To be fair, YouTube doesn’t have an algorithm that promotes the best videos, either. For quite some time now, it just promotes garbage.

@snek_boi@lemmy.ml, where are you? Now this was absolutely a surprise to me, that this was, in fact, not real, just a satire (which I learned from the comments).

Use less for checking contents of files. Many people use cat all the time, but I don’t like it, because if you do that often, your terminal window quickly gets flooded with stuff, and then you have to scroll up and down if you wanna see a previous output. With less, your file opens in a different “frame”, which you can close when you’re done.

Nothing. I picked a distro that works for me out of the box. On top of that I only installed stuff, instead of replacing stuff.

I find Gnome smoother than macOS.

This wasn’t the case many years ago, but now I find Gnome pretty good, the amount of bugs are surprisingly low.

On the other hand, I experience glitches on macOS regularly on the UI, especially on a multi-monitor setup (I use both Gnome and macOS with multiple monitors).

And generally feature-wise I find Gnome a lot more convenient to use in terms of window or workspace management.

I’ve used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.

KDE:

• Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
• Lately I’ve encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don’t have the capacity for this.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
• There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would’ve been much smoother. Here’s an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you’re typing, but it still does what you’d expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.

Gnome:

• It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it’s easy to accomplish when it’s so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
• Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It’s still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn’t even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
• Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it’s not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there’s way to improve here too.

To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.

I guess, any website served by Google Cloud wouldn’t work either.

In my opinion, social media is extremely harmful to society. Fediverse has implemented some proper moderation, while those more popular platforms tend to amplify what makes this world crazy (and eventually completely destroyed).

If there’s one reason why it’s not okay that those platforms are more popular than the fediverse, it’s that at least the Fediverse has the chance to properly moderate content, while on those platforms it’s either unmoderated, or even worse, the quality content is oppressed.

Manjaro, because it’s rolling release and it’s built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

In case anything breaks, there’s quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

It’s been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.

It happened to me countless times that I was suffering with a task for hours and hours and hours, then finally found what the problem was. Then a few weeks later, facing the same issue again somewhere else, I only remembered the fact that I had that same issue weeks ago, but I completely forgot what the solution was.

Weirdly enough, sometimes it’s indeed a lifelong experience and I can remember the solution forever. I don’t really know what it depends on.

COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.

I beg to differ. First of all, the fact that the Rust compiler eliminates a bunch of bugs that would cause crashes in other languages, is already a major factor in making the user experience smoother. Secondly, generally speaking, according to my own experience, overall code quality has a proportional effect on the software. If it’s written well, bugs are more likely to be caught during testing and less likely to occur after release. In a badly written software there are always more bugs. This point isn’t Rust-specific, just mentioning that developer-related stuff does have an impact on the user experience. And by the fact that Rust is such a powerful tool compared to others, and COSMIC being the first desktop environment written in RUST, it is revolutionary.

Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.

Sure, I didn’t say we can only have one solution for each problem. As long as a new solution is justified (offers unique features, better performance, more stable and reliable, or by other measures), then so be it. That will make the open source world better. For example, if they decided to write the Mir Wayland compositor in Rust, that would be a valid reason to keep pursuing it (although even then wouldn’t entirely be convinced by that). I’m still saying, for the problem of segmentation it isn’t very good that many small teams are creating software that otherwise already exist. I find contributing to the major ones more useful.

(Btw you seem to have a quite deep and extensive knowledge of the history of Ubuntu components. Upvoted for the detailed insights.)

This old canard again.

Dude, I was just sharing my own opinion. Has anyone mentioned these before? I didn’t know about that.

Came first.

Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.

For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.

