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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I bet the others already gave a lot of good advice, but there is one thing I wand to emphasize. The way in which you install software matters more on Linux than on any other operating system. You are meant to install it through your distros package manager, which you will most likely use through the software management GUI of your distro. Do not download any executables from websites directly, unless you are absolutely sure that:

    • They are made to work on your distro
    • They come from a trustworthy source
    • You have complete and up to date instructions on how to install them

    Sometimes you might need to add additional repositories to your package manager, the same rules apply there. You might also run into things called Flatpaks and Snaps, these are universal package formats and another great option for installing software. Flatpaks work out of the box in a lot of distros. Number one rule there is to stick to things that are marked as verified, unless you have a good reason to trust them. These universal formats might be integrated in the GUI software manager too, this varies across distros.

    If you follow those rules and keep your system updated, I don’t expect you will have much trouble with Linux.


















  • Yeah people are gonna argue about everything, and the only way you can get them to stop is to take the choice away from them. Doesn’t sound like it fits into the principles of open source software, right?

    Multionitor scaling and HDR are luxuries. Some distros are working to fix them, others aren’t. The good thing is though that once the code is upstream, everyone benefits from it. Even small distros that choose to run Gnome or KDE can just change a few config files to enable all the fancy things these projects provide.

    Of course that doesn’t mean smaller distros are necessarily going to do that, they have the right to be different.


  • We have standards like pipewire, xdg portals and wayland in active development that try to cover anything a desktop OS might need. Lately there has been a huge push towards them, as the standards they replaced weren’t future proof at all.

    But I take it that you are more concerned about fragmentation of these standards. I can almost guarantee that a lot if it will just whither away with time. Noone wants to maintain ancient protocols like X11 anymore. We might have another turbulent few years in this transition, but the end result will be worth it.

    And I don’t get what you mean with compatibility exactly. There are lots of ways to define that, and the Linux desktop is excellent in many of them. We have xwayland for legacy applications, loads of translation layers to bring together older graphics APIs under the main vulkan drivers, WINE to run windows software, etc. You’re gonna have to be more specific there.