I’ve used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn’t work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).

Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro’s name )

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About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.

They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.

They broke my desktop.

Again.

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I’ve been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.

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UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn’t usable.

Why??

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Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.

You can’t:

Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can’t get that to work on it.

They won’t add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.

So, if the only machine you’ve got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.

( “Haskell Programming From First Principles” requires Stack )

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I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux…

can’t remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something … it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby … so…

the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn’t fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND…

Ubuntu wouldn’t fix it, because they insisted it was upstream’s problem, even-though they wouldn’t include a maintained version of Ruby.

Fuck idiocy.

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On & on & on.

Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the “religion” of the various Linuxen.

I’m old, & tired of being beaten-on by “friends” and “allies”.

Abusers are abusers.

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IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,

THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.

Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they’ve got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.

I’d want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell’s correctness & Julia’s ruthless-efficiency ).

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Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?

Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can’t have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps…

This “improvement” forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or … not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.

War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for … fashion & class-status??

The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.

It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn’t going to bother them.

Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated “strategy” consistently solves the wrong problem.

Same as breaking people’s wifi solves the wrong problem.

WTF “loyalty” for a distro can ANYone have,

… once one has been “punched-in-the-face” by them, enough times??

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I’ve read OpenBSD’s statement that “lack of a manpage IS A BUG”.

That IS PROPER.

They GET it.

There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:

Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.

Test-1st.

As somebody pointed-out, of all the “agile” methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas … the rest, like Scrum, don’t…

That difference-in-religion, XP’s objectivity MATTERS.

Any “improvement” which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don’t get the “improvement” in.

Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?

I wouldn’t permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.

I wouldn’t permit breaking of people’s network-access to be an official update’s component.

MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.

That needs to be SOME distro’s spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done…

I want low-vision people being able to use it.

I want blind-readers working in it.

I want deaf people having full function through it.

I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.

I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi’s stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it’s wonderful ).

Anyways, you’re seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.

I won’t willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but … they’re “too big” to make accountable?? etc. )

But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.

Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one’s distro.

DON’T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.

KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays … wtf??

Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??

That isn’t a “feature”, that is “fashionable” mental-illness.

And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.

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/grouch

just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who’s tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.

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I haven’t used it since Valve made Proton what it is today, but:

The troubleshooting was a nightmare. Heaven forbid the trouble be with graphics drivers. I love the command terminal and all but when you try 10 different solutions from Stack Exchange and Reddit and all of them give you errors or do nothing at all… At some point I just had to accept that it wasn’t worth the amount of time I had to invest in it.

I hate Windows as much as the next guy but I had to admit that troubleshooting, for whatever reason, took significantly less time when problems came up on Windows.

My cousin gave up Linux because he struggled to find answers to problems. He was really into trying to build a home server and followed YouTube videos. He used to video call with me for tech support, which was kinda exhausting like teaching a kid how to use a computer.

After a few months, he gave up on it and gave me his server filled with weird ass directories and software constantly giving errors because it’s not configured correctly. It was easier to wipe and restart.

Because it refuses to work well without constant tinkering.

I picked up a raspberry pi 5 to use as my desktop at home, and tried pi OS, Ubuntu, KDE Plasma, all of which could connect to my home wifi network, but none of which would provide reliable upload or download speeds. Ongoing issues with connection quality to my Bluetooth speaker. Trying to find fixes online is challenging.

I wound up installing android, and everything just works.