@Curius Nice write-up! After reading it, I feel compelled to share some of my thoughts on the matter.
As many people here, I also come to Linux after many years of Windows. However, I have opted to stick with XP privately, as well as professionally, where I have managed to resist against IT department pressure to upgrade, until I have chosen to enter retirement towards the end of the pandemic... And shortly after that, I have started experiencing problems with logging in to certain web sites, on grounds of outdated browser (in fact, I had already experienced these problems earlier, but to non-vital sites).
So I was under pressure to take action. Upgrading from XP after so many years of resistance was out of question; migrating to the competing paid OS even more so, so I have started to look for general opinions about Linux and BSD distributions, and I have ended up installing Ubuntu (strongly advertised as being beginner-friendly). However, I was spontaneously put off by the apparent resemblance to OSes that I wanted to avoid (I did not know at that time that it is possible to install other desktop environments), and my next move was to install Lubuntu, which I have happily used until recently, when they have started pushing their snaps. In fact, I was not even aware of their existence, until I have got "bitten": while on a limited Internet subscription, I have started a large download, and just before completion, Firefox had decided to update itself without asking. And after updating, it had restarted itself and... forgotten the ongoing download!
This experience, plus opinions of concerned people on the net have determined me to take action once again. Since this time I wanted to avoid running into similar problems in foreseeable future, I have had a closer look at the other popular Linux distributions, and especially who is behind them and what are their goals, while still keeping an eye on the volume of the offer, and I have ended up with Debian (Bookworm, and then Trixie shortly after, due to improved support for my rather new laptop). I have also "bookmarked" Arch Linux for trying out one day, but for the time being, I am fully satisfied with Debian.
Regarding the dependencies hell that you have mentioned, this is a problem that still exists Today, and I think the snap system has been created specifically to address it. Distribution repositories are quite dynamic, and sometimes, newer package versions break backwards compatibility; I am sure that developers have their good reasons to do so, but I suspect that this is exactly the "food" that the "dependencies hell" needs to stay alive! And when major packages (Python 3 and Qt6 come to mind) decide to do breaking upgrades, they force all depending packages to upgrade (which can be hard and time-consuming at times, to the extent that some familiar packages disappear, hopefully only temporarily, from the repository), and this goes on and on...
Regarding the Desktop Environment choice, plus the choice of Window Manager, where available, I have grown into LXQt over the Lubuntu years, that time with OpenBox, and now with kwin, but I also occasionally log into a KDE session, when I need some of the additional features that it provides. None of them is to my liking out of the box, but I can set them both up so I can work with them; it is just that with LXQt, I have less setup work. My beef with them is that they overtake too many keyboard shortcuts other than Meta + whatever, overriding shortcuts that I want to use in my applications. Sure, I can disable them, and this is part of the setup work that I have mentioned, but sometimes it is not so easy to find where they are defined.
Otherwise, I don't have much interaction with the DE during a computing session; the whole workspace is occupied by applications that I use, and I only occasionally interact with the taskbar, which I want to have along the bottom edge, and as thin as possible, in order to maximize the area available to applications. Aside from this, the chosen widget style also has a notable influence on my computing experience, not so much by how the widgets look, but by how they behave. I can think right now of two widget types that behave differently than expected (in an unpleasing way) under certain widget styles: combo boxes and scroll bars. And for this reason, I most often choose the Windows style, which, even if not aesthetically very pleasing, has all widgets behaving in the way I expect them to.
Anyway, there are applications, including ones that I frequently use, that partially or fully don't obey the user preferences. I can live with that, but the scroll bar as former Windows users know it seems to be strongly "usurped" by UI designers: the up/down arrows are often absent, and sometimes, the scroll bar is absent altogether. In Firefox, it is at least possible to get the scroll bar back, but in Okular/full page mode, it is impossible by design decision: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432007. I could argue with the designer, but it is her software after all, and I can still keep looking for another PDF viewer.
