How? Most people here are one missed paycheck away from having their lives upended; they have no time, money, or power. Look into the stats on poverty, healthcare, etc. in the US. The state of affairs is abysmal.

Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Bazzite… there are plenty of beginner friendly distros these days!

Yea, this is an absolutely unhinged price point for a device like this

Everything everyone else said, but also it literally has more features. KDE Plasma and apps like Dolphin make Windows look like a toy.

I agree that the learning curve is surmountable, but the fact is that many people are unwilling to use a CLI, which is valid. It’s also very easy to bork your install with EOS, which is terrifying for people who don’t have the knowledge to even begin to troubleshoot issues and who just want their system to work. IMO new GNU/Linux users, unless they specifically request a more advanced distros that will help them learn how things work, should always be recommended a distro with the lowest possible learning curve in order to keep their data safe, their confidence high, and minimise downtime. They can distro-hop later if they want to learn.

I love EndeavourOS and I use it myself, but inflicting CLI package management and pacnew files on someone fresh from Windows is like throwing a baby into shark-infested oceans to teach it to swim.

My recommendation for new users is Fedora KDE:

• Almost never has any problems
• Works out of the box
• Up-to-date packages
• GUI package management and upgrades with Discover
• Lots of useful features vs. other desktop environments (such as GNOME that doesn’t even have a minimize button)

Mint is what I’d recommend for an elderly person who just needs to browse the internet and reply to emails, but for someone who needs to get work done it’s Fedora KDE all the way.

Fedora is a great distro. IMO it and Mint are the “it just works” distros.

Hard agree:

• Mint = “Just works”
• Fedora KDE = “Just works but also has a bunch of useful features and up-to-date packages”

Those are photographs…

This. Based on my (elementary) understanding of laser printers, you have to have a laser zap a transfer belt to charge it so that it will elecromagnetically attract the toner, then precisely lay down a fine layer of toner onto the belt, then lay the microplastics + iron filings from the belt onto the page, repeat this four times, then roll the page through a tiny oven to bake on the thin, shiny layer of plastic. It’s very complicated, and have you seen the price of new fuser units or transfer belts?

I mean, toner is also made out of microplastic and iron filings.

God restaurants have gotten so expensive, especially delivery. $15-$18 for a burger, another $4-$6 for fries, multiplied by two, plus delivery fees, taxes, and tip… easily $50+

In much the same way that sneezing can be ascribed to a cold, it depends on frequency and severity.

I use RSS Guard

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Before the last word.

What’s a beginner to do

Well that’s just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It’s not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don’t have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don’t want to.

So when you ask “am I supposed to X,” the answer is that there really isn’t a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you’re supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.

Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.

Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.

What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn’t supply any.

AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

If I’m not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their “Welcome” app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.

Since I started using a privacy respecting browser and moved to GNU/Linux, my whole life is captchas.

Agreed, you get to pick between a system that empowers you to do whatever you like, or an unborkable system. If you need something that won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot, you ought to be using an immutable distro.

For ages I blamed GNU/Linux for breaking when I was unknowingly causing issues. These days, I don’t fix what isn’t broken, and if I can’t help myself, I make sure I understand what I’m doing, write down any changes I make, and ensure I have a snapshot ready in case things don’t work out.

GNU/Linux may not exclusively be for advanced users anymore, but system customization still is.

Initial setup can be hard, and then, because GNU/Linux lets you do whatever you want, It’s not hard to bork the system if you’re using commands you don’t understand. The biggest realization for me was that if I want a stable system, I can’t expect to experiment with it / customize it to the nth degree unless I have a robust rollback / recovery solution like timeshift in place. Feeling very empowered after leaving windows, I have destroyed many systems, but truly, if you set up your system and then leave it alone, these days it’s not difficult to have a good experience.

But yea, you’re totally right: the userbase can be toxic AF, and there’s no one place you can go to learn the basics you really ought to know.