Cool! Yeah, they don’t seem to be referenced as much anymore, but they were seriously impressive and had their use cases. :D

that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).

Yeah, Mint is often referred to by folks as a “beginner distro” implying you’ll somehow inevitably skill up and distro hop, and sure, plenty do, but it really doesn’t have to be that way!

(Heck, Eliot the super hacker in Mr. Robot used it as his home distro! Lol 😉)

I mean, it’s stable, you can still get newer stuff and gaming via FlatPak, and it’s just overall friendlier. The community is super helpful and nice too!

I personally jumped to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I like having new features sooner. (I blame Blender haha!), and honestly, I didn’t expect to fall in love with KDE as much as I did. I really like KDE. :p

I’d always encourage people to try other distros just to see if they do something that fits them better or something, but yeah, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to “graduate” from Mint. It’s lovely. :D

I’ve been contemplating… trying to start some kind of “PC Computing Club” or something. With the goal being to outreach and educate people toward computer literacy.

It would have to be something that’s “cool” to be a part of, because nobody actually seems to show up to “computer classes” even though they all clamor for them. Especially old people. They think they want to “learn computers” and then just drop out if they show up at all.

There’s gotta be a way around that. 90’s computer users were passionate and would be staging riots at what’s been done to the Internet, privacy laws, and on and on…

This “deliteracy” campaign is entirely intentional. They want to create an idiot cow-sumer class, which only exists to labor and pay subscriptions, without understanding anything.

Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.

My first was actually DSL: “Damn Small Linux”, contained entirely on a CD to remove a TERRIBLY resistant malware from my Windows XP machine. (It was awesome for that! Had no idea what I was doing lol.)

Tried Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Studio, but they didn’t like my Wi-Fi devices back in those days, so I didn’t get to do much with them!

Used Mint seriously on my aging laptop and loved it. It’s such an excellent on-ramp and you can hang out with it as long as you like.

Later tried Manjaro for a while but…it started having some controversial project decisions and just didn’t feel like home.

Using EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop and it works great! Considering migrating though: Arch is an excellent teacher, but I’ve had to spend unexpected weekends fixing weird hitches after updates.

Honorable Mention: Puppy Linux! I used to be able to boot it to any laptop from my Android phone, and that was a really neat trick for public computers and stuff.

I feel it. As a distro itself I’m not a huge fan of how it does things, but I really do like their theming, colors, font, aesthetic, logo, all that.

Thankfully easy enough to make any distro look like anything, with a little effort. :)

“… It’s the smell !”

That IS unfortunate o.O. How weird!

Every other distro I’ve used has just been like “Hey, some of this stuff was system integral, recommend a restart when you feel like it. 👍”

This was really informative, thank you so much for taking the time! Definitely bookmarking this. :)

I was looking up further why you’d use a bare repo over a standard one. Somebody said for just sharing a repo between users, “snapshots just take up unnecessary space.”

…But would that mean you can’t roll back history? Maybe I’m ignorant on the term snapshot in Git context lol.

But yeah, I really appreciate the post and I think that’ll get me on the right foot, to actually developing games instead of setting up yet another tool and procrastinating what I want to actually be doing anyway. 😂

Glad my instinct was correct about not using Syncthing for this purpose. XD

That’s some really helpful advice, thank you! 😃 I actually didn’t know you could just make any local folder a repo like that.

Would a Forgejo instance still be helpful if I wanted to have “one point of truth” between multiple machines even if I’m the only dev? I already use Syncthing, but for some reason I feel like there’d be a lot of sync conflicts and stuff.

The other main reason for wanting to learn Git, of course, is because it’s otherwise more difficult to try out changes to scripts and experiment, without finding yourself lost in the weeds and forgetting what worked last.

My current “version control” is “copy the entire project folder before you do anything major.” 😂

I remember this confusion a LOT back when main-branch Blender had its own game engine built in.

Forums were full of people saying crap like :

“Don’t use that, because since you used Blender which is GPL it means you have to provide the source code to your incredible GOTY contender and then everybody will beat you at life!!!”

There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.

• They embraced! :D
• They extended! :D
• . . .aw, shit. :/

I’ve only a basic understanding of using Git myself, but I think I’m gonna learn it with a self-hosted Forgejo for my Godot projects too.

