Just a minor suggestion. When looking for something different than what you’re currently familiar with, do so in very open minded way, hopefully no looking for clones to what you were used to, but willing to experience and learn new stuff (there’s no failure, just something new that had to be learned and experienced).

I know it’s easier saying than doing…

Looking for advice on giant communities is sort of hard, and in the end you won’t know what works better for you if you don’t try it. The open mind needs to come with some time to be able to play, and enjoy during the play, so it’s not a whole series of frustrations.

On this same forum (different threads/posts/converstions) I’ve read very different recommendations. Even though Manjaro has been recently getting a lot of bad reputation because of letting some certs expire, it’s still considered an “introductory” gnu + linux distribution. I’ve also read Mint is a pretty good “introductory” gnu + linux distribution as well, specially now that ubuntu has finally shown its inclination towards its snap store, rather than the good and solid dpkg + apt, which allowed it to grow on users to where it’s currently at.

I myself prefer rolling release models for distributions, and being as vanilla as possible, to be closer to upstream as possible. However I dislike systemd, which is just a personal taste, so I don’t have a specific recommendation. It used to be Manjaro offered openrc, but they dropped it, and the distributions I know are Artix (it has gui installers if that’s considered “introduction” level distribution, but one still need to handle the configuration mismatches with upgrades as with Arch), Gentoo (I wouldn’t say it’s not for starters, but for sure it has its learning curve, but more importantly you need to be aware that it’s a source based distribution), and Void. If you don’t really care, rolling release distributions, which might have an easy ramp up might be Manjaro as mentioned, and now I believe openSUSE Tumbleweed. maybe even fedora come close… Rolling release models might come even easier for newcomers, in my opinion, since there’s no need to think on what happens on major updates, but rather one needs to keep updating periodically, but hopefully the distribution helps supporting the safest and saner configurations natively so the user, and particularly newcomer to the distribution don’t have to deal a lot to get such safe and sane configurations, at least to start with. And that’s to me the important part to call it “introductory” distribution, easy installation might be part of it, but it’s hardly the majority of it, and this is perhaps the sad part of what I like about being as vanilla as possible, some distributions even take that as a mantra for configurations, and upstream developers don’t always have the safer, or the saner configurations by default. I believe Manjaro and some others take that into account to make things smoother to start with. Maintaining the distribution, keeping it up to date, being able to install stuff, has it’s learning curve, no matter the tools/frameworks to do so, and it might be harder if one has to deal with how to make things work because the software doesn’t work as it should (configuration required upfront), and it’s not hardened enough as well so the user needs to know that and do additional configuration upfront as well.

Sorry about that. I was not aware of other meanings. I’ll try to remember to use the complete “software” word instead of its acronym I was used to since the 90s… Hopefully under the context what I wrote doesn’t get misinterpreted. Thanks !

If talking about non proprietary kernels’ drivers, such as linux, then again, profit is what regulates it. No wonder why now nvidia finally cares about linux, being the most used kernels behind the cloud, behind servers of whatever. Meaning, it’s not profitable not to support linux now a days for Nvidia.

The other fundamental factor is lock-in, which is abused by some big corps, such as MS.

But the profit idea es even wrong, but it’s what we have been educated with. For an OEM, providing FOSS drivers or FOSS FW doesn’t mean to have less profit, but somehow it’s interpreted as such. And there’s also our culture, backed by corps again, that tends to make us believe that everything profitable enough has to be corporate secret, and if not, others would take advantage of you business. That way of thinking really prevents for more FOSS adoption at the OEMs level. I don’t agree with it. It might be the presence or lack of some HW features might be inferred by the drivers/FW, but it doesn’t mean your competitors will know how exactly you provide such feature, and even less how to make it with the performance you do. And usually once released, you really want to show off your features, your innovation and so on, not keep it secret. So in general, really see no issue for OEMs not to offer drivers and FW as FOSS, even as free/libre SW.

I can imagine OEMs offering FOSS drivers and FW, but that not being as convenient for the major players in the market, since that would risk their position in the market. Just a thought…

Remember the lock-in mechanisms by the corps that feel being threatened if open sourcing dirvers… Some of which no longer say it out loud, but still think GPLed licences are a cancer…

I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I’ll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn’t experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn’t suffer the same fate. And linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can’t think of any kernel more adopted than linux…

To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today’s world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:

• Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
• On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it’s where corporate reach deeper offering “cheap” educational licences.
• From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
• Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
• In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today’s world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don’t really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn’t guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that’s not the majority of open source SW.
• The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
• Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there’s the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it’s easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.

Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it’s not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future “technologists”…

On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don’t think there’s any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.

On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it’s actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)

Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.

