It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn’t exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.

Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.

Same here. Has to be degoogled though.

Bloated when being run on a potato.

Luckily 99.9% of people do not compute on a potato.

it’s nothing but config files you have to edit from the local console shell

Some people seem to love that, as well as the total lack of any kind of access control or security. I mean, look at how many people are still arguing that “Systemd is destroying Linux”, clinging to initd with all its bash scripts and no nice way to prevent race conditions and such.

To roughly quote someone from a talk (not sure where I heard that, was about systemd as well I think):

“We nerds are very good at change when we’re the ones proposing it, but very bad when it comes from the outside.”

Reminds me of an old story about the game director Chris Taylor. He wanted to make a second iteration to bis game “Total Annihilation” since he promised to do so to his fans. However the current rightsholder, Atari, refused to sell the rights to him and instead took it as a business opportunity. They announced they’d do it themselves (without Taylor). The project got immediately canceled after the public reaction exploded in their faces (this was before social media).

Taylor still didn’t get the rights to his creation back and proceeded to do it anyway with a new name, “Supreme Commander” (with great success). Atari only lost both money and public good will. This still worked though since there wasn’t that much of a public mass manipulation machinery. With social media Atari could’ve potentially gotten through with it.

Found more context, for who is now curious:

• Apparently threatening violence with guns is okay (just got marked as “off-topic”).
• The maintainer of X11Libre, Enrico Weigelt, is an anti-vaxer who already got scolded by Torvalds for writing bullshit on the kernel mailing list

The more I read into X11Libre, the more I’m laughing. Now the freedesktop ban also makes perfect sense.

I’ve read the fastest as Pepsi Co.

Ah yes, I love when people do that. Especially since it perfectly circumvents word-based personal filters.

Yeah… I had a USB stick that was fat32 formatted but didn’t have a drive letter assigned. So… it just doesn’t shw up. Now biggie, right? Quickly add one in the disk manager… except I couldn’t because the “Snap-in feature wasn’t installed, please use Windows Update and try again” (It was the latest Windows 11). For assigning a drive letter. Of course it would do that if I freshly format the stick…

That OS is a total mess.

Branch Education. Rare videos, but so good!

It being good for Nvidia hardware isn’t wrong, but it being the best or especially good for gaming isn’t exactly true. It mostly boils down to the proprietary Nvidia driver being preinstalled and a lot of media attention why Pop!_OS became so popular for gaming.

Other distros that are just as good or better for gaming with Nvidia are, for example:

• Bazzite (Immutable)
• Nobara
• TuxedoOS

The first two are really going the extra mile for patches and gaming support. Bazzite can be a little bit frustrating though given it requires some additional knowledge to work with immutable file systems if you ever need to edit system files. Otherwise you should have a solid experience on any of them.

That’s Ubuntu, Mint and NixOS.

If you’re already on Mint and it works for you it’s a great OS to work with, so no inherent reason to switch. However if you look for something more modern with the same Desktop Environment as Mint (Cinnamon) perhaps Fedora Cinnamon is something for you (doesn’t use apt though). The most modern features you’ll find on a distro with KDE (Cinnamon for example is behind with support for modern stuff like HDR).

You’ll get tons of recommendations when it comes to modern KDE distros. Personally given you said you’re a beginner I’d suggest giving TuxedoOS a shot, as they

• Got the Nvidia drivers preinstalled
• Are based on Ubuntu (Best compatibility)…
• …which is the same base as Linux Mint (so .deb still work)
• Got the App Store all set up optimally (some distros don’t)
• There’s a hardware supplier if you ever look for sth.

Some negatives:

• Comes with Tuxedo Software superfluous to you (removable of course)

Depending on your beliefs it might be a negative that it’s made by a company. However Tuxedo is based in Germany (therefore GDPR applies), they’ve people work full-time on it and a good track record for many years now. Also having the Nvidia driver pre-installed is really good in my experience, only very few distros do that due to license stuff. Otherwise of course there’s also Kubuntu or Fedora for something with KDE. You can test all of them on DistroSea in your browser.

Feel free to ask anything. 🙂

It’s funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.

Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it’s really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We’re existing in a super diverse ecosystem.

It’s just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it’s the best pick for the person who’s asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.

NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.

(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)

And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The “just buy and be happy” aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.

If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want “same but Gnome” that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔

It is, with the best meme security problem that came to my mind.

…/

I really wish everyone thought like that, but I still see people recommending Nix, Arch, Void… and some go the ideological route and start recommending systemd-less only like Artix or ranting against anything that uses Flatpak. Those discussions can get messy, and they always alienate the person who asked. Unfortunately those with ideological reasons are always the loudest and present in basically every “Beginner’s Help” group.

Jokes aside, there are quite some good uses. Both extreme sides on this topic (those with money who abuse tech, people and planet, as well as those who just want to hate everyone who even dares to suggest that AI could be used positively) are just so god damn loud and obnoxious.

Perhaps AI being useful to uncensor porn ends up being the smallest common denominator we can agree on to be good. 🍆

I have one of those Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher. They’re really useless.