Every time I see a headline like "Windows introduces thing, nobody asked for it but it's coming to all versions and can't be uninstalled"
I don't think that's the main problem, as on the inside (meaning backends) most things are rather standardized (ignoring legacy stuff) and any distro not adhering to those modern standards can be - purely from an economic aspect, NOT a nerd or enthusiast aspect - safely ignored. I do concur that choice paralysis indeed is a problem though.
The modern stack is pretty straight-forward: Flatpak and Snap for distribution, GTK4 (opt. with or without libadwaita) or Qt6 for the UI, Gnome and KDE to take care for proper integration, and stuff like Wayland, Pipewire and the XDG specs to focus on in technical aspects. All the documents necessary to work on fully functioning apps to publish via both Flatpak and Snap are there (not saying everything is perfect, just that it's properly working). Distro-specific bugs will also be either prevented by the new sandboxing or are to be fixed by the distro in 99% of all cases, not the app author. What's really missing right now is a way to sell it through those hubs.
Eventually there'll be sufficient pressure on all sides so common technical necessities will be defined that distros will have to adhere to if they want to receive app support (which is very much possible given the sandboxing around Flatpaks and Snaps). Until then every company keeps freely defining what they support. Right now they usually go two or three big ones, namely Ubuntu, RHEL+Fedora and perhaps SteamOS. Some also go for OpenSuse, probably because they use SLES for their own machines.
Meanwhile commercially developed distros - meaning stuff like Pop!_OS (System76 devices), SlimbookOS (Slimbook devices), Tuxedo OS (Tuxedo Computers) - all use Flatpaks, and as they all integrate it as intended apps work on them as they do on any other distro that uses the modern stack. So customers don't have to think too much about it.
tl;dr… Don't give new users too many options (avoids choice paralysis) but 1 or 2 modern ones or whatever a hardware vendor offers, and don't expect developers to target distros that do not want to fully support either Flatpaks or Snaps. Then we're already on a good way.
Tumbleweed.💖
Although for my relatives I'll rather recommend Slowroll once it's our of beta (or even Leap for older family members). Just that little bit more stable. 🙂 Still, OpenSuse does a fantastic job. I'd love to see them available directly from device vendors like Tuxedo, System76 or hell, even Framework.
It really depends on your use-case, your criticism is valid though. In general it would be way better for new users to not learn about it as something that gets slapped onto a Windows machine, but on fair grounds for comparison (meaning on a machine from hardware vendors like System76, Tuxedo, Slimbook etc).
For Software it really is a hen-and-egg problem. Big companies won't support Linux until enough people are there, and enough people won't come until known software is available. This however changes gradually; The Software Store is receiving payment features in the future (almost any distro uses Flatpaks in the background), so there will be more viable paths to monetize your software product for companies. Meanwhile the amount of users rises more and more for years now thanks to 1. Valves push with SteamOS + Hardware and 2. India and China who got comparably high Linux userbases (I think in India it's 13% of all desktop PCs).
So yeah, not there yet. But not "far from ready", really. It just needs some software improvements that are in the works, and for the device vendors to become more known.
"Android apps barely run on iOS, that's why I go back to Apple :<"
Okay, bye. 👋
And its uselessness has been proven for years now. But not like anyone cares, instead pupils now get awful laptops (that like to catch fire) full of surveillance software. Great times.
I think it's a general issue of any community that's organized around a belief and/or got ousted by society for too long I guess. Of course there'll always be people who are like this from the beginning, perhaps due to trauma, bad upbringing, bad education or whatever.
Gotta imagine a militant vegan bible-belt Linux FOSS-Bro… oh my god…
It's even hard to keep track. Just heard that Musk killed your free accessible way to file taxes online, then that Senators are denied access to government buildings under his orders. Yesterday it was something about concentration camps for immigrants and ICE. It's like the speed the original nazis did it but doubled, you might just need 2 months for the complete collapse of democracy instead of around 4.
