Those who are frustrated with everything M$, including the apps, will be glad to see that alternatives exist. So, that’s just a kickstarter.

If someone is frustrated with Edge, pointing out that after installing GNU/Linux they’ll have Firefox or Chromium available instead. There is no reason to further introduce another step of installing a different web browser.

Why would I do that? If people made up their mind about a distro, they can just go to the distros’ website that have their own documentation and most of them are good enough.

But people did not make up their mind about a distro. They have no idea what a distro is. They dislike Windows, they’ve heard about Linux and now they’re looking up instruction how to use it. One of the popular complains is that just choosing distribution is a huge burden to new users. This is where people who know GNU/Linux should come in and steer people into specific distribution which has highest chance to be good enough for most number of new users. And then you can write a comprehensive guide how to get that distribution working and how to transition from Windows workflows to workflows on that distribution.

Seriously? Installing a browser is hard for regular computer users now?

Yes. Yes it is. If they embark on installing a new operating system, every unnecessary step makes it so much more difficult.

Switch from what? Are we talking about MacOS or OpenBSD? Did I say switch from Safari?

At this point I don’t know if you’re arguing in good faith. First sentence of your post (emphasis mine):

I’ve been seeing a lot of people wanting to switch to GNU/Linux(shortly just Linux) recently, owing to various reasons including Windows 10 EOL, forced integration of AI tools, screenshot spying, bloatware, etc. and I thought I’d make a comprehensive guide based on my experience.

Later you’re discuss switching from Edge and not Safari.

You seem to be vehemently butthurt over the fact that I just didn’t leave it at the native Firefox/Chromium that a distro might provide.

No. You’re missing the point (and also you seem to be the one butthurt that people may think there’s nothing wrong about Firefox). The point is to not overwhelm people with unnecessary information. If you want to write comprehensive guide about switching to GNU/Linux, write a comprehensive guide about a single distribution aimed at new users.

I’ve installed Librewolf on some really old, non-technical people’s systems and they’ve not complained.

You have installed. They didn’t have to do anything. Now you’re writing a guide about a complicated process of installing a new operating system and include unnecessary steps for them to do.

Why would I want to decide who’s going to be reading this?

Because that makes the text coherent. If you don’t decide who your target audience is, the text becomes useless for anyone. This is true of any text. If you write text for someone maximally patient, someone minimally patient won’t read it.

Someone already rebutted you on this on how people will get frustrated with their installation if they didn’t know that HDR/VRR don’t get supported on X11. And I’ve also been talking about gaming. So, yeah. A lot of them care about GSync/FreeSync and 10-bit colour.

Then pick openSUSE and recommend that if you’re so concerned about Wayland. Don’t bombard people with jargon they don’t care about.

More lost data? How so?

Through the process of failing to make a proper backup of the data.

A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works

I’m honestly not sure how much people care. Lemmy and Reddit will have one believe X11 is unusable, and yet I’m still using it on two monitors and I don’t feel any disadvantage at not having HDR or different refresh rates. However, I don’t really want to argue on that part.

My concern is that when newbies search ‘how do I install Linux,’ most sources give them a consistent answer, rather than every website having it’s own ‘top 10 distributions’ list or long articles full of technical jargon. Linux Mint is not a terrible distribution and it seems to be common recommendation which is why I’m recommending it as well. I believe it’s better we give people clear message and lose a handful who care about HDR or VRR, than lose a score intimidated by the choices and perceived difficulty.

I said this was my experience and there is a reason why I started using/recommending these apps. A lot of people would just simply disagree with you claiming that Firefox or Chromium have nothing wrong.

You’re writing a guide how to switch to GNU/Linux. If you want to discuss browsers, do it in another guide. If someone wants to switch operating systems, confusing them with browser choices isn’t helping.

Again, this has been my experience. And the title does say ‘comprehensive’ guide. Not a quick guide.

You’re also saying the guide is for people who recently got interested in switching to Linux. Those people don’t need to hear about Arch. They don’t need to understand what immutable distribution is. A comprehensive guide for that target audience should focus on comprehensively describing one or two distributions targeted at that target audience.

But not everyone will be looking for X11 support and therefore Mint.

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

And wrt Bazzite, not everyone will want to use an atomic distro.

That’s why I wrote ‘if your entire focus is gaming.’ People who just want to play games, don’t care. They just want their stuff to work.

I see you want to simply stuff and just ask people to resort to one or two things. But that’s not going to stop people. They’re going to experiment different things.

Of course. But the way I see it, that’s not the target audience. Someone who so far had been using exclusively Windows, does not need to be front-loaded with all that information. Describe Mint in detail, especially pointing out differences they can face between Mint and Windows, and mention that other distributions also exist if they want to try them in the future.

