I use Linux because it is free and good enough to do most stuff I want to do on a computer.

I use windows at work because I get paid - so from my perspective it is cheaper than free. It makes it frustrating to do the stuff I’m supposed to do but my employers are fucking idiots so it doesn’t really matter.

I already assumed aur was riddled with stuff like that.

Use a condom when fucking around in there.

Haha, Don’t offer people windows 11 , even in jest. It’s clearly the opposite of “being excellent” to them ( rule 3).

Gotta love mods.

Who is this mythical average user I keep hearing about?

I’ve never had a problem forcing people at work - even those with very limited IT knowledge - to run things from cli in windows.

For years in one place I worked the IT support first line solution was to tell all users to force a gp update from the windows cli. They’d point to a nice little how to guide with screenshots and everything. I don’t know if any of the thousands of people working there were the all important average user either though, probably not.

Surely that can be OPs choice.

If a user has a large number of programmes they might not want to hand hold updates of all of them each time.

If they choose only the handful they want from arch repo or aur then they might have a quicker update and find it easier to stay awake.

I’d think it should be up to them if they want to trade off bloat vs the burden of an update.

I find, especially for AUR stuff the update can become vexatious.

Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don’t really know.

Maybe i just update and see what happens.

There’s been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market “rationality”. And we get the benefits ever since.

People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they’re not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don’t seem to see the “investment” markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That’s either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.

Laptops run off batteries a lot of the time - so compromising outright performance - full instruction set - for battery life will be attractive for many laptop users who use it on the go.

I’m no apple fanatic, I’d never get one, but I do see the appeal of those apple laptops.

I’m sure x86 could get closer on the performance to battery tradeoff if they wanted to; but I bet they’d be looking to price up at the apple level for that.

I’d go basic debian . Install flatpak and flathub to get any packages that are too far out of date or might get so. Any derivative or ubuntu derivative just sees like unnecessary extra dependencies to me.

Debian gives i think a wider choice of desktop environment than any of the derivatives on install, but I think they’re all much of a muchness really. Most of the DEs have the “Click something, window opens” feature.

I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.

Of course that’s after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it

Looks a wee bit like Calculon, facially at least; a bit skinnier in the torso.

oh oh, I’m a below average arch user. I suspect i copied most of my hoome from debian or something.

I’ll rename it to Dickuments as a security feature.

Yes very possible in all the big western European countries.

I’m sure you’re just using “communist” rhetorically there, for various USA history reasons that I don’t fully understand.

But it’s important to point out that corruption isn’t the same as “communist handout”. There was nothing “communal” when the USSR did corruption, and nothing “communal” when the USA does corruption. It’s all just concentrating power in a few peoples hands with as few limits as possible.

Good luck to you though, if your political forces can’t stop the concentration of power then conflict and likely bloodshed might be the only option. And there’ll be a lot fighting to save the empowered, hoping for some crumbs to trickle down to them. I can’t believe that all the pro-gun rhetoric in the USA - that I’d previoulsy though crazy - begins to make some sense.

And those from the fucking UK apparently.

Very similar though - just waiting for them to elect farage to gut UK public services.

That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.

It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.

You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.

I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.

:) thunderbird 2 is go. . .ing grocery shopping.

Some buses are also smaller than some US cars.

Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.