I guess I just don’t expect most beginners to want to read the breaking changes. Like when firmware packages recently changed, pacman paru yay and octopi don’t tell you about those breaking changes. You just get an error when you try to update. If you read the notes, you know to uninstall the old package, install the new ones, problem solved. What about using meld to merge pacnew? I don’t expect someone in their first week of Linux to figure it out. Even if they can learn it, I don’t expect a lot of users to want to.

Maybe I need to have more faith in people? I stuck to Ubuntu derived distros for about a year before I took on Fedora, and then eventually EndeavourOS where I learned the ins and outs of managing an Arch based system. I learned a lot, and I learned it gradually, which worked well for me, so I don’t try to throw other new users in the deep end of the pool.

I am a cachy user, and this is the worst possible advice. Arch based distros are not for brand new Linux users.

Just spitballing, because honestly the amount of effort that must go into sustaining this attack in the long term just baffles me. Like, why?

I wonder if it could be a state actor? I can imagine that the powers that be in MANY countries could be motivated to keep users away from operating system software that isn’t spyware.

Nope, but it’s definitely a test run for when dems don’t control the state.

My vote is Fedora, but Pop is a good choice as well.

Maybe I’ve been hitting the hopium pipe too hard….

Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.

Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.

So they’re all just going to spring for new machines when Microsoft pulls the plug on win10?

I have a 5 year old niece and 73 year old father in law running Ubuntu. Everything is relative right? To me they’re Linux illiterate, if not computer illiterate. It’s not meant to be an insult, and I’m regularly amazed by some folks inability to get what they’re looking for out of a search engine.

All I’m getting at, is that Debian isn’t “easy” to everyone.

Setting engine timing when replacing a timing belt is easy to my brother in law who’s a car guy, but if I watched a YouTube video on it I’d probably still botch the job and blow my motor. It’s easy to him. Not to me.

To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.

I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.

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I don’t know, maybe it’s been cracked down on, and I never noticed because I blocked so many instances and communities over the past year.

I was kind of being sarcastic, because most people aren’t going to dredge through the slime to make their feed habitable, they’re just going to go right back out the door.

Another thing that might make it hard for people to stay even if they show up? If you have a lemmy.world account and view all posts from federated instances, the amount of furry lewds, giant futa horsecock, and pedo anime girl posts is astronomical. I think my instance blocking list is like 60+ lines long. Maybe we should post a guide for “how to unclutter your feed of yiff and 10 year old anime girls in suggestive poses”

I hate to say this, but have you noticed how mentally lazy most people are? Using signal is easy. Bitwarden and randomized secure passwords is easy. I can’t get any of the normals in my life to make use of them. It’s too much mental labor to do something different. Something that isn’t forced on you by herd mentality and constant advertising spam.

I honestly think one of the reasons I love Lemmy is because the people that come here are the people mentally active enough to think outside of the cages mainstream social media builds for us.