You say this is a comprehensive guide, but it’s comprehensive in the sense that it touches on a lot of different topics. It goes broad with its scope, but for a new user going in more detail with typical Mint installation would be more useful.

For those who are only on Linux, I’ve been told that running fsck(file system consistency check) on a corrupted NTFS drive may not go well. Hence the reason I asked them to convert it to ext4.

I reckon converting would lead to more lost data than just using NTFS partition. This also locks users into using the drive under Linux. I just don’t think this is a useful recommendation for someone who is just switching from Windows.

If you’re targeting this at Windows users who just heard about GNU/Linux and consider switching, this is a terrible guide.

Edge → LibreWolf, Ungoogled-chromium/Trivalent.

No. When someone wants to switch to GNU/Linux, don’t also shove your other opinions onto them. There’s nothing wrong with Firefox or Chromium, which often come preinstalled.

Picking a distribution. There are a lot to pick from.

This whole section is way too long. Here’s what it should say:

Use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition.

If you want to say more:

Use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. Or if your entire focus is gaming, use Bazzite.

No new user gives a fuck what Linux distribution is. They don’t care what atomic distribution is. And talking to them about Arch can only lead to disaster.

SteamOS, also Arch-based, is typically not recommended for Desktop systems, I think.

No. Do not recommend unsupported distribution which doesn’t work with the most popular GPU brand to any new users.

Picking a Desktop Environment

This section unnecessary since the previous section should already direct the new user to either Mint or Bazzite.

Avoid Balena Etcher. I’ve seen people have issues with it.

And you think Rufus with magnitude of options and Ventoy will leave users with fewer problems?

If you’re using auto-partitioning,

There should be no ‘if’. A new user should not do manual partitioning. If they are interested in doing it, they’re already way too advanced to read your tutorial.

→ For those who ditched Windows completely, make sure to back up your data and convert your external drives’ Filesystem to ext4 too for Linux-only use.

Uh? Why? Let them use NTFS if the drive is in NTFS.

As the saying goes, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You’re the one doing that. It was your choice to bring up an article which is full of manipulative language to make your point. It was your choice to bring up irrelevant facts about Canonical employees in your post.

Since the article was published on March 19, I wonder if much of it, revolving around what the author saw as indications of authoritarianism, came from heavy disquiet in the face of authoritarianism’s recent gaining hold of the White house.

How is that an excuse for making shit up?

AFAIK, Rust is mainly funded by the Rust Foundation, which not only includes Microsoft, but also includes comrades from Huawei and alike.

So does Linux Foundation. What’s your point?

You are completely missing the point here. You replied to OPs comment about licensing with a comment about incompatibilities in code. My comment was about licensing.

But the post is about an article by Sami Tikkanen/Roy Schestowitz (not really sure who the author is) and my answer is in context of that post. Like I’ve said, if you want to discuss licensing policies and how uutils affects future of FOSS, don’t use manipulative trash articles as starting point. Write a coherent post where you present factual information and than we can talk.

If wanting to keep FOSS as FOSS is disgusting to you why are you in this community in the first place?

It isn’t. But author of the article and OP are lying and using manipulative language to discredit people they disagree with. That’s what I find disgusting. I criticise the article because I don’t want such people representing copyleft licenses.

Issue is that author stated that ‘Rust people’ are authoritarian and that they chose to reimplement coreutils to impose authoritarian control over FOSS. This is not grounded in reality. Unless you also want to claim that ‘BSD people’ are authoritarian, the author presents no valid point of discussion.

If you want to discuss consequences of uutils being under permissive license, feel free to write a coherent fact-based post about that. Article you’ve cited makes you no favours. If anything, based on the article and your post all I noticed is ‘how disgusting people many GPL proponents are.’

Your criticism omits the passages about usage of the MIT license over the GPL (the ones I quoted in the post).

I’ve addressed it:

Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.

[…]

This is pure speculation aimed to support a conclusion that the author has. uutils aims to be fully compatible and there are no indications that this goal isn’t sincere.

Discord on the website of the Rust project: That’s not a lie at all: it was the truth at the time of publication on March 19

I stand corrected regarding it being a blatant lie. However, the paragraph is still at least manipulative since nothing indicated that it was the primary communication platform. The forums were listed before it. At most you could argue Discord was primary chat platform, but even that is irrelevant considering that anyone who didn’t like Discord had an alternatives.

Sounds like the author is authoritarian and wants to dictate what people can and cannot use on the Internet.

How was this not a sign of flagrant disregard for free software and for people’s right to use the web however the fuck they want to use it

Last I checked Firefox and Chromium were free software and the forums work in both. Furthermore, if anything you should have issue with Discourse rather than Rust since that’s the software running the forums. Or better still, submit patches to fix compatibility issues.

