Depends on what you’re beginning.

The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.

There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.

It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.

I did this for awhile…

https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next

If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.

Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.

Even as a toy language if I can’t tell what it’s doing beyond interface with an llm prompt… What good is it?

Consistency and validity of output is essentially impossible to prove, because this has all the accuracy of both humans famously bad at explaining their problems to machines who understand 80% of it.

You’re just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us…

Its the same problem as standardized Unix systems in the 90s. There’s more ideas on how to implement hardware than there are hands to integrate driver software.

When it comes together it’ll be because we either make the manufacturers warp around something like POSIX, or provide a common target on phones like the steam deck.

Otherwise every hardware generation will get the undescribable misery of supporting the last one, from the one they’re on, while writing the next one. The problem tends to compound.

K, teachable moment maybe.

How complicated do you think a web browser is? Out of the box there is support for 30 years of web and file systems, support for socket types that will never be commissioned again and a pipeline to every native media format.

It’s complicated, it’s essentially an OS. with perfect backward compatability. (Mostly)

I have an increasing amount of bile for the Mozilla Corp, but if you’re on Lemmy you probably noticed corporations don’t make the best decisions for you… My question is how many of the options do you see in about:config do you think chrome and safari don’t show you?

Mostly to their benefit I’d add, except if they set them maliciously you’ll never know.

Zypper is very solid, and I can’t say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn’t the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.

They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.

Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.

All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it’s great!

On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I’ve had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.

I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn’t keep up on how that turned out.

I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.

Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.

Honestly unless you’re going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years… But I don’t want to set it up again. Not again.

It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the “core” (that stays the same everywhere and you don’t have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It’s big and complicated because you’re replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don’t like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.

It hooks into nearly every base utility I can’t live without (fzf, jq, helix, ripgrep). If you’re on windows im not sure you’re going to get a ton unless you live in WSL.

You can pick the editor it’ll open by default, which should be configurable with comparable syntax highlighting. Vi can pretty much look like whatever. I think it’ll default to vscode on windows.

Im not sure what you’d use it for but manage files, but I would have poked it and probably moved along while I was still on windows.

Edit: the other benefit you might not see has a lot to do with support of mime types.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

The xdg open protocol will open whatever app is assigned to handle type locally. Which is probably why it defaults to editor.

I binned my copies of ranger and nnn when I found this last year. Its stellar.

Diskonaut is the only other one that stuck, of the new CLI file managers. hunting lost files from a recovered hard drive was a lot easier with directory visualization for whatever reason.

I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.

That doesn’t mean the org always live up to it, but that’s partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.

The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I’m amazed they’re not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it’s a rock solid implementation.

This. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I tend to think you can secure yourself some of the gains without rooting your phone, but it’s a lot of twiddling and an ecosystem swap.

I loathe apple, but if you’re not ready to dive in, your home devices are where I would start. Routers, modems, home PCs, learn how to set up encryption and redirection to put things behind. Ditch your roomba.

Edit; I did not mean to talk down, sounds like your on that train. Android is linux and adb is awesome (sometimes).

Keepassdx/xc and syncthing have been awesome, rise up has a decent free VPN client for public use in fdroid.

Definitely worth running through vim tutor at least once.

It’s beyond typing speed, things like piping out strings to utilities is using one program to write another, you aren’t just getting faster because of access, it’s a paradigm shift.

Edit just for fun: im a non Dev dummy who happened to grow up in a Unix household. Even having dropped vim for helix and bounced around the MS admin/Apple IT space for 30+ years. When I switched to Linux I could still remember binds I’d set up and last used at 9.

Kinda like riding a bike.

Efficiency.

There’s 0 chance if you have to pick up your mouse that you can keep up with a Unix gray beard.

That’s just editing, if they’re from the emacs era there might be nothing you can do with text faster across their whole system.

I like vscode as a entry point, but if you care to get faster learning just vim motions and sys utils alone is going to cut time from the process.

This is incredibly true. The hardware manufacture process is a slow turning and cost centric wheel, but it’s always forward looking. If it doesn’t exist today you are building around compromises made outside the scope of your concerns.

Anyone whose had to work on DEC or Sun hardware can describe in excruciating detail about how minor implementation differences in hardware cascade down the chain. (Missing) Rubber washers determined a SAN max writes once, lest the platters vibrating cause the chassis to walk across the floor.

‘Universal’ support is always a myth, and carving up what segment to target is shooting one moving target while standing on another one unless you have exclusive control of implementation of the whole chain (apple).

From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.

So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.

Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.

I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.

Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.