t hear about the registry. You might have known it existed if you were some kid with your dad’s hand-me-down Pentium III HP Pavilion, but you NEVER touched it. Sometime around Windows 8 you started to see guides talking about “If you want to put it back to behaving like Win 7 did, just add this registry key.”

You are decreasingly likely to be told to open the terminal and run some arcane command to customize a Linux machine. GUI tools in distros designed for newcomers, casual users or gamers (things like Mint, Pop!_OS or Nobara) are increasingly complete and rely on users manually editing config files or running commands for fewer and fewer “typical” tasks.

I used a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for awhile. If you’re going to do that, get the most RAM you can.

I also ended up using Ubuntu MATE rather than Raspberry Pi OS. PiOS didn’t hold up do daily use, their PIXEL desktop isn’t particularly well made.

Was a Windows user up through Win 7.

I started to play with Raspberry Pis and mostly Raspbian on the side largely related to my amateur radio hobby.

My laptop died, I bought a new one. Windows 8.1. Figured I’d rather use that slow-ass single core Pi 1 running Debian Wheezy than this.

First I tried Ubuntu Unity. I thought “Okay this could work, let’s keep shopping.”

Next I tried Mint Cinnamon. “Here we go.”

I’ve taken a look at Manjaro a couple times over the years. I have stopped this.

I briefly tried to run Pop!_OS when I first built my desktop, that lasted 3 weeks.

My desktop and laptop run Mint Cinnamon, I’ve got a tablet running Fedora Gnome. I kinda found my home fairly quickly and I’m not really interested in moving out.

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullremoved about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.

In my 10 years around the Linux ecosystem, I’ve never seen anyone recommend Red Hat to new home desktop users.

Ubuntu has joined Red Hat. It’s a corporate server distro now.

Go look at their website. More corporate logos than a Cup series stock car. Just figuring out which version you should download so you get a “normal desktop” is a task bigger than it should be. Back on the stupid bad old website I came across a guy who said he “installed Ubuntu but it didn’t come with APT” and I’m like “wtf…did you install Ubuntu Core, their Snap-only IoT thing?” And he stopped responding.

Actually I’m going to accuse Fedora of doing this too. You kind of have to know “Fedora WorkStation” is the Gnome version which is considered the default, “Spins” are the versions with other DEs, and “Silverblue” is the immutable file system version.

It has been my experience that it is a bigger pain in the neck to install Windows. Something you can try is practice it in a virtual machine using something like VirtualBox.

In my family, my parents’ generation either worked in IT and spent some of their careers writing macro-assembly on punch cards, or they have no coherent answer to the question “what is an operating system?” For this latter group, I’m going to be their sysadmin either way, and I no longer sysadmin Windows.

Everyone in my generation are pretty computer literate; I think I program in the most languages but my cousins all know what file systems are, could put together a household budget in Excel, know how to install software etc. A few of my cousins are in that “mostly use Windows for gaming and Ubisoft/EA aren’t great companies” phase where Linux is still a bit inconvenient.

My niece, the only representative of her generation in my family, has a reasonable child’s grasp on computers. She’s used iOS and ChromeOS and Windows and Linux, so I’m pretty sure she understands the same hardware can run different software. Not sure how deep that understanding goes but she’s a kid she has time to learn.

Yeah, my hypothesis is that most of the folks who will object to Windows 11’s bullremoved enough to switch to Linux already have by now. There likely will be another bump in transitions at Win 10’s EoL but not as many as who have switched since the rollout of Win 11 already.

I once ran a poll on Reddit asking why people switched to Linux. More people responded it was because Microsoft launched a new hated version of Windows than Microsoft discontinued an old beloved version. ie more people switched because Win 8 came out than Win 7 died.

The little USB Image Writer utility that comes with Linux Mint seems to work great for everything but Windows. So I literally never have a problem with it.

And there it is.

Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint’s Software Manager application is “garbage” and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.

I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but…what’s wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.

I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for 10 years now. The answer to this question is “for what most people consider everyday usage, you have to use the Linux terminal about as often as you have to edit the Windows registry.” And in fact over the 10 years I’ve been a Linux user, GUI tools in Linux are increasingly available, and I’ve heard Windows normies talking about the registry more.

When I started out, Mint shipped with Synaptic Package Manager, and a lot of distros didn’t include a GUI at all. Now GUI package managers are the rule rather than the exception and most have bespoke polished app store -like things. You of course can still use apt or dnf or pacman or whatever, but you decreasingly have to.

I never once touched the registry on my Win 98, Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 machines. Win 8 required a couple registry keys to turn off that…curtain that you had to click away to get to the login screen? and a few other “tablet first” features Win 8 had, and now I hear “just go and add these registry keys to put the start menu on the left, turn off ads, re-enable right click and retract the rectal thermometer.”

Linux is becoming more normie friendly while Windows is genuinely becoming less normie friendly.

I’m starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I’m just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.

Especially on something like Flathub and especially for apps that can plausibly run locally. Like, I kinda know beforehand I’ll need an account with Discord to use the Discord app, because it’s primarily for communicating with other people. But a todo app? Dafuq does that need the internet for?

It should also be common or required practice to make note of “Google account required” or something in the app’s description.