Then for the parts that don’t have feature parity, I won’t know what I’m missing, and I have no need for “iNdUsTrY sTaNdArD LeAdiNg oPtiMiZeD sYnErGyStiC wOrKfLoWs” or whatever hahaha.

It does definitely present a conundrum if you want people to see your open source software though. Damn network effect. =\

And even then, mainly aimed and enterprise customers, right?

“We’ve detected viruses heading for your computer!”

Have you heard about the recent fuckups of fedora? fedora is a shitshow.

Oh really? I guess I haven’t. 😬

Yeah it was late here so I think I was poorly mushing two separate thoughts together there. I meant I was thinking of moving to a distro that isn’t as bleeding-edge for the laptop I’m not updating every single day…But also I should find something that still has a nice large software variety so I stay off AUR.

OpenSUSE has the “Open Build System” which I’ve used for like one package. So that’s pretty neat.

This is really tough because I have two gamers in the family using Nvidia cards I want to help move off of Windows, but I don’t want them running into having to roll back as often as I have or fiddle too much, but I feel like Mint is a little too far behind.

So I was considering the KDE spin of Fedora for them…But yeah, the answer isn’t so easy anymore lol.

Whelp…I’ve REALLY loved EndeavourOS for my laptop, especially because I felt I could mess around with stuff, but maybe this is my call to use something like Fedora or a OpenSUSE variant (I love Tumbleweed dearly).

Nothing against the incredible Arch, but I’m deffos that user who does

> yay 
> "Build files exist. Do clean build? N"  
> "View changes? N".

ENTER.

I want to learn, but also I’m a bit of a danger to myself if this malware threat is this broad.

When that forum is a reddit thread:

“I got it working on my end.”

“How did you solve the problem?”

“This message has been script deleted because reddit was stupid salmon truck cantaloupe spezsucks”

“Wow, that fixed it! Thanks! I have no problems with it now at all!”

Yeah don’t mess with the Debian gang. They’ll take forever to reach you but when they eventually do, they’ll be ready. XD

Haha, I’m seriously wondering if there’s not some kind of script we’re supposed to run first that’s like “Okay, new stable release now. Fetch and replace the latest repos!” Maybe in the desktop environment?

At least like with most things, Linux Mint I remember being so easy to upgrade to a whole new release right there in that universal update program. I don’t have to worry about that tangling up anyone I set up with it. It actually feels exciting hahaha.

All that being said: Rolling or point release or whatever – SET UP SNAPSHOTS. YOU’RE WELCOME. o_o hahaha

Haha Debian is really cool and I’m glad it’s there! Definitely rock solid! Don’t wanna throw any shade at their very important work. :)

…I’m just too goofy to update it properly sometimes. 😅 Skill issue lol.

I’m probably a big newb, but on my headless Debian machines, major updates screw me up sometimes too.

• “Ah! All my updates can’t be found on the server? Oh we’re done with “Bo-Peep” and moving to “PotatoHead” now? Maybe I should be on the newsletter or something…”
• Change some sources in that one text file I gotta look up every time…
• apt update && apt dist-upgrade “Oh, that’s a lot of errors…”

I’m sure it’s not that bad and I’m being dramatic but I do kinda appreciate my rolling OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for this reason lol. I feel like newbies would struggle with that major release upgrade process…

This. This is everything. Youth, adults, elders, everybody. Computers are everywhere and dammit people need to understand at least the basics of the machines that run the entire 21st century.

Dropping computer literacy classes in schools because “BiG tEcH rEpS toLD uS diSpOsAbLe tOuChScReEnS aNd ChRoMe aRe TeH fUtUrE” was such a freaking trap.

We’re experiencing a “Whole Language Reading” fiasco of technology education right now, and we need to correct it for everyday people. Linux proliferation to the people can absolutely be that gateway.

Otherwise, we end up with the same stupid class gaps Big-Capital always ends up creating: The hyper-specialized technical-managerial class, and the ignorant, helpless, paying consumer.

When people are educated they can grasp the extent of their freedoms, and they’re more willing to fight for their rights.

(And yeah yeah, inb4 doomers be like “We’re already there, we’re cooked bro, we’re done, game over man , we’re dogmeat pal!” Heard it all.)

To paraphrase Nick Fury: “Until such a time as the world ends we will act as if it intends to spin on.”