Of the mentioned UI shells, I only have experience with Unity and Cinnamon. I can’t argue about the rest. However: COSMIC is actually revolutionary, since it’s entirely made in Rust. I’m actually looking forward to it and I’m eager to try it once it becomes stable. Cinnamon was made for a reason: back in the days, when Gnome 3 was released, its UI was quite controversial. Cinnamon aimed to provide a more classic experience while running on new Gnome. Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af). Bottom line here is, if they’re developing and maintaining their own solution for something that has a popular alternative, then better do a good job, otherwise don’t try to force it on the users. Or do force it, and maybe someone will like it… but OP was asking about the worst distro, so I came up with one that I personally didn’t find usable on the long run, and still is unrealistically popular in my opinion.

Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.

Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

• Bret Fischer’ Docker courses
• Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s JS courses are said to be good, I only tried his Vue course, that one is indeed good.
• Mosh Hamedani had great C# courses, but sadly he hasn’t been updating them, so by now they’re outdated. Could be still relevant for the basics.
• Asim Hussain’s JS courses
• Aaron Parecki’s The Nuts and Bolts of OAuth - I’ve found it a straight to the point explanation of the basics that should be enough for smaller projects, and also enough for you to make your further research when you need it.
• Not programming, but I would put Kody Amour’s math courses here as well.
• Nathan Stocks’ Rust courses are fine. I got them for free, if you watch out, you might find him posting coupon codes for free access to his courses. I haven’t found them especially excellent, but for free they’re actually pretty good.

Okay, fair enough.

When I posted my original comment, I had the assumption that someone who uses Linux (or about to use Linux) knows at least the basic terms.

But to be honest, OP didn’t even specify for what purpose they were looking for the worst distro. Maybe they meant for a docker image for their k8s cluster. Who knows. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve been using Manjaro for like 7 years. Throughout these years I maybe had two issues with updates. I’ve easily fixed one by myself (it was a dependency issue), the other one was a bug in packaging. Mentioned it on their forum, they were crazy fast to reply (I wouldn’t even expect that from a software company, let alone an open source project), and the fix was out in a few hours.

Btw their issue tracking related to updates is top-notch. This is another reason why I had a positive impression with this distro.

Regarding their own software, I am also impressed by their mhwd scripts. Even a shitty Nvidia driver can be easily installed with it, which actually works. And their OS installation framework has been adopted by other distros as well.

Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.

I agree about the segmentation as a major issue, and that’s exactly why I brought it up in my original comment how it’s not okay that Canonical keeps re-inventing the wheel instead of improving an existing project.

I wasn’t comparing macOS to Ubuntu, I was comparing Apple to Canonical in a way how they approach the market. What I found similar is, that both of them are going their own way and making their product as different as possible from others. Not out of innovation, just for the sake of being different. Canonical is somewhat better though, because they’re dealing with free software, so technically you can uninstall what you don’t like, and install what you want. But why would I start to replace and configure components, when I can just have another distro that is working the way I like out of the box?

Udemy.

The catch is, unfortunately 95% of the courses there are trash, and it can be a real challenge to find those 5% that are actually valuable.

Edit: on Udemy, there are almost always discounts. If you don’t see prices around €12-20, just wait a week or two.

I’d pick Ubuntu. I don’t really understand why it’s still so popular. Never ever had a successful dist-upgrade with it, so technically if you wanna stay up to date with it, you have to reinstall every six months.

And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.

Are there any worse distros? Probably yes. But in proportion to its popularity, Ubuntu is the absolute worst, that’s not even a question to me.

Edit: I can see several replies to my comment praising Ubuntu for its role in making Linux platform (and free software) more popular. That’s fine, perfectly valid. In fact, my very first experience with Linux was with Ubuntu as well, through a CD addition to a PC magazine back in 2005.

To clarify myself (since the post itself is not very elaborate), when I posted my comment, I was thinking of the quality/usability/stability of Linux distributions, and due to personal experience I’ve never found Ubuntu usable in the long term. I did try it several times through the years, also installed it on my mom’s laptop (fairly simple setup with no customizations at all on a Dell Latitude, a.k.a good hardware), and even there basic things just didn’t work on the long run.

I’ve been using Manjaro for many years, and it’s been working mostly flawlessly. Minor issues arise sometimes, but that’s incredibly rare, and easy to fix.