Thank you so much for the detailed answer 🙏

Basic, but Ubuntu. It’s got snaps which are slow and generally suck, plus Canonical

I don’t necessarily need it anymore, but I’m sure someone would find it useful in this comments section! Thank you!

Man, just the “normies” user experience in general.

I’ve had so many issues from the start, even on “beginner friendly” distros. Hell, I’m a software engineer by trade - I literally use WSL2 every day for my job - but there are some things the OS should just do.

Prime example: wifi connectivity (er, just connectivity in general - Bluetooth included). It seems like every distro neglects this part to some degree. I’ve tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Kinoite, countless others - but it seems like every one either has some form of Bluetooth connectivity issue (a la Kinoite not detecting my Bluetooth headphones) or a straight up wifi issue (like Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Linux Mint ALL not connecting to Panera WiFi on a wiped 2012 MacBook Pro - it was because Panera has a popup to accept wifi terms, btw, which is extremely common. Starbucks was broken too).

It’s that sort of stuff that prevents people from staying on Linux. People DO go to internet cafes to hang out and surf the web. It’s a helluva deal breaker that I need to turn on my phone’s hotspot just to connect to some Internet and then deal with LTE speeds. And as for the argument of “well that’s super old hardware” - it’s prime hardware that people will try Linux on and get pissed off.

Also, Nvidia support. It’s one of the most popular graphics card options - it’s a deal breaker that it doesn’t work out of the box on a lot of distros. Never ran into this myself, but just scroll here for a bit to see how prevalent it is.

I REALLY want to daily Linux but man, these issues prevent it (even now that I’ve moved on from the MacBook). If you really wanna help Linux grow, fix these problems and / or work on improving the “non-technical” user experience. You shouldn’t need to know what KDE is to use your desktop, nor should you need to Google like 15 things to get thru the installer with certainty.

I know this will get a lot of hate, and I really really want to love Linux, but I’ve been burned often so I’m skeptical.

Interesting, thank you for sharing. I’ll have to give it a go next time!

For anything lower-spec (like, <4Gb of RAM), Ubuntu absolutely CHUGS because of Snaps. Flatpak has no such issue.

Ironically, Lubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu fork) worked the best for me while I was using it. No slowness, but I installed pretty much everything using Apt (didn’t know about Flatpak back then).

I ended up having it lock up and freeze on the sign-in page though, so I moved on to the slightly heavier Linux Mint.

I think this is the perfect post to bring up XWayland.

That being said, I haven’t used it yet (so I can’t comment on whether it works flawlessly)! Can anyone elaborate on their experiences with it? I’m curious on it and don’t have my hands on a Linux machine at the moment

Doomed by I Prevail

I can also back that up! KDE feels way faster than Gnome (and especially Cinnamon) on older computers

My one big gripe with Mastadon is that images take absolutely forever to load if they have even a marginal amount of pixels. I scroll art often and I’m left waiting for greater than a minute for these things to load (and I’m on a very, very fast connection).

I learned Gimp alongside Photoshop ~10 years ago and it’s my preferred image editor. It does have some silliness sometimes, but overall I adore it.

One of the best things they ever did was making it one-window by default.

I was, indeed, a frustrated developer. Struck at the worst possible time, too

Can we please stop calling Mastadon a “Twitter alternative”?

Makes it sound far too derivative in my opinion - Mastadon has a lot going for it that Twitter has never implemented (Federation being the chief one).

This isn’t at specifically the OP, but rather at the news articles.

Fantastic article, 10/10 read. The roasts are on-point

I definitely like Organic Maps the best of the options I’ve tried, but unfortunately it doesn’t have Android Auto support.

It looks like they tried to do Android Auto support about a year ago in a branch, but they abandoned the branch. There is a new “aa” branch that is active though, so hopefully that works out.

If it does get Android Auto support, I will definitely switch to it permanently though!

Same. In my experience as well, almost all alternatives to Google Maps either:

• don’t have Android Auto support (a must for me)

• don’t have local coffee shops (you’d be surprised how often these apps fail to find 7-Brew coffee shops…)

• don’t actually give you enough time to turn (Waze… Which is also owned by Google btw)

Waze is the closest of these but man it’s annoying with that third bullet point. It’s also not FOSS.

I can only imagine Magic Maps falls into one of those three categories too.

You have great taste