No, APT is the past 20 years.

I’ve said it before, I think Cinnamon is a middle ground between Gnome amd KDE. If you almost like both, go for Cinnamon.

I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.

Wheatley is a great character, he’s just got a minor case of serious brain damage.

I wrote a thing about this earlier: Fedora has apparently been infected with an advertising department. Their website has a lot of branding and buzzwords and wanketeering and very few technical details. It never says the word Gnome anywhere. You just have to know “Workstation” and “Silverblue” mean Gnome.

“A large data centre” this wasn’t. I saw a couple washing machine-sized vats of oil-soaked computers.

Holy shit, that’s it. GPT is Wheatley from Portal 2. The moron you attach to a computer system to make it into an idiot.

I’ve seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa’s water system. I’m struggling to imagine that’s enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I’m kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.

Based on my experience migrating from Mint to Pop!_OS, the next step is migrate back to Mint.

Ritchie’s Basilisk.

Well yes, largely for the same reason people are driving around on bald tires, paper thin brake pads and three drops of oil in the sump. It’s because the education system has failed them in one way or another.

I have noticed two trends over time:

You’re increasingly likely to be told to edit the registry to customize a Windows machine. Back in the 98/ME/XP days, you just didn’t hear about the registry. You might have known it existed if you were some kid with your dad’s hand-me-down Pentium III HP Pavilion, but you NEVER touched it. Sometime around Windows 8 you started to see guides talking about “If you want to put it back to behaving like Win 7 did, just add this registry key.”

You are decreasingly likely to be told to open the terminal and run some arcane command to customize a Linux machine. GUI tools in distros designed for newcomers, casual users or gamers (things like Mint, Pop!_OS or Nobara) are increasingly complete and rely on users manually editing config files or running commands for fewer and fewer “typical” tasks.

I used a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for awhile. If you’re going to do that, get the most RAM you can.

I also ended up using Ubuntu MATE rather than Raspberry Pi OS. PiOS didn’t hold up do daily use, their PIXEL desktop isn’t particularly well made.

Was a Windows user up through Win 7.

I started to play with Raspberry Pis and mostly Raspbian on the side largely related to my amateur radio hobby.

My laptop died, I bought a new one. Windows 8.1. Figured I’d rather use that slow-ass single core Pi 1 running Debian Wheezy than this.

First I tried Ubuntu Unity. I thought “Okay this could work, let’s keep shopping.”

Next I tried Mint Cinnamon. “Here we go.”

I’ve taken a look at Manjaro a couple times over the years. I have stopped this.

I briefly tried to run Pop!_OS when I first built my desktop, that lasted 3 weeks.

My desktop and laptop run Mint Cinnamon, I’ve got a tablet running Fedora Gnome. I kinda found my home fairly quickly and I’m not really interested in moving out.

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullshit about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.

In my 10 years around the Linux ecosystem, I’ve never seen anyone recommend Red Hat to new home desktop users.

Ubuntu has joined Red Hat. It’s a corporate server distro now.

Go look at their website. More corporate logos than a Cup series stock car. Just figuring out which version you should download so you get a “normal desktop” is a task bigger than it should be. Back on the stupid bad old website I came across a guy who said he “installed Ubuntu but it didn’t come with APT” and I’m like “wtf…did you install Ubuntu Core, their Snap-only IoT thing?” And he stopped responding.

Actually I’m going to accuse Fedora of doing this too. You kind of have to know “Fedora WorkStation” is the Gnome version which is considered the default, “Spins” are the versions with other DEs, and “Silverblue” is the immutable file system version.

It has been my experience that it is a bigger pain in the neck to install Windows. Something you can try is practice it in a virtual machine using something like VirtualBox.

I would agree. If you watch the video, you’ll see that Linux Mint’s onboarding process walked Luke through using the Update Manager. Pop!_OS didn’t. Also apparently Pop!_Shop doesn’t or didn’t perform an apt update upon launch for reasons beyond my understanding. Anyone familiar enough with Pop!_OS to know if that was or still is the case?

I’ve done a whole NTSB breakdown on that incident before, but here’s what I hope is the short version:

He was using Pop!_OS. Pop!_OS’ desktop environment was at the time kind of a fork of Gnome. I think now it outright is a fork of Gnome.

