My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.

MX Linux. It’s exactly how I’d set up Debian if I wasn’t too lazy. Although, I’ve gone back to Debian after Bookwarm was released. I love it but miss MX

Windows will reach 12 this year. Double score!

I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.

Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

For someone as tech illiterate as my mom, I’d advise against trying it. But you are here and my mom would never know that Lemmy is a thing. You also ask about Linux.
I’d guess that you will have great fun using and appreciating what Linux and the foss communities have created.

The author is exited but I’m not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.

well…

That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”

This appears to be true on the surface but is not accurate. I am a structural engineer and when people need to do something with their buildings, the engineers (structural, mechanical, fire, etc.) and the architects need the plans or at least a survey. If a side has the plans and the authority on the plans, that side has huge leverage over the building. Fortunately, this is never the case with buildings. Plans are considered public information. It would be so much better if the same applied to software.

That’s a fantastic description!

Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.

One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don’t have to use any particular distro if it doesn’t fit your use case or preferences. I don’t use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).

Is that all? I can live with that! A few months ago that I checked there were a lot more open issues.

I guess my biggest difficulty will be that the Macbook is my wife’s new laptop and she’ll kill me if I change the OS… again!

I love Fedora. It was my OS of preference 20y ago. Now I am old and use Debian. Arch was a very shortlived adventure in a transitional period that I felt tired of keep breaking all my OSs out of boredom.

Your response is problematic because you wrote it with a healthy state of mind. And that will soon be punishable @[email protected]

George Orwell was 39 years late. Or so we think we know…

I have the same feeling too. The communities here keep growing. The first weeks here felt a bit… lonely. But now it feels like the fediverse is starting to thive!

That’s a good point. Perhaps FSF has got the message and GPL v.4 will give FOSS developers the option to ensure that all derivatives of our code will remain publicly available and not placed behind paywalls.

This explains a lot. Execs are not engineers, they don’t understand software, nor how the community contributes value to the project. They just need to find an income stream and are willing to break everything they don’t understand to achieve it. Even the company they work for.