Unpopular Opinion

This is the part that kills linux, and has for many years. The power users assume everyone knows how to linux. So if something goes wrong, your linux from says "oh yeah, just run the bash script and sudo the nana."

And I'm like "....."

Not even sure half the time if he's intentionally gaslighting me, or if he genuinely is so lost in his own bubble that he has no clue that I have no clue what those words are.

Then he's like "here, just copy this into terminal."

And that gives an error. And he's like "then fix the error", and I'm like "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE ERROR MEANS!!!

I have no idea if it's still true, but in my days using windows, the error popups at least told you what was wrong, and it was intuitive how to fix it.

If it says "audio card not found". So windows has this one center where all the hardware is. Generally you poke around in there until something works.

And thats the difference between most people, and linux users. When windows fucks up, most windows users don't know what they're doing, but they know where to do it. So they go into the hardware section and just fuck around until SOMETHING works.

Whereas linux users get the error code, and know exactly whats causing it, and how to fix it. But if you're trying linux, and DON'T know those things, you just get an error you don't understand. You google it, and you get 10 different possible issues that maybe are what you're dealing with. But the problem is, on windows if you fuck around, you're not likely to break anything. On linux if you fuck around, you could make everything so much worse.

And thats when you get linux users, telling brand new windows users "Yeah! Start with CachyOS. Its arch, but easier!"

Which again, I can't tell if those linux users are gaslighting, or clueless.

This is a great point. I moved onto a distro that does need more tinkering. But Mint is still, and always will be installed and ready to go. Mostly just because when something goes wrong in my main OS, it's easier to boot into Mint to fix it, rather than a bootable USB.

This was why I stopped using Mint when i tried it years ago. My tinkering broke the world too easily. Not sure if that has changed.

indeed. for the vast majority of users something like Mint is perfect. or for gaming something like Bazitte. that's all you need and you're off to the races.

I use NixOS because I get bored with other distros. I love the endless configuring, find a better method of configuring, using nix-shells for various things, etc. it's fun. I can't go back to any other distro because I find them boring.

"!most cases" 😉

If his main use case, or an important one, is gaming then I'd argue one of the gaming distros would be best suited.

Bazzite is a relatively safe bet, but I'd recommend CachyOS if he's on supported hardware (probably is from what you wrote), having a better chance of drawing more performance-% out of it when it seems that it's needed.

Mint can game, but it's a lot more hassle and manual intervention (depending on hardware, mostly).

stupid sexy KDE…!

“Most cases” is doing most of the heavy lifting here. You’re clearly not like most people since you have specific aesthetic standards. Most people don’t care as long as it doesn’t look like it came from 1993.

You clearly care, and that’s why you should run something more specific. Maybe you want it to look cool out of the box, or maybe you want to configure it to your heart’s content. There are different distros for both audiences. Both of whom are definitely not like most people.