this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.
A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don't think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.
Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that's required is insane to the average user, and most people won't want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.
That's the thing about Linux though, is it really depends on the user. The average user doesn't need any more than a web browser and maybe some Office suite. Chrome OS has shown this. Linux is actually great for these users.
It's the semi-power user, the one that has to do a lot of work, but doesn't know much about computers that Linux seems to trip up.
It's like that wojack bell curve meme.
You perfectly describe Linux from 10-20 years ago but a lot has changed and improved
Last time I installed Linux, it took me about 30 minutes. I had a perfectly fine system that I then improved to my personal likings because I can, not because I must.
I also (about a month or so ago) installed windows 11 and it was a shit show. Getting the ISO installed on a USB stick already took hours and more attempts than I wish to remember to get something that actually worked.
Then the installation, It took literally hours, loads of "I want to sell you shit you don't need!" screens, I needed to download gigabyte sized files for drivers with bloat shit, it managed to freeze within minutes.
People pay money for that shit and it will spy on you.
Meanwhile in Linux land, you can have it as simple or as complex as you wish
Don't come up with the "but inevitably something will break and then you need a command line she'll" because have you ever had the fun of needing to dig around in undocumented windows registry bullshit, or the windows "power" shelll?
I too am using Linux, but finding an "automatic" linux is difficult since most distros are about performance. It's like trying to find an Italian Sports Car with an automatic.
And for the general user, they don't install their OS. It's preinstalled on a Laptop, or an all-in-one, think-dell office PC that their company provides them. Sign in like you do with everything today and you are good to go. Even Macs do this.
Linux has improved, but the desktop os's need to be more stable (in 1 year I broke 2 manjaro installs and my BTFS file system died in my Fedora install), packages need to be more up to date, and there needs to be gui's for any setting that a user needs to access like restarting a systemd process. A general user will not touch a terminal. Let alone download a git repo, just to update the latest build of Mangohud since the Ubuntu version is so out of date that the GOverlay GUI Utility that's on Ubuntu doesn't work with it.
manjaro's so notorious for it's bad mainteinance it even gained a website for tracking the last time they screwed something up. I'm glad I haven't seen anyone recommend that shitty distro in a while. Tbh nix (the package manager) has proven to provide excellent stability no matter whether I used it on macOS or Artix. It's been more than a year since I had to reinstall my OS or generally deal with large scale system breakage. Also have grub set up to provide both a LTS and edge kernel, for example. The last installation that broke for me was well over a year ago, it was OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it also used btrfs. Which is a pretty nice FS if set up correctly, but by default it's quite slow. Then I switched to Alpine since I've been using it on a VPS for a couple of months earlier and absolutely loved it. I don't count fucking up the configuration files as system breaking because I assume the consensus to be that we refer to unexpected issues here. Getting rid of GDM, glibc, bash, systemd, coreutils and similar bloat not only speeds up your system, it also improves it's security and stability.
I wonder when I'll become so deranged to start tinkering around with BSDs and Gentoo, it'll be pretty funny if instead of wasting my time gaming I'll waste it hacking my system to improve it's responsiveness by 1-2% lmao
TBH, when Manjaro broke it was my fault, I know it was my own fault, and I feel if I was running EndeavorOS the results would've been the same if I did the same actions.
That said, yes the miss-matches repos drove me insane, especially as someone who likes keep my update number at 0, and I can't update AUR packages. And there were a few niggles and grips here and there. But as a power user, who didn't want to touch a terminal, Manjaro has the best set of Setting and Configuration GUI's I've used thus far in Linux. If another distro took what Manjaro did, but kept it to the Arch Repos, then I'd use it in a heart beat.