All three browsers recommended are Chromium-based as well, so they're dependent on Google and have to suffer from the Manifest v3 problem and the necessary manual intervention. Brave even is known for being maintained by a dick. Some of those recommendations are really bad.
Don't get your second question though. The reasons for non-US should be obvious.
NewPipe is awful for Peertube. You have to add AND SEARCH every single instance manually. It's only useful if there is a creator on a specific instance that you specifically want to watch.
Not to mention it lacks any (ethical) monetization options. And the app is absolutely rudimentary, lacking even basic functionality.
Framasoft made it clear they don't want to make it a Youtube alternative though, however it could be through plugins. So there'd have to be a company or cooperative using it as a base to build upon, which is actually realistic. Especially European ones; not because Asia wouldn't be interested in being more independent on the US as well, but because Framasoft is from France and Europe actively works towards this goal anyway with lots of money behind it.
"Unfortunately" most of the higher user base comes from the Steamdeck where most users never use it as a desktop PC. While many people are now trying Linux for themselves due to lots of good reasons, it remains unnecessarily complicated to use for many reasons. Abundance of bad advice being one of them.
Those who use a system without any GUI are adv. users or professionals who know what they're capable of, who can safely ignore any safety features.
99% of users ain't Linux professionals though. So 99% of guides and tips should show the more safe, intuitive, accessible GUI tools.
Welcome to the reason 99% of Linux distros remain so unpopular and both hard and unintuitive to use unless you're tech-savvy. After those 5 minutes about 50% do it correct, the other 50% put a single character in the wrong place or follow an incomplete and bad guide and get stuck in boot. Or they'll go and use an OS that's more intuitive and more efficient for them despite probably also extorting them because that weird "Linux" thing is obviously only for nerds, who're completely detached from the reality of most people out there not realizing that modifying core system configuration by hand that can make your device inoperable without any help from your operating system itself should not be the god damn norm.
Users should never have to fiddle with the fstab manually. It's a shame the internet is still pointing to it when asked most of the time instead of explaining the GUI disk tools. Or at least some CLI management tool in case that one exists.
I concur there's a good trend, unfortunately it still takes some time to get there. About OpenSuse, to get the stuff out of the way they're currently working on:
- Better, more friendly installer (Agama)
- Stable and Modern Software, not either/or (Slowroll)
That's definitely good. Their default website for the preinstalled browser also includes all the community links as well as a search, leading people to stuff like the Forum which is indeed very friendly (definitely not hostile like f.e. the Arch forum). They also tick a lot of boxes basically no one else does with the bootable system snapshots and (almost) full graphical system management with their YaST2 Suite (because nobody should be forced to manipulate god damn system config files with a command-line editor!). My main gripes with OpenSuse are:
- Flathub not added by default (especially when using Gnome)
This leaves new users with either no (Gnome) or a lackluster (KDE) amount of Software in the store. The concept of adding more software sources isn't generally known, and new people have no clue what to look for. When using KDE they'd just assume there's very little Software available in general.
- Lackluster Onboarding Wizard...
It's literally just a bunch of links. While one of the links leads to Documentation (as well as a Readme, but that thing is tiny), the docs are already extremely advanced and go into system details most people will have never heard of or will ever need. Examples of how to do this well do exist, like in Mint or Zorin.
- ...which should include a quick Snapshot settings menu
By default OpenSuse tries to save 10 snapshots per day, another 10 per month, 10 per year… it's flooding your disk with snapshots eventually, and that you still can only change in a config file!
- Making the Software Store properly update
It's a necessity to know 'sudo zypper dup' since the Software Store more often than not fails to install system updates for some reason (especially with the Nvidia driver installed)
- Include the Nvidia driver in the installer
While OpenSuse did a great job with reliable Nvidia driver packages, the manual install is still really bad. Distros like Pop!_OS solved this with a dedicated image, however OpenSuse got excellent installers that could auto-detect the necessity for the driver and/or offer it as an option.
