Are they really picking their OS then?

But yes I agree, most people will just use what they have and Windows is the standard because they made sure it would become the standard.

TIL

I didn’t have it set to true but I also never noticed any problem

All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn’t come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn’t seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).

Well you technically don’t need mono or gecko, especially not if you’re just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn’t exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)

Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.

How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.

Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it’s not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time… TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don’t really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you’re looking for.

I mean I use DDG as default search engine in Firefox and Google Search isn’t much better now, but google search isn’t even a 10th as good as it used to be 10 years ago.

Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.

For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.

What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don’t have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.

What I didn’t like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn’t find easily.

like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I’ll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox

Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it’s not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.

Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn’t added through the config file so there’s no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.

Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it’s an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it’s supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.

Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn’t have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn’t even be doing.

Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I’ve been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.

At least I’m pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.

So since you’ve already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.

(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)

yeah that’s one thing I really miss from when I had google as default search engine, typing word/phrase + define and actually getting a useful result. DDGs version is barely even helpful at all

Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

I’ve tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there’s some better instance than the one I tried though.

Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

Baidu search, tbh haven’t tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah

Guess what I found in /home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don’t know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.

It created a 9GB sized file called ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well…

-Syu

you can just type yay and it defaults to -Syu if there’s no other argument

also while I never use pacman on its own (I always use yay) I still check the pacman man page every now and then because while all the commands from pacman can still be used the yay manual only shows the commands added besides pacman’s default commands

Arch Linux with i3wm

Fish, Alacritty, Rofi (dmenu replacement)

End of Windows 7

If you’re going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).

Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5’s UX the main reason I didn’t like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn’t do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.

It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn’t know how (and still don’t even now).

If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.

And for the record I don’t like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.

If you don’t mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.

Pacman (Arch’s package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there’s the AUR on top.

Also while I’ve never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier

It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!

History with Fish makes this easy

I first tried KDE Plasma 5 but tbh I thought it was just a worse experience than Win7, it was really close but all the tiny little annoyances got in the way and it felt like I couldn’t do everything I needed through GUI so I still had to use terminal but it was awkward having to switch between using the keyboard and mouse and I would navigate through the GUI to get to directories then open terminal…

After a month or two of that I finally tried a tiling WM (i3wm) and it’s just a way way better user experience than any DE.

I will note though that I’m using Fish for my interactive shell and seeing anything in the tiny dmenu was just way too hard until I used Rofi for drun.

Without Fish and Rofi I might’ve tried more DEs or even gone back to Win7.

I recently used Linux Mint with Cinnamon on a relative’s PC and using Bash and the apt package manager sucks so bad. I even prefer Arch KDE, although I think Nemo is a bit better than Dolphin.

Anyway it’s been about 2 years of daily driving Arch with i3wm for me and I haven’t really gone out of my way to learn things but you naturally pick stuff up along the way just by using it.

Just make sure you’ve got another device with an internet connection in case something happens. I basically haven’t had any issues after I got better but I made a lot of user errors at the start. Nothing that can’t be fixed but finding out how to do the fixing without internet is a million times harder.

yay -Syu

you don’t use yay do you

Edit: typing yay without any other argument defaults to yay -Syu so there’s no reason to type it out

As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago

Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.

Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.

So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.

I use Fish and have keybinds for previous and next directory, 99% of the time when going up in a directory it’s to (one of) the previous directory/ies I was in

the date-time in the top left corner looks weird. The numbers are all greyed out except for only a small section