Schwim Dandy

3.5 GB disk space required? I’ll just look out the window, thanks.

Like anything else, can be, depending on your needs.

The senators were not the ones that exposed anything.

Betterbird

Could you tell me what would be lacking? There’s a surprising amount of bells and whistle s you can add to the setup. Check out bunsenlabs distro for an example.

I love OB with tint2 and conky , no de needed.

Which is why I said “linux as a whole”. Many distros will try to undo the nerdery and neckbeardism that is built into the parent distros but as a whole, linux is going to always be less welcoming to a new user than someone that’s used to useless warnings and repeated password entries for elevated privileges. Being safer and being new-user-friendly rarely go hand in hand.

Yes but surely you’re aware that even the most new-user-friendly distros and their tools aren’t necessarily aimed at new users.

That warning is a perfect example of how Linux developers choose which hill to die on. They post a warning for an app that everyone knows can deliver bad times to two camps of users; those that know and don’t care and those that don’t understand the warning. If we could quantify the helpfulness of that warning, odds are that it saved 0 users from malicious action from that avenue of attack.

Never expect Linux as a whole to be “helpful” to the new crowd.

Schadenfreude intensifies.

I appreciate titles that let you know you don’t need to waste time watching it.

With the prices on the Pi5 your potentially getting into the price range where it might make sense to look at the Beelinks mini PCs, based around a 12th gen Intel.

Wow, wish I had known about that before. That looks amazing! I ordered one and will give it a shot. Do you happen to know of a community based around mini-pcs? If not Lemmy, forum, etc. I use places like Tomshardware but would love to see things like the Beelink when they pop up.

I see. I went a bit pricier and am running a refurbed EliteDesk 705 G4-Mini for one of my linux desktops but I’m also running linux desktops with a Pi4 and 5 elsewhere. All three have been working great but as you mentioned, running linux on ARM takes away a lot of software options, unfortunately.

Could you share what you consider better options at the same price point?

I agree. I used Debian for a very long time but found a move to Sid for fresh packages to be a frustrating experience so I just moved to an ubu based system.

Well, in fairness, I didn’t name it.

When they say base, they’re talking about the distro it’s built off of(Debian, arch, slack, fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). As an example, Mint is built on the Ubuntu base, Bunsen is built on Debian, etc. These are often called flavors as they’re not considered distros but rather something built on top of a distro.

The major visible differences in distros are the package managers and tools provided for it but they also have different goals. Debian aims for rock solid stability, fedora puts FOSS first, Arch is designed to take up your free time by making you build everything from scratch and pointing you to a wiki when you’re stuck (I kid).

The flavors then customize the experience, usually muddying the distro goals in the process. For instance, someone might take a fedora base then pack it full of proprietary software and release it.

I wouldn’t say what you use is irrelevant but you can truly make every base look and perform the same if you do some work. People that don’t like a particular base usually don’t want to do that work, they want to use it. I’m one of those people. Where I used to love tinkering in Linux, now I just want to get it up and running so I can do my stuff on it.

You can easily fine tune what requires a password in Linux by editing the /etc/sudoers file.

Debian stable will always prioritize stability and provide you older versions of applications. Even Debian Sid(their testing/rolling release version) gives you less than bleeding edge versions of apps. You can always install your own versions by downloading from provider or building yourself but if you’re wanting more current software, I’d consider another flavor of linux.

You can always install other themes, icons, etc. to get the look you want, Debian is just the underpinnings of the desktop. Using XFCE there is no different than using it in another distro.

The size difference is because of preinstalled applications, as you suspected. Some call it bloat, others just understand that Ubuntu is trying to cater to “set it and forget it” user.

Can I ask what you consider “spamming ads” to be? That could be relevant to suggesting alternatives.