Quazatron

I expect that some forks will actually have useful features or corrections that, when cherry picked, cleaned and polished, can improve the main kernel.

The rest (98% or more) (yes, I pulled that number from my arse) will be absolute rubbish.

I do not envy the kernel maintainer’s job at this point. They are sifting sand with a spade and a sieve while the world is dumping truckloads of rubble at them.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Look, I’m doing my best, ok? Back off!

Use whatever feels comfortable. Both are fine. People are complaining about micro annoyances that should not really affect you at first.

When you get comfortable with Linux, you’ll also get to pick sides in micro battles like KDE vs Gnome, vi vs emacs, systemd vs sysv, flatpak vs snap and all the other wonderful my-side-is-better-than-yours fights.

The important stuff (my documents, my desktop settings) are in my user’s home folder. That’s what is important. The rest (the Linux distribution) is swappable and replaceable. I keep /etc (the global system configurations) because I sometimes make changes there that I like to keep when distro hopping.

I mostly backup /home and /etc on my home machines. Anything else I can recreate with configuration-as-code tools like Ansible.

I can, I’m just lazy.

I respectfully disagree. XFCE having the same experience is its main appeal.

AFAIK it’s a project that does not have many developers, so the pace is quite slow, but the reverse side is that there are no surprises. When running production systems you do not want surprises. You want a desktop that lets you work and gets out of the way. That is the reason why XFCE doesn’t get much press but has quite a few satisfied users.

You have much to learn about how things work in FLOSS.

Projects don’t die because you and your cool friends decided that they are old news. They will live on as long as there are users and developers interested in keeping them going. There are countless examples, I’m sure you can find some if you get past your short sightedness.

I seem to have a tendency, a skill, a knack to choose and buy that specific hardware model that is not supported by these cool open source projects.

Same thing happened with PostmarketOS, I have a box full of old phones that are specifically not supported.

It’s a really shitty superpower.

I’ve avoided Gnome since the shift to GTK 3, when it became apparent that the devs were hiding functionality in the name of some greater vision that was never explained to lesser mortals.

You don’t get to treat me as a moron, only my wife can do that.

XFCE and KDE have served me well, at least they don’t hide settings and functionality from me.

I’ve seen this opinion voiced quite a few times for the last 28 or so years I’ve been a Linux user.

Guess what? It’s free and open source software. People work on what they feel like when they feel like if they feel like. You can’t mandate “let’s just have a couple of distros, think of the public!”. It doesn’t work like that. Yes, life is not perfect.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.