I don't wear hats cos am busy using debian

What comes default on fedora KDE spin

Using Fedora without codecs?

Too often I see desktops where the only two graphical apps are some ultralight terminal and Mozilla. Why do they want to suffer?

Honestly yes. A few years ago when I was still getting into linux I'd customize the shit out of everything, wm with lengthy configuration, mostly terminal apps, "minimal" ui with custom made themes, and all that.

My current fedora system is almost default Sway with a few convienent shortcuts and a few tweaks, using GUIs where it makes sense or simply because I just want something nice. I just don't have time or the need for something so customized. Defaults are good.

Heck, I'm even considering switching to Plasma once I get a better PC (gonna need to sell a kidney or two for that to happen tho), since default Sway still requires considerable tweaking and there's a few quirks I just don't want to deal with.

Fuck FreeDOS

All my homies use Plan9

I would say we should burn the light-mode heritics, but they've already done it to their own eyes.

yea as much as like using the command line, I'm having a hard time remembering all the options required, especially with things i use rarely. the discoverability is just better in GUIs

plus: most people learn graphically (visually) much easier than text-based. at least for me, it's much easier to build an intuition of something if i get a graphical display of the contents in a directory. that's why i always ls -alh every new directory that i enter, before i do anything else. for many people, it's better to use GUI file explorer because you also get image previews etc. but the same concept also applies to other issues:

like, if you want to configure various hardware on your machine, you open the settings app and get many icons that you can click on. meanwhile, on the terminal, there's no clear list of things that you can even configure.

I have too sneezed with a nosebleed, those are spurious allegations

Why is it constantly booting to a black screen with text?

This is easy, just install steam and go

Ahh the beauty of this Debian server, don't even need to get out of my sofa because I have SSH on my phone.

Heck yeah they did! I remember going over to my grandmothers house to use Word on her computer running DOS. She used that computer to keep her personal budget, do the accounting for her office supply business, write letters, and the newsletters for her church and social clubs. No gui, just a command line and some things that we would now call a TUI.

It was stigmatized by Windows, because the Windows terminal was terminally shitty. People swear to me that their new terminal is awesome, but I have my doubts. Microsoft seems to have a problem with making stuff that doesn't suck.

It’s still somewhat early days, but you might want to check out https://v-os.dev/

I’ve also been playing with Haiku on an old laptop and it’s pretty decent as a daily driver for the basics.

Can you explain why are you fond of haiku? What are it's strong points?

I had it in a VM, and liked the UI design. It was retro and unique. but that's about it.

A regular user will never in a million years create a script.

Flags have always been poorly standardized outside of system apps and tools. Generally, -u should equal --update (and depending on how the app was written, may warn for --up: "Did you mean --update?") Single tick flags are generally combinable: -ua or -ls. I have seen long single tick flags somewhere, but can't remember where. (Your -update example.) Various python libraries than handle flags have helped a ton with getting people to use the same patterns, so that is nice.

You just summed up my first experience with systemd many years ago.

systemctl != sysctl. Both somehow got wedged into the same index in my brain and took years for me to correct. On top of that, was reversed to . (Or was it the other way around?)

I was convinced from my first experience with systemd that the person who wrote it was the purest form of evil. (It's leveled out a bit over the years, so it's tolerable to use these days. Still not a fan though.)

You should try "the fuck". Wrong command? Just type fuck! It will fix itself. 100% AI free.

I'm the idiot who tries -Up

my poor cpu. You don't even need to use -vo=tct as mpv will draw to the frame buffer if x server is not available. There's also fbi and fbpdf for displaying images and pdfs to the frame buffer

Neat. Nearly watchable. I tried kitty/sixel options but those are too high-res and cause even more frame-drops (at least on the older hardware I tested it on, no drops playing with normal mpv), with a 360p video it's isn't scaled up.

Then again, I guess it's a whole lot more watchable than the blinkenlights (Starwars) thing via telnet.

The whole idea of someone not being sure if they want to use Linux while having an aversion to systemd, a system they likely don’t even have full context for, is just bizarre.

You’re either new and don’t know what you want or you’re someone who already knows well enough if Linux is for you or not, and likely exactly which version you want to use.

I know you’re trying to be helpful, but I clicked the link, sure that I was ready. Now I’m scared again.

I’ve got a laptop to give it a go. Gonna save the good files and let err rip. It always comes down to just wanting something that works. I really would rather learn something else with my limited spare time.

Still scared. Getting closer to making the switch every day though.

Oh Im deeply aware those exist. My daily is Debian Stable.

I've heard the jokes about rm -rf /. I've never met anybody who's taken it seriously and nuked their system.

That command is legendary. It's one of the first bits of computer lore I ever learned, about 10 years before I ever touched Linux. In fact, at that time I knew two things about Linux: it's a free OS and don't do rm -rf /.

Of course you should do some research first, so that you're sure that you know what a command does, but if you're getting it from a forum like Stack Overflow or even reddit, you can be reasonably sure that if the commenter was trying to destroy your computer they'd get downvoted and one of the other commenters would warn you about it. Don't treat Linux like it's some kind of minefield that you have to tiptoe around. It isn't conducive to learning.

I think the real issue with the modern terminal, and Linux in general, is that we are using tools designed for programmers and system admins, who are expected to know exactly what they are doing, to build and run servers and treating them like they are end user tools. My grandmother was perfectly happy using a terminal for the only computer she owned because the tools it provided were simple and had those built in protections in a way that bash never will be.

Have you used a terminal file manager with image preview like yazi? Or just a thumbnail viewer like lsix?

I use the terminal for terminal shit. File manager is not terminal shit (for me).

Def possible

Linux has a wide selection of GUIs. For those comfortable with Windows I would recommend either Mint's Cinnamon or KDE.

you can literally replicate Windows 98 if you wanted. XFCE is possible, KDE is easy to replicate. there's a very good git repo of this called Chicago95 that does everything, even the old Windows 95/98 boot screen.

Hell I had my KDE Plasma desktop looking exactly like NeXTUP for awhile. someone even recently made a spot on version of MacOS9 for KDE Plasma.

A clone of MS DOS Shell and maybe Win 3.1 is all anyone really needs.

I mostly just stopped obsessively fiddling with the visuals, I honed in on a good setup, colorscheme etc. and just kept using that. My period of trying flashy stuff like window transparency was very short, it can look cool but most of that stuff is way too impractical.

If it was convenient, every single GUI would just use that as a settings menu.

I… what are you talking about? Those words make sense on their own and I could probably diagram them as sentences, but put together in that way they don’t seem to parse into anything coherent.

Edit: Wait, are you saying that you think there are distros that don’t have a terminal or terminal emulator?!?

um, no. The joke is that a lot of people are scared of Linux because they think it’s “just a black screen with a bunch of text”, a lot of people who are newly using Mint or the other common “friendly” distros are proud and trying to convince everyone that you never need to touch the command line, and then the more people know what they’re doing the more likely they are to just live in a terminal and not bother with anything else.