I’ve only had two mentionable issues with Linux so far: A GPU bug that causes a few games to reliably hang my GPU (which may have been fixed recently with newer mesa drivers; I haven’t checked), and Helvum not recognizing anything (which was probably me installing it wrong or something).

Windows however… Changing system settings with no warning, forgetting network configuration out of the blue, GPU crashes that hard rebooted windows, and driver updates that prevent booting at all. Some software gets installed without notice, others get removed without notice. The forced update debacle has lost me more than one open document. I’ve had critical audio issues on every machine I’ve used, including individual school machines that should be identical. Several of my remaining windows machines have issues with various system programs maxing out the disk write speed and locking up everything for dozens of minutes at a time.

And then more recently there’s the security violations, always online behavior, enshitification, and removal of user choice.

This may be a tad biased as I’ve used windows for a few decades and Linux for just over a year, but going back is always a chore…

Do you have any idea how hard it is to go from Linux to Windows?

I do. It’s a MASSIVE Pain in the ass, especially if you’re looking for minimalism, performance and a tiling window manager, as Windows can’t provide either of these.

And there’s also the spyware and other stuff. I just remember hating one of my lecturers in college for using Visual Studio in the first year (Y1), and using Excel in Y2, for the modules she taught, meaning I had to use Windows for them. Luckily, for the first assignment in Y1, and the second assignment in Y2, I didn’t actually need Windows, and for the second assignment of Y1, I just did it in class on the college’s Windows machines. But Y2, first assignment I did a Windows dualboot cuz I unfortunately didn’t have time to do it in class.

Anyways, point is that I associate Windows with bad memories. While I associate Linux with good ones.

The [youtube(.)com] link is the actual website that you watch the video on which can have a crap load of extra stuff like playlist info, highlighted comment info, where you came from, and probably more. The links can get really long, like 100+ characters.

The [youtu(.)be] link is a redirect website who’s only purpose is to reduce the size of the link to just the watch ID and timestamp. It dumps even the query language to keep the links under 30 characters or so.

Such link shorteners (such as bit(.)ly or tinyurl) were popular when Twitter was getting big and the character limit was an SMS message length; 140 characters. youtu(.)be in particular helped avoid bait and switch scams (as you can tell it’s definitely a video instead of going in blind) and it has the watch ID so titles, thumbnails, and embeds still work.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=WjABILVAz5Y

https://piped.video/WjABILVAz5Y

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I think the second format also allows for specifying the timestamp, so you can link to a certain point in the video

Ubuntu is no longer the user friendly everyman’s desktop system anymore.

Agreed.

Arch is extremely user friendly, just not the installation process.

I do wonder what your definition of user friendly is. Cuz I can’t fathom how you can think that a distro that subscribes to what’s quoted below can (by any stretch of the imagination) be considered user friendly.

“Note: It is imperative to keep up to date with changes in Arch Linux that require manual intervention before upgrading your system. Subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list or the recent news RSS feed. Alternatively, check the front page Arch news every time before you update.”

Which simple means that you have to check if you can update before you actually perform an update. That’s just wild.

And you know what’s most curious about this, we’ve actually solved (within Linux) issues related to updating your system. You read that correct, it’s a solved problem. And I hope that you’ll benefit from these advancements even if you continue to use Arch.

Btw, please don’t come to me with packages that automatically pop up in terminal to inform you about manual intervention. On my system, updates occur automatically in the background and with some black magic shenanigans (or just great engineering) it ‘fixes’ itself without requiring any manual intervention from me. That pop-up message in terminal can’t compete with that.

I find it to be much less of a pain in the ass to use than Debian based systems.

That’s subjective, but sure; you’re absolutely free to think that.

For one, you have the Arch User Repository, so you’re very unlikely to need to not be able to find some software you want, and more importantly, so many packages in Debian are out of date and they take forever to update them, stuff often breaks because the version needed as a dependency for something else is not in the repositories.

Distrobox exists. Moving on.

and pacman is so much more robust than apt.

What do you mean with robust here? And what makes you think that pacman is much more robust than apt? Thank you in advance for clarifying/elaborating!

I get frustrated online when I see people saying “Ubuntu is the most user friendly distro” or “arch is not for noobs”, this stuff was true like 10 years ago, that’s no longer the case. Ubuntu is user hostile, and there are arch derivatives that are basically arch with a graphical installer, which is the only part of using arch that is hard for people who aren’t hardcore nerds.

Honestly, I actually agree with you. Ubuntu has indeed lost all of its credibility. And Arch is absolutely not as bad as people make it out to be. But! In an environment in which Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Pop!_OS, Bazzite are mentioned; Arch simply is (by contrast) the lesser option in terms easy of use etc. So, while in absolute terms, it’s definitely not as bad as peeps make it out to be. It is, compared to the earlier mentioned distros, simply less newbie friendly.

It’s not like Gentoo or Void or Alpine or Nix or running a BSD system or something advanced like that.

Thankfully, no one ever bothers to recommend these to new users 😉.

So, to be clear, these are clearly too advanced and thankfully people never recommend these to newer users. However, while Arch isn’t that bad and thus can be used by some newbie users, it should IMO only very very carefully be recommended to new users. If it’s the kind of person that likes to learn as they go and enjoys reading documentation, then (by all means) it’s absolutely fine to recommend it. But you won’t find them that frequently…

agreed ubuntu is kinda shit but arch is hard (to setup post-installation) for a new user imo. You should try kde neon or smth which I’d consider to be a nice beginner distro

Nope, Arch is not noob friendly, you have been using Linux for long enough that you forgot how everything was different when you started. Also Arch hasn’t changed much in 10 years (I should know, I have been using it for 15), if it wasn’t noob friendly before, it’s certainly less so now that it doesn’t has an installer and the wiki makes you jump from one page to another instead of having all of the steps for installation in a single place.

I agree that Ubuntu is not ideal, which is why my recommendation is Mint. I also agree that Arch is not hard. But if you give a new user who just wants things to work Arch you’re setting it up for disaster.

For users that are familiar enough with Linux that they feel comfortable on the terminal, yeah, Arch is a breeze to use, but you need to understand the difference between “power user friendly” (which is what Arch is, i.e. allows power users to have an easy time, by for example having a large user repository) vs “beginner friendly” (which is most definitely what Arch is not, i.e. give users an easy out of the box experience where they can figure things out without needing to read wiki pages). Most new users need a beginner friendly distro, and shoving Arch down their throats is not the way to do it.