Downvoting because, when I think of FOSS it is all public transport.

Can some create a train/bus version of this meme? I don’t have the skill or authority to do that.

Yes, I see now that this is not helpful at all. I’ll put a disclaimer in front of it. I don’t want to write a comment like that again.

I came to Linux without the “help” of social media as we know it today. That may be part of the reason, why I did not make such a experience myself. I remember asking someone from a higher semester in university how to burn a CD on Linux. They gave me three lines of cli and the name of another GUI tool I don’t remember. They didn’t tell which distro or environment to use. They must have assumed, I will find it on any of them.

That response in the past should’ve been and will be my guideline.

Thx, sometimes I forget that. But I don’t get what you mean by “purity test shit”. I am not that “I use Arch, btw.” kind of person, I just have a strong opinion about what is user friendly. Maybe I voice it more here than I would in RL. When someone with no idea about what’s suitable I recommend what I use, because then I can help better. And I recommend what they usually get out-of-box with no extensions, because then they can get help from others with the same default setup.

Maybe this attitude comes from my struggle with other desktops than Gnome. The Terminal is the only universal thing between all distros and desktop environments. Package managers don’t differ that much these days.

And yes, I agree, distro or desktop environment hopping is not a thing a user should need to do in order to be comfortable with their computer.

I am a Gnome person, like others are MacOS or users of the Windows UI paradigm. Even in the time when I used a fork of dwm to create my own tiling window manager rice, I used a lot of Gnome/GTK apps. I am now back on Gnome with the PaperWM extension and I am in my happy space. I think, it is the positive enthusiasm (spelled wrong, I know) that drives my attitude, too. This can be overwhelming and could lead to things others don’t want on their computers. I could try to dial it down. So, thx again for reminding me.

Edit; disclaimer / content warning: This is a hot take and not helpful for new users! Stay away from reading it unless you want to know, how new users should not be treated. I certainly have learned my lesson (see comments).

Actually …

I still don’t get why Mint with it’s legacy Cinnamon desktop is recommended to new Linux users. Even Debian stable with a modern Gnome or Plasma desktop would do more justice to the growing FOSS ecosystem. Or go with Fedora which I recommend to all Linux/FOSS-newbs.

This is a meme, but my strong opinion at the same time. Go with Mint/Cinnamon as long as you like; you’ll make your own experiences and it is part of Linux/FOSS, too.

I inherited a lot of Ubuntu servers at the university, too. But I am not directly responsible which makes life easier; I am just managing it.

Interestingly, they agreed to monthly updates with possible restarts and they are fine with it, because I keep the servers healthy. And: We even plan to move from VMWare hypervisor to Proxmox VE as well, but we can do it in stages without big downtimes.

There is one CentOS server carefully isolated which cannot be updated anymore. Moving it to Rocky would introduce a big downtime and redoing a lot of custom config. Luckily the user-facing server of that cluster is running a current Rocky Linux.

The things, I established so far, are running stable Debian. Nice to see Proxmox VE being based on Debian. (:

It is interesting that you are in a similar boat, but with a different outcome. I hope that your colleguas will reconsider some day.

This is the most accurate chart I have seen so far; I can relate to all of them except NixOS, because I have tested it only briefly in a container.

I first settled on Ubuntu and than moved from that along the chart and I am know in the Debian phase for my main distro after ~10 years with Gentoo.

For others I recommend Fedora or Debian depending on their needs and skill. Arch has no place for me anymore. I can live with Ubuntu on servers, if someone else had it already installed, but I would never use it on a desktop. But Debian is a default on servers/VMs for me, too. And: I can see, why people choose rocky on servers. I am partly responsible for some rocky servers and they seem to behave nicely.

I was a passioned Gentoo user for many years and I also only met 1 other IRL Gentoo user. Ok, there were more once at a Linux conference where a bunch of Gentoo users had a desk showing off Gentoo compiling @system for a BSD system.

Even the binary repository was not enough for me to not go back to Debian after ~10 years Gentoo usage. It was a fun hobby and a great learning experience.

Please don’t be angry with me, but the package manager is called portage; emerge is just one commandline tool to interact with it.

Kind of, yes, but you can teach it to write less. I instructed it, to answer only Yes or No with a brief explanation, if there is not much need to add sonething in my context.

That doesn’t mean the answers get better though. ^^

Have you read the btrfs or zfs man pages? They are very well written. You just have to want to understand it. If you don’t, let it handle your tech-buddy or admin, or have them quickly look over the command that is about to be confirmed with pressing ENTER.

Better go one step back to Debian instead.

Yes, but be sure to exclude certain services on servers and monitor the remaining pending upgrades.

Who has to work until 17:00 on a Friday except shift workers?