Sooo fun, :)

Source Mage GNU + Linux (external wiki)

Haven’t tried halloy, but it sounds cool, I wish rust build with shared libs in mind, instead of everything link statically, but it sounds interesting, I’ll see how it is compared to srain which is my current choice…

srain, becuase of being modern gtk, because of being light on dependencies, because of being available on aur, and because I’d like it more (yes there are several things that are also a matter of taste) than the alternatives, :)

What is implied with alacritty not being customizable, what is then .config/alacritty/alacritty.toml meant for? That said, I’d argue kitty has hard coded what fonts can be used with it, though some might think this is good, but in my mind it’s a limitation.

At any rate, this is a matter of taste. I use alacritty with screen. Some might argue kitty is better because of tabs supports, and if that’s a thing for them, then that’s fine…

At any rate, again, terminal emulators are a matter of taste…

IT might be, but librelinux for example really removes all binary blobs, although there’s some tooling around doing that, so new cases might be missed without human inspection, but they are careful about binary blobs… So from the whole spectrum of open source stuff, if you care about binary blobs, chances are better on the libre/free SW side.

Probably Guix, and GNU endorsed distributions. Binary blobs are not allowed on free/libre distributions, or not on their official repos. That said, most gnu + linux distributions don’t care about those. Most will take care, if they get to realize it, about distribution licenses, so if something has some sort of legal issue to be distributed, that will get purged from its repos most probably…

:)

BTW, moved to iosevka myself, now my current preferred font for both, the console, and fixed fonts…

Many thanks for the suggestion @toastal@lemmy.ml

I’m not systemd user, and I generally see this absorbing as much as possible as a terrible practice. I don’t usually comment on systemd stuff, since I’m happy just not being forced to use it.

However, even though I don’t use it, the decision of people managing systemd really affects non systemd users. See by succeeding in getting all major distros into become systemd distros (somehow now governed by RH, if anyone cares), everything systemd absorbs tend to leave alternatives sooner or later deprecated, or abandoned.

Even autofs is no longer part of some official repos, given systemd has its own auto mount/unmount functionality… And there are several other examples…

At any rate, hopefully the more bloated systemd, doesn’t make it the more vulnerable. And also hopefully, doesn’t make life worse and worse to non systemd distros and users…

BTW, before sudo there was su, so a life without sudo is possible, :)

Uff, somehow missed your post. See mine. That’s the FS I’m hoping to use next. I’m waiting for it to support swapfile, or alternatively read from official sources they won’t ever support it, :). But yes, that’s the one I’m looking forward to use.

How about bcachefs. I’m waiting for it to support swapfiles, which seems to be in the TODO list, but so far doesn’t work. If you use swap partition[s], or prefer not to have swap at all (I never fell for this, and besides swap is required for hibernation if that’s a thing for you), then bcachefs is ready for you. It’s already part of linux since 6.7, and on Artix, current linux is 6.8.9…

To me is the FS to use. I’m still on luks + ext4 (no LVM) and do entire home backups with plain rsync to an external device. I’d have to learn new stuff, since ext4 is really basic and easy to configure if in need, but I think bcachefs is worth it, and as mentioned, just waiting for it to support swapfiles, :)

and Guix

They don’t run by themselves, they need a terminal emulator, or a console, underneath, so they can work. You can actually call screen on a console without graphical environment, and it’ll provide the console all benefits of multiplexing. That doesn’t make the multiplexer a terminal emulator by itself.

So, in my mind no, screen is not a terminal emulator, alacritty is, like xterm is, and so on. The multiplexor just adds extra capabilities to the terminal emulator.

At any rate, it’s not worth going any further. What I meant is that neofetch was able to find out and show I’m using alacritty, whereas fastfetch doesn’t show alacritty. And we can argue about the virtue of one or the other, but it’ll boil down to taste. I prefer how neofetch shows alacritty, hehe. Some might prefer fastfetch showing screen. And most importantly, this is not critical at all.

There’s an issue on fastfetch filed about it, and one of the devs indicated when using the screen multiplexer, they could find out the terminal emulator underneath, however they couldn’t do the same with tmux. And to be consistent among multiplexers, they decided not to expose the terminal emulator underneath when using multiplexers, just show the multiplexer. I don’t agree with that argument, but it’s the dev right to choose to do that.

Greetings !

No, screen is a terminal multiplexer, like tmux. The terminal emulator I use is alacritty.

But neofetch tells you if wayland already:

WM: Wayfire (Wayland)

Actually while neofetch detects pretty well I’m using alacritty:

Terminal: alacritty

Probably they learned $TERM is really meaningless if using screen or tmux, but fastfetch totally misses this and mistakenly shows screen as the terminal:

Terminal: screen

The only thing I like of fastfetch over neofetch is that it’s faster, :) And yes the display missing, but I’ve never considered that something of much interest for such output… To me neofetch is just fine, and on terminal it gives you a more accurate answer… In the end is a matter of taste… But what it does is well done, :)