Absolute trash article.

The first thing that I noticed back then

When is ‘then’? Because that affects the meaning of the rest of the paragraph. Prior to Rust 1.0 a lot of things changed in backwards-incompatible way. Currently, if you learn something, you can continue applying that knowledge.

I don’t want to learn something that does not last - that feels like a wasted time when I could also learn skills that remain usable to the far future.

Then software engineering is not a career for you. Maybe you could become a bricklayer because pretty much everywhere technologies changes and if you want to be at the top of the game you need to learn new skills.

That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.

So are many C programmers. Or Python programmers. Or Heskell programmers.

If you go to the website of the Rust programming language nowadays, one of the first things you’ll notice is that their primary communication platform is Discord.

This is blatant lie. The first thing I see when I go to the website is that Rust has official Mastodon, Blueksy and YouTube channels. And if you go to Community page you’ll see the main communication channels are self-hosted forum, and Zulip.

Another thing that you notice immediately if you use an independent web browser is that their developer forum does not work. If you use a “non-supported” browser, or have JavaScript disabled, the webpage body has a CSS property “overflow-y: hidden !important;” which prevents the user from scrolling the page. On top of the page there is a banner that tells you to download one of the “supported browsers”, which are Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

What is the issue exactly?

Which leads me to the next point. Rust people are clearly hostile towards or generally against free software.

So let me get this straight, you’ve poisoned the well with lies and irrelevant information to prime readers to hate Rust and accept your point. Got it.

There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version.

Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.

If the Rust version becomes popular […] the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. […]

This is pure speculation aimed to support a conclusion that the author has. uutils aims to be fully compatible and there are no indications that this goal isn’t sincere.

Rust’s licensing is also problematic. The license has been worded in such a vague way that it may or may not allow forking or re-implementation. It may or may not require deleting all references to the word “rust” from a fork or re-implementation.

All of that is fully compatible with FSF and OSI definitions. There is nothing new in requirement that forks use a different name.

The rest seems to be just ‘Rust people’ generalisations and lies.

You’re so gracious that you allow people to pay to be beta testers for your proprietary app.

(Also, I hate to be that guy who calls everything AI generated based on some tiny markers, but the use of emojis makes me feel the post is AI generated with no, or minimal, human oversight which puts in question quality of your code).

First step is to shrink and possibly move around your existing partitions to make space for a new one. GParted Live may help with that. Once you have enough space, just install Arch there. If you already have separate /home you should be able to reuse it.

tldr: For Linux adoption it would be better for devs to focus on 2 (“main”) distros which are very similar to Windows and macOS and then 2-3 further (“big”) distros which give a bit more room to experiment. All the other distros create confusion and analysis-paralysis for the user who wants to switch or wants to help others to do the switch.

This is a mythical man-month fallacy. If everyone who works on distributions focuses on just a handful of them, that does not mean development will go any faster or lead to better outcomes.

Also observe that majority of work which ends up in GNU/Linux systems is outside of distributions. And this work often ends up quite focused.

The problem isn’t diversity of distributions. The problems are people who go on describing history of GNU/Linux when a newbie asks them what distribution to start with; and ‘top 10 Linux distributions’ articles which litter the Internet. Just the other day someone shared a link to Distrochooser, a website which gives newbies ten distributions to pick from.

When a newbie asks about Linux, point them at Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition and that’s it. Or at most ask if their primary use-case is playing games in which case recommend Bazzite. That solves the ‘problem’ of distribution proliferation.

See also New to Linux? Stick To These Rules When Picking Distro.

Why am I using the tool if I then have to read through several reviews anyway?

Also, a lot of smaller distributions are derived from a few larger ones. Therefore, they are usually not very different.

Yes, that’s the point. That’s why if a newbie asks, recommend one of the big ones.

In the end, it is more important to try, after gathering a reasonsble amount of information!

People who know nothing about Linux need a clear choice. If you’re giving them dozen suggestions, than the tool didn’t help them in any way.

Also, a lot of smaller distributions are derived from a few larger ones. Therefore, they are usually not very different.

There are a lot of choices

There are too many choices. I’ve tried the chooser and at the end it gave me 9 distributions to choose from (i.e. nine distributions with no marked negatives). I’ve tried again and it gave me 13 distributions to choose from. This is absolutely useless for someone who knows nothing about Linux.

If someone selects ‘I have little or no knowledge about Linux’ it should go straight to recommending Linux Mint or with no other questions. Or maybe Bazzite if they selected gaming as main use case.

And if I select Windows experience, why doesn’t it mark Ubuntu with a negative as it has more of a MacOS feel?

The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.

I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.

What do you mean? They are included in the updates to -testing.

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