Its the same problem as standardized Unix systems in the 90s. There’s more ideas on how to implement hardware than there are hands to integrate driver software.

When it comes together it’ll be because we either make the manufacturers warp around something like POSIX, or provide a common target on phones like the steam deck.

Otherwise every hardware generation will get the undescribable misery of supporting the last one, from the one they’re on, while writing the next one. The problem tends to compound.

This is always a spectrum from how long it was since the last Debian stable release. So about 2 years max.

Modern release cadences make it crazy anywhere but Debian, but security patches are very timely. If you’re dealing with newer features, driver support or java/npm packages you’re probably also outside the typical defaults, but there’s generally some people working to keep the common ones up to date.

Still not my preferred way to handle updates and in some cases… kind of abusive to the maintainers who constantly haVE to deal with bug reports from “out of date” Debian users. The xscreensaver maintainer has some choice words. But it works, has for years with no sign of slowing.

K, teachable moment maybe.

How complicated do you think a web browser is? Out of the box there is support for 30 years of web and file systems, support for socket types that will never be commissioned again and a pipeline to every native media format.

It’s complicated, it’s essentially an OS. with perfect backward compatability. (Mostly)

I have an increasing amount of bile for the Mozilla Corp, but if you’re on Lemmy you probably noticed corporations don’t make the best decisions for you… My question is how many of the options do you see in about:config do you think chrome and safari don’t show you?

Mostly to their benefit I’d add, except if they set them maliciously you’ll never know.

Zypper is very solid, and I can’t say anything bad about suse, but it was 15 years ago I was strictly working off of VMs while the company I was working at advertised support. If there wasn’t the Debian social contract I think a lot more projects would have forked it.

They had a better reputation down the company chain than redhat, but the orders always seemed to go to IBM.

Gentoo is an open book test on compile flags at all times.

All you have to know is all your system variables, compiler flags that exactly two distros use, init, daemons and hardware and it’s great!

On some level I admire the people who know that stuff, but I’ve had my OS compiled for me for a long time. I loved portage once I figured out how to use it though.

I might add some version of Suse (open or enterprise) to that list though. Last I checked there were a bunch of shops kicking the tires as cent os shut off. Didn’t keep up on how that turned out.

I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.

Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.

Honestly unless you’re going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years… But I don’t want to set it up again. Not again.

It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the “core” (that stays the same everywhere and you don’t have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It’s big and complicated because you’re replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don’t like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.

I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.

It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.

I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.

That doesn’t mean the org always live up to it, but that’s partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.

The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I’m amazed they’re not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it’s a rock solid implementation.

This. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I tend to think you can secure yourself some of the gains without rooting your phone, but it’s a lot of twiddling and an ecosystem swap.

I loathe apple, but if you’re not ready to dive in, your home devices are where I would start. Routers, modems, home PCs, learn how to set up encryption and redirection to put things behind. Ditch your roomba.

Edit; I did not mean to talk down, sounds like your on that train. Android is linux and adb is awesome (sometimes).

Keepassdx/xc and syncthing have been awesome, rise up has a decent free VPN client for public use in fdroid.

I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.

Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.

Definitely worth running through vim tutor at least once.

It’s beyond typing speed, things like piping out strings to utilities is using one program to write another, you aren’t just getting faster because of access, it’s a paradigm shift.

Edit just for fun: im a non Dev dummy who happened to grow up in a Unix household. Even having dropped vim for helix and bounced around the MS admin/Apple IT space for 30+ years. When I switched to Linux I could still remember binds I’d set up and last used at 9.

Kinda like riding a bike.

Efficiency.

There’s 0 chance if you have to pick up your mouse that you can keep up with a Unix gray beard.

That’s just editing, if they’re from the emacs era there might be nothing you can do with text faster across their whole system.

I like vscode as a entry point, but if you care to get faster learning just vim motions and sys utils alone is going to cut time from the process.

This is incredibly true. The hardware manufacture process is a slow turning and cost centric wheel, but it’s always forward looking. If it doesn’t exist today you are building around compromises made outside the scope of your concerns.

Anyone whose had to work on DEC or Sun hardware can describe in excruciating detail about how minor implementation differences in hardware cascade down the chain. (Missing) Rubber washers determined a SAN max writes once, lest the platters vibrating cause the chassis to walk across the floor.

‘Universal’ support is always a myth, and carving up what segment to target is shooting one moving target while standing on another one unless you have exclusive control of implementation of the whole chain (apple).

For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you’re selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

I think it’s grossly undersold personally. What valve has managed is getting the single target platform open source could never agree on.

It’s a small miracle, and it bleeds over into stuff like device driver support in a way I don’t think most people who didn’t deal with Linux in the 2.x era immediately appreciate.

If Linux on the desktop has a surge, they did a lot of the legwork.