I thought it’d be a pain but installing programs through the terminal is actually so nice, I never would have expected it
Just wait when you try AUR on arch systems. I was long time ubuntu based user but once I tasted rolling release and AUR I don’t want to go back.
It is going to make to want to go back
Someday
When you least expect it, and have a deadline
For me that day was yesterday. Ran an update. Next bootup got a black screen.
Saw it as a sign that it’s time to distro hop again lol
I know the feeling! I’ve been happily rolling with opensuse tumbleweed for almost a year now. Btrfs rollback is a life saver (2 times). Less than 5 minutes for a rollback. Other than that, pretty solid…
That happened to me few times, once GPU driver update, once grub update, both relatively easy to fix by searching the error on Endeavour forums and reading their official updates. And both of these issues was me not reading the update notes.
And when I was once forced to reinstall it was matter of an hour at most to have PC with working environment up and running, thanks to separate home mount and keeping all my installation notes in one place.
But one can do that with Ubuntu too.
I learnt one lesson from my manny distro-hopping sessions in the last 12 years, allways separate home from system amd keep all essential installation scripts and files in one place.
I once installed HP shitbox printer drivers from the command line in 30 seconds, and the shitbox printer just…worked.
My heart soared higher than the eagle. I touched the face of the one true FOSS God, and felt that thing when astronauts have epiphanies about the Earth. 10/10, would recommend.
I once plugged my linux laptop into the scanner and it just worked
I spent days tinkering with proprietary, outdated (seriously, win XP as target) programs that provide sort-of drivers, and nothing worked, on windows.
I think that is just wildly amazing that printer drivers in Linux so often just work. I plugged in a wireless printer the other day and the hardest part was connecting it to the network. Once that was done BOOM Ubuntu found it and I could print. Those driver maintainers are doing a great job!
Capitalism vs Communism on a small scale
One is “We’re not making profit anymore, so not paying anyone to do this. Also not publishing the source because of IP.”, the other one is “I have fun doing this, I think I’ll adapt the driver to my printer. Open ofc, so others can benefit, while all others, including me, benefit from others achievements.”
The moment I loved the FOSS community was when I went on an Linux IRC channel, complained about my wifi not working, and some stranger messaged me detailed instructions with a patch in 20 minutes that completely fixed my issue.
At the same time it encourages people to just trust whatever people are telling them to input in the terminal, which is potentially dangerous.
Mine worked out of the box on mint. Like, it detected the network HP shitbox and I could print, no user intervention. I was floored.
I really like having a hotkey bound to the terminal window, so I can pop open a terminal, check something, and return to what I was doing.
For a moment I wondered why I never bound a hotkey thusly, but it’s because I simply almost always have at least one terminal open in each workspace.
FWIW, most Debians (which includes Ubuntu and Mint) have Ctrl+Alt+T set to open the default terminal program without needing to install anything else. This is usually reconfigurable in the system settings too if that’s an awkward stretch.
But I get that people like the drop-down terminals too, for which see also Yakuake and Guake.
Yeah. Everyone I know that switched to Linux liked that as well.
Also, updates.
“hey computer! Update!”
“Sure thing, here is a list of 57 packages I will update, y/n?”
“y”
“ok… done!”
👌
But how do Linux users handle the crippling loneliness of their operating system not pestering them with ads on every update? How else can you know if your computer loves you? Where is the warmth of the corporate embrace?
We shitpost on Lemmy and start flame wars about vi vs. emacs, X11 vs Wayland, sysvinit vs systemd, snaps vs flatpak, etc.
All of those wars have long since ended.
Neovim, Wayland, Systemd and Flatpak have won.
Sometimes I run the update command and there hasn’t been an update since yesterday. I think that’s pretty close.
They discontinued that native app and have a kinda broken pwa. But open-source community delivers.
Guess what I did last night? I spent 4 hours working on getting PSD, XCF and KRA thumbnailers working in Mint. It took custom scripts to be written and each one required different commands because KRA files are just a zip file so you have to extract that and grab one of 3 possible preview files that might exist inside that zip and make that the thumbnail, while in gimp files you cant just use convert command, even convert[0] will only turn the first layer into a thumbnail and thats completely useless. And to top off all that, I finally got thumbnails working in gnome/nautilus but Only the XCF thumbs will generate in cinnamon/nemo (I still have no clue why that is) but I cannot just switch to gnome because there is technically no gnome variant of Mint so gnome doesnt work 100%… etc etc etc
Linux is still not there, this stuff should be simple and automatic. If a 20 year professional took 4 hours to get this far, the average user will give up immediately. Yes Mint is still my daily driver, but seriously thumbnails should not be this much work.