This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The most successful Linux distros are ones that normal people are not aware they use at all. Most people dont install operating systems, they just use whatever comes with the device. To them its an appliance.
Android is a flavor of Linux and is widely successful. Ive seen libraries use Linux and a browser and the machines worked for decades. And there are quite a few Amazon tablets, ebook readers, etc... all using linux.
Theres a never ending number of examples out there.
Nothing wrong with Arch as a distro base. The meme stuff is all bullshit. It is a peer of Debian and Fedora. These foundational community distros are not a good starting point for a beginner or for a painless consumerist experience but they are solid for experienced users and have the best support and documentation.
If you are approaching Linux from the PoV of someone who wants to learn rather than someone who wants a reliable consumer computing platform the big community distros are still absolutely the right way to go IMO.
People go on about Mint being friendly for users but under the surface it is Ubuntu which itself is pulling from Debian. People laud Bazzite despite it being Fedora based. ChromeOS is shipping Gentoo to school children. If you package Arch well and ship it to people like Valve has its an extremely pleasant consumer platform. CachyOS improves the arch installation and micro-optimises FPS but you can screw it up as easily as any other mutable Linux system so fundamentally it is not much better or worse than Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for a consumer experience.
SteamOS, Bazzite and ChromeOS all recognise that immutability is the key to a reliable experience for consumers - an experience that surpasses Windows. Updates are the most likely way to break a system and the hardest thing for non expert users to troubleshoot and rectify. Immutable distros with good support for new hardware have to be the S tier choice for Windows refugees. I have never tried Bazzite and likely never will (I use arch btw, with one system being a cachyos hybrid) but on paper it seems like the most sane choice barring a general release of StreamOS. A distro like Mint might be user friendly but it is bringing nothing new to the table when it comes to a reliable experience for consumers.
The real solution for the majority of WIndows refuges is going to be pre-installs with the supplier guaranteeing all the hardware is supported like Steam Machine. That way you get rid of all the cursed Nvidia systems. I think something like PopOS is the wrong way to do it for normies as the old LTT videos demonstrated, it is still a fragile system for naive users underneath the friendly skin.
The only thing that sucks about switching to linux is moving my external NTFS USB drives to my new linux server.
Linux HATES NTFS, hates usb drivers, and hates external drives that aren't formatted to ext4. fstab doesn't work for my WD Elements, so i just gave up and shucked the drive and put it inside.
I can't fit 5 3.5" hard drives in my SFF dell 3070, so i'm stuck on windows right now, but they keep doing random updates the last few weeks and my windows explorer freezes constantly and my computer barely works. So i'm going to have to switch to linux and possibly reformat all 36TB's to ext4. Not excited about that at all.
So either reformat all my external drives, buy a very expensive NAS with an external SATA port and hope my motherboard recognizes them.
Linux doesn't really have issues with NTFS, you just need to install the drivers.
My entire server storage is NTFS (except the boot drive) because its migrated from a windows system, but I use linux.
Yeah, you will generally have a better time with exFAT, which is a format both Windows and Linux works with well. All my external drives get formatted as such.
Whoa, surprised this is coming from The Verge. Is it really the year of the Linux desktop now??
Dabbled with Linux on a Raspberry Pi and a laptop that I only used from time to time; it wasn't until the imminent Windows 10 support drop announcement that I finally installed it in my main rig. The words "fuck it" were uttered in my mind too.
If you going to install Linux, install something basic like Ubuntu, fedora, mint and pop is!
Now tons of people will start searching for cachyos, because the vegre did.
I guess, I won't do the classic "haha you have to run console to install an app" meme because I know there are distros that cater to Windows users like myself, the problem I find is that most software I'd want to use wouldn't be supported like video editing and stuff I care about, I'm glad to see Linux rise because only then Microsoft will learn, but also there's not a BIG issue that's keeping me away from using Windows for now.
It might change who knows.
Davinci Resolve supports Linux natively nowadays, and the FOSS video editor Kdenlive is actually pretty impressive now as well.
I'm not going to dwell on how annoying it is that it took people THIS LONG to get off the Windows train. I'm just happy to see the world changing for the better.
Welcome to civilization, new Linux users!
Welcome to the dark side. I've been here since about 2011, but I'm absolutely glad to see you're coming over.
When will it be the year of actually being able to read articles?
Linux has been great for me for over 20 years, but the damn internet continues to get worse.
