Comment by resource_waste
2 months ago
I might be a bit contrarian on this.
I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago.
The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make them good. It makes them good at marketing.
People confuse Fedora with Arch, which is terrible. People confuse Ubuntu with 'stable like a table', instead of 'outdated stable'.
We almost need a reduction in favored distros. Out with the complexity: Fedora for desktop. It has all the DEs too.
Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.
Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
This is idealistic not realistic.
With enough effort, this is true... but out of the box, you are going to have significantly more bugs and conflicts using outdated distros.
I'd love to see a 'time in terminal' by distro. I imagine Fedora would be in the mere minutes per year, and Ubuntu in the hours per year.
What do you find "idealistic" about it? My intention was to explain reality as I see it.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "outdated distros". It should be implicit that I'm referring to the currently maintained versions of available distros, not deprecated versions.
And the "time in terminal" metric might not generally make sense, given the preference that many Linux users have for CLI/TUI tools over GUI ones, given the efficiency and consistency advantages of the former -- many people prefer to work in the terminal even where GUI tools for equivalent functionality are readily available.
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