As many people here, I also come to Linux after many years of Windows. However, I have opted to stick with XP privately, as well as professionally, where I have managed to resist against IT department pressure to upgrade, until I have chosen to enter retirement towards the end of the pandemic... And shortly after that, I have started experiencing problems with logging in to certain web sites, on grounds of outdated browser (in fact, I had already experienced these problems earlier, but to non-vital sites).
So I was under pressure to take action. Upgrading from XP after so many years of resistance was out of question; migrating to the competing paid OS even more so, so I have started to look for general opinions about Linux and BSD distributions, and I have ended up installing Ubuntu (strongly advertised as being beginner-friendly). However, I was spontaneously put off by the apparent resemblance to OSes that I wanted to avoid (I did not know at that time that it is possible to install other desktop environments), and my next move was to install Lubuntu, which I have happily used until recently, when they have started pushing their snaps. In fact, I was not even aware of their existence, until I have got "bitten": while on a limited Internet subscription, I have started a large download, and just before completion, Firefox had decided to update itself without asking. And after updating, it had restarted itself and... forgotten the ongoing download!
This experience, plus opinions of concerned people on the net have determined me to take action once again. Since this time I wanted to avoid running into similar problems in foreseeable future, I have had a closer look at the other popular Linux distributions, and especially who is behind them and what are their goals, while still keeping an eye on the volume of the offer, and I have ended up with Debian (Bookworm, and then Trixie shortly after, due to improved support for my rather new laptop). I have also "bookmarked" Arch Linux for trying out one day, but for the time being, I am fully satisfied with Debian.
Regarding the dependencies hell that you have mentioned, this is a problem that still exists Today, and I think the snap system has been created specifically to address it. Distribution repositories are quite dynamic, and sometimes, newer package versions break backwards compatibility; I am sure that developers have their good reasons to do so, but I suspect that this is exactly the "food" that the "dependencies hell" needs to stay alive! And when major packages (Python 3 and Qt6 come to mind) decide to do breaking upgrades, they force all depending packages to upgrade (which can be hard and time-consuming at times, to the extent that some familiar packages disappear, hopefully only temporarily, from the repository), and this goes on and on...
Regarding the Desktop Environment choice, plus the choice of Window Manager, where available, I have grown into LXQt over the Lubuntu years, that time with OpenBox, and now with kwin, but I also occasionally log into a KDE session, when I need some of the additional features that it provides. None of them is to my liking out of the box, but I can set them both up so I can work with them; it is just that with LXQt, I have less setup work. My beef with them is that they overtake too many keyboard shortcuts other than Meta + whatever, overriding shortcuts that I want to use in my applications. Sure, I can disable them, and this is part of the setup work that I have mentioned, but sometimes it is not so easy to find where they are defined.
Otherwise, I don't have much interaction with the DE during a computing session; the whole workspace is occupied by applications that I use, and I only occasionally interact with the taskbar, which I want to have along the bottom edge, and as thin as possible, in order to maximize the area available to applications. Aside from this, the chosen widget style also has a notable influence on my computing experience, not so much by how the widgets look, but by how they behave. I can think right now of two widget types that behave differently than expected (in an unpleasing way) under certain widget styles: combo boxes and scroll bars. And for this reason, I most often choose the Windows style, which, even if not aesthetically very pleasing, has all widgets behaving in the way I expect them to.
Anyway, there are applications, including ones that I frequently use, that partially or fully don't obey the user preferences. I can live with that, but the scroll bar as former Windows users know it seems to be strongly "usurped" by UI designers: the up/down arrows are often absent, and sometimes, the scroll bar is absent altogether. In Firefox, it is at least possible to get the scroll bar back, but in Okular/full page mode, it is impossible by design decision: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432007. I could argue with the designer, but it is her software after all, and I can still keep looking for another PDF viewer.
What would be the alternative? Probably to let the user install all the non-free firmware/software that he needs by himself. The end result would be the same: that firmware/software would land anyway on the user's machine, but the additional effort required on the user side would probably scare off some potential new users.Hardware vendors have succeeded in normalizing nonfree firmware to the point of ubiquity.
Statistics: Posted by TiberiusKG — 2024-09-08 23:13