NekuSoul

Oh yeah, Mint is also pretty special. It’s pretty good for non-gaming “it just works” purposes, but recommending it blind for gaming is just straight up evil: No Gnome. No KDE. Just three niche DEs that are still mostly stuck on X11. Meaning, that if you want to properly make use any recent monitor features (as in, decade old features) your only option is to switch to another distro.

It’s a surefire way to get someone to switch back to Windows.

Either that, or it’s Debian with its ancient drivers and libraries. Maybe even both.

Pretty good take. IMO, it’s also quite ironic that the FSF is pushing the same flawed logic that politicians do when they want to outlaw secure encryption, just for a different (noble) goal.

My assumption is that it probably uses the same mechanism that most other SSDs already have where it always saves the data with internal encryption and simply overwrites the encryption key when a wipe is requested.

This same mechanism already allows SSDs to be formatted quickly while still being secure without having to zero out everything, which would cause a lot of additional wear.

The additional complete wiping would just be the cherry on top.

Not sure why exactly, but if I had to guess it’s probably a lack of marketing people in the FOSS world in general.

Recently I’ve only really seen recently the End of 10 campaign from the KDE folks gaining a bit of traction, but even that’s more vaguely pointing in the direction of Linux than anything.

From what I gather, the only thing they’ve got going for them is that they’re actually contacting key people to try out the distro, as well as timing that campaign to coincide with the EOL of Win10.

But yeah, so annoying to see when there’s so many better alternatives by better people out there.

As for the latter, I haven’t confirmed this myself, but I’ve been hearing that there’s a lot of curling into bash going on, so yeah.

It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

For me, that’s indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I’ve seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.

That, and it’s neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.

I do think those featues have become pretty common in PC gaming nowadays, which is why I’m more in favor of openSUSE as the beginner distro if I had to pick just one, but sure, let’s put that aside.

When it comes to Linux though I just don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all distro yet that I can safely recommend to everyone. And getting beginners onto a distro that fits them can greatly benefit their initial experience, so I think it’s worth it to give them a few simple choices. That said, you’re completely right that the way OP tries to explain the differences isn’t how you should do it. Ever. Less choices, less jargon, less mentions of fringe distros. It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.

Do you really want to recommend btrfs to beginners?

I mean, it’s the default on Fedora with all its spins, openSUSE, CachyOS and even SteamOS for its root partition.

So lots of people use it nowadays without even knowing.

Chiming in, I’ll say that I mostly agree with your points, except for one:

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

They won’t care about X11 vs Wayland, sure. A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works, and that’s where proper Wayland support becomes a must.

If you recommend someone a distro that can’t do those things and later have to tell them that they have to switch distros for that chances are high they’ll just go back to Windows.

I feel like a big problem is that a lot of people never learned how to learn.

Adding onto your examples, I’ve also heard about a study once where they were given similar basic Excel tasks. However, you didn’t even have to solve the tasks. Instead, just trying to get help from the help function or searching online got you into the highest skill bracket. That bracket ended up being the smallest group.

Mint is a fine distro, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that wants to do gaming right now either. None of the first class DEs are running on Wayland yet, which means that most monitor features of the last decade are not at all or badly supported.

Depends on how you break it. Broken partitions? Sure, Gparted it is. Everything else? Most often can be fixed with a quick arch-chroot and then undoing whatever caused the mess.

So yeah, I agree with the Ventoy suggestion. Such a neat little tool that it’s earned it’s place on my key-chain.

Agree. I wouldn’t even mind it if they were more open about what they’re actually doing, as picking a well working set of apps from the sea open-source apps can have value.

That said, if you read through that site it feels like they want to appear like it’s them who created all that software.

Although, at least with DRM-free games you’re given all the tools to preserve the game yourself if you want to.

Good catch. Never used Remote Assistance, so I don’t know how different it is, and if it actually requires telemetry.

Although the broader issue isn’t the why, it’s that it does those things at all without clearly communicating them to the user. Even their documentation has severe lack of any kind of explanation.

I thought so as well for a time, but that tool in particular is what finally made me lose faith that there might be any good debloat tool out there.

Basically, someone mentioned that it does a weird thing, so I’ve decided to take a look closer, and stumbled about a whole lot of dumb choices. To exemplify, I’ll just repost that part of my comment from back then:

Oh yeah, I’ve just skimmed what else the “Disable Telemetry” script does to the registry, and I honestly can’t classify it as anything other than batshit insane.

A few highlights:

• The popup delay of nested context menus and mouse hover popups
• Disables the prompt when there are open programs when shutting down
• Switches the explorer from the default view to This PC
• Enables long file paths
• Expands the file copy dialog by default
• Straight up disables RDP???

And this is only one script out of a few dozen this “tool” has. Not to mention this is listed under “Essential Tweaks” that are, according to the documentation “Essential Tweaks are modifications and optimizations that are generally safe for most users to implement.”

Problem is, there are no good debloat scripts. It’s all written by amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, messing up the system in subtle ways that then take ages to figure out.

Less packages really doesn’t mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I’d say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.

That said, I’m definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.

For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.