It just so happened that a version of the Steam .deb package went out with a buggy set of prerequisite data such that if it encountered a “weird” desktop environment it would declare itself incompatible with this which would make APT uninstall the entire GUI stack, right on down to Xorg. It wouldn’t happen to distros using more mainstream desktops like Gnome or KDE or xfce, but it did effect weird things like Pop!_OS.

This bugged version was apparently the latest version published when the Pop!_OS install image Linus used was made, so that was the version in the apt cache on Linus’ Pop!_OS machine.

In the time between the creation of that install media and the filming of the episode, the bug had been reported and an updated version pushed to the repo.

At no point during the install-first boot process, or while launching the Pop!_Shop did Pop!_OS update the apt cache.

Linus tried to install Steam via the Pop!_Shop’s GUI. behind the scenes it saw the error about incompatibility with the desktop and threw a dialog box that said “Failed to install Steam.” The system was not harmed or altered in any way and continued working correctly.

Instead of googling “popos failed to install steam” to see if there’s a way to fix it, he instead threw a small bitch fit about how Linux doesn’t work and you have to use the terminal for everything. He googled for “how to install steam with the terminal” or similar, and found the command “sudo apt install steam.” Most guides online for installing things using APT tell you to run an update and probably an upgrade command first, I do not know if Linus found instructions that omitted that or if he skimmed too aggressively.

Running the command “sudo apt install steam” printed a lot of STDIO to the terminal including a large list of things it was preparing to uninstall, followed by a plaintext warning in bold text that read (paraphrasing) **WARNING! This operation is very likely to seriously damage your computer. You should not do this unless you REALLY know what you are doing. To continue, type “Yes do as I say.”

It is my belief that Windows trained Linus to ignore such warnings, because Windows constantly throws errors about “this may harm your computer” basically every time it asks for administrator privileges. Linux does not do this; Linux usually accepts a ‘y’ or even just hitting the enter key with no input to mean “yes proceed,” sometimes when it wants you to really stop and think it’ll make you type the whole word “yes.” Having to type that whole sentence feels almost like “update your last will and testament to continue.” I think a lot of users learned it would do that from Linus’ video.

He did so, the computer dutifully uninstalled the entire GUI stack and dropped him into a terminal.

I’ve said this several times before.

There were a couple episodes where they had iJustine on as a guest. I think they built a server for her? Anyway one episode they did was they set up a Mac and a Windows PC next to each other, and had Justine use Windows and Linus use MacOS for a series of routine computer tasks. Both found stumbling blocks. Both of them, when hearing what the task is, said to the other “Oh you’re going to struggle with that.” I remember specifically Justine saying that of taking a screenshot on MacOS because apparently the key combination isn’t intuitive, it’s something like Cmd+6 or something?

Why didn’t WIndows and MacOS both get declared unfit for use by normies the way Linux did? They did a similar “here are some tasks to complete” challenge which wasn’t well thought out; how would most people “sign a PDF?” Why would “enjoy HDR content” be on there other than “lol it doesn’t support this.”

I also recall another older episode where (do we retroactively call her Emily for appearances in older videos?) walked James through the process of installing and running games in Linux. Which I think would be a more valuable series of videos than “some guys who fully intend to go back to windows at the end of a month try to slog through Linux unaided I guess.” Do a 30-day Learning Linux challenge, where some newbies who genuinely have a goal of switching platforms do so under the guidance of a veteran user.

I’ll even put my keyboard where my mouth is. I’ve used Linux full time for 10 years now for work and play, I do not currently own any working Windows systems. I’ll volunteer to be that mentor character on camera.

In my family, my parents’ generation either worked in IT and spent some of their careers writing macro-assembly on punch cards, or they have no coherent answer to the question “what is an operating system?” For this latter group, I’m going to be their sysadmin either way, and I no longer sysadmin Windows.

Everyone in my generation are pretty computer literate; I think I program in the most languages but my cousins all know what file systems are, could put together a household budget in Excel, know how to install software etc. A few of my cousins are in that “mostly use Windows for gaming and Ubisoft/EA aren’t great companies” phase where Linux is still a bit inconvenient.

My niece, the only representative of her generation in my family, has a reasonable child’s grasp on computers. She’s used iOS and ChromeOS and Windows and Linux, so I’m pretty sure she understands the same hardware can run different software. Not sure how deep that understanding goes but she’s a kid she has time to learn.