Those are things that come to mind. There technically is lots of more stuff, but those wouldn't be a distro- but more of KDE / GNOME problems (especially around stability). I really appreciate the OpenSuse team doing lots of good stuff, but there are some things a normal user (and by that I mean someone who can't use the CLI to administrate a Linux by hand) can't do, yet would be forced to either immediately or eventually. And yes, of course OpenSuse isn't primarily marketed towards "normies", that doesn't mean all these things wouldn't also be nice for sysadmins to be fixed.
sigh point 2 fits perfectly. The wider Linux community is full of people who's openly oust you if you if you don't know certain things or, beware, do not want to have to learn using a CLI but simply wish for GUI tools (in flippin' 2025!). The elite here are people who like to tinker with tech, or rather those with certain knowledge the broader public doesn't possess. On the other side are people who got other priorities than learning about the insides of an operating system, who get alienated by people who expect them to become CLI magicians as well because "it's easy". Completely ignoring how utterly lost most people feel at that moment.
Everything you said after that is rhetorical bullshit that's also very common in the community and literally the reason I saw dozens of non-techy people reject Linux-based OS' after they encountered their first issue and looked for help. You're twisting my criticism of systemic issues in a way it looks like a personal failure of myself, because that's something / someone you can argue against. Your last few sentences are also shifting the goalpost, I never spoke about that exact behaviour you're describing there.
I'm done with this BS, bye.
I'm talking about the Linux ecosystem as a whole. You can always only get a few good things, but no distro ticks literally all possible boxes. Mint is really close, yet they decided to embrace the objectively worse .deb package system over Flatpaks and still got no proper disaster recovery like OpenSuse does (something that should be an imperative especially for "beginner" distros). Or as another example, Gnome devs acticely decided against overhauling their extension system in favour of more stable solutions that'd allow extensions to gracefully crash instead of crashing your whole desktop. No, apparently monkey-patching is totally fine because (I assume) radical developer freedom is better than stability for millions of people. I'm so fed up with people who'll then proceed to defend what they rightfully love and tell me it was easy to get out of that! People just gotta learn to use the CLI, lol! 🫠 That's what I criticize.
I also talked about elitism, lol.
One fascism vs. the other fascism, and everyone loses.
What are you using, a potato? Any modern distro comes with those. Without GTK4 and Qt6 barely anything even runs, lol.
I mean, you can reject literally everything of this new technology stack, but that doesn't change the fact it's things are working now. If you stay with old tech don't be surprised if things stop working though, the world will move even if you prefer to stand still. However if you want to be taken serious in your criticism please inform yourself on what you're criticize. Neither Flatpak nor Snap run "another distro inside". What you're talking about is stuff like Docker or Distrobox. Those are neither the default on user systems nor should they be, only very few distros aimed at enthusiasts and professionals ship them by default.
There are also multiple ways to ship portable apps, the best known of them would be AppImage. That one simply isn't recommendable due to a lack of maintenance and security issues (they simply don't fix the libfuse2 issue).
It's not like everything was great in ye' olden days anyway. There literally are FOUR different backends for desktop notifications, Pulseaudio is a friggin' trainwreck and don't even get me started on Xorg configuration. Every desktop environment very much did their own thing and once you installed an app using f.e. GTK2 on a KDE3 system the whole thing looked like it recently insulted Mike Tyson since there was no proper config available / it lacked the icon theme / the font broke everything / it didn't like your hairstyle. Likewise running older software more often than not was a real pain as they expected an environment with obsolete libraries etc.
Like it or not, Flatpak and Snap already are the standard. So is Wayland (and it works like a charm by now), and Pipewire is a god damn godsend after meddling with Pulseaudio all those years. And from a developer's perspective it's so nice to have a controllable environment to work with, i.e. Flatpak and Snap. Of those two only Snap generates huge overheads btw, it's a known problem with Canonicals approach (one of many). Still, technology like that is what Linux needs for the future.
But hey, ultimately Linux gives you the choice. If you want to stay in your niche I hope it suits you well.