The thing is, it’s fun

I’m trying out Arch on my laptop atm, and tbh the only real advantage (at least for me) is that the packages tend to be a lot fresher than on Debian-based distros. The question is how many of your packages you really need to be that fresh.

I think a lot of Arch users feel like wizards because they connected to the home wifi using the command line, but if you’ve tinkered with (/broken then had to fix lol) other distros, you will have done all this stuff before

Yes, but what if you need to download additional drivers for your wireless card

It’s not rocket science. You might need a wired connection to begin with though

Ok, no worries. I’m not sure how I can explain to you what I meant tbh. The context is that Apple hardware that recent is unlikely to have fully Linux support yet, simply that. It is a relative claim, but you seem to have parsed it as an absolute?

Dude, there are so many contexts in which 2016 could be considered ‘recent’, including the one I was speaking in, and yet you march into my mentions with the patronizing bullshit. I don’t know, maybe you think you’re being friendly, but it doesn’t feel friendly to me.

8 years is recent if it’s apple hardware and you’re expecting Linux to work flawlessly out of the box. Maybe things were different back in your day though

Ok, fair cop, I’m misremembering things — I had issues with a realtek card recently though. The point is that, as good as first party support is these days, you can’t just buy anything and expect it to work, especially if it came out in the last couple of years.

I do check in on it every now and again, and it is impressive! I reckon they’ll be able to offer a seamless transition once Apple stops servicing M1 Macs, which is really good going. But, depending on your use case, making the leap now would mean sacrificing some functionality

But plenty doesn’t e.g. Broadcom wifi cards. If you just buy whatever new hardware and expect Linux to work out of the box, you’re likely to have problems ime.

There are always options of course, but you have to shop wisely!

Learn to read.

On the contrary, it’s often new hardware that causes the problems because the drivers won’t have been reverse-engineered yet

It depends. I installed mint on a 2011 MBP a couple of years ago and it was a breeze. I installed arch on it recently and the only snag was having to install the proprietary Broadcom driver to get wireless. It runs great though — which is just as well because it would actually be more difficult to install OSX on the bloody thing, seeing as they no longer support it.

A 2016 MBP is still a bit recent, but, as a general rule of thumb, by the time a Mac stops getting software updates, Linux will be ready for it.

Your criticisms are literally general ones. You’ve only gone into specifics to describe the configuration of your favorites bar in detail for some reason. I’ve been saying throughout this conversation that it’s a question of use case — that making general statements about ‘usability’ overlook a whole host of users; the visually impaired being one example that comes immediately to mind. The point is that there should be options, and people shouldn’t be put off from trying different things until they find what works for them, because for everyone who needs a GUI-only approach, there is someone else who would benefit from a bit of CLI in their workflow but has been told it’s beyond them when it really isn’t.

Ok but if we’re talking about our own personal rigs, I launch favorite commands with one keystroke. I absolutely guarantee I can boot up my computer, navigate to whatever working directory and already have gotten to work before you’ve clicked on your second icon. But it’s different use cases isn’t it? I can definitely see how if you’re using the mouse anyway, a GUI suits you better. I work mainly with text, but so do most people, I think? It’s terms like “terrible usability” etc that I’m taking issue to here, because you’re talking out of your arse. You admit that you’ve never bothered to learn, then make sweeping proclamations as if everyone on earth uses their computer primarily for Blender

Yeah tbc once again I do actually use a GUI as well, I just think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you refuse to even try using the terminal, because it’s not as hard as you’re telling yourself it is. For example, typing ‘firefox’ and hitting enter is way easier than looking for the icon and clicking it. When I was first starting out with it, I mainly worked by cycling through previous commands with the up key. Then you learn about Ctrl+R and you are flying.

Again, if you don’t want to use the terminal that’s up to you, and a perfectly reasonable preference. But don’t make out that you couldn’t learn it very quickly if you wanted to, because you definitely could!

But the GUI also requires memorizing — often steps that are not consistent across desktop environments, or even versions of the same one! Terminal commands otoh can be noted down for later use — and the terminal remembers them. I use the GUI for some things too tbc — it depends on your use case obvs — but you don’t need to pretend the terminal is this genius-hacker level of inaccessible, because it’s really not

So I never planned on using the cli, but the thing is, when you’re following a tutorial — say you’re installing/configuring something new — it is so much easier to copy/paste commands than it is to read instructions and then translate them to your own particular GUI environment. Once you’ve done that a few times, you’re already one of us