I love The Debian Project as an entity and I hope it exists until the end of time. I have this old 2005ish Sony Vaio which was built right at the cusp of the switch to x64 and thanks to Debian (who I believe are the only ones who still do 32 bit builds) I was able to bring my nostalgia for the device into a modern age. But I digress.

I think ultimately we need to find a way to make dependency conflicts a thing of the past. Just install two versions of the same library if 2 of my programs need different ones. Maybe I’m thinking too naively about this and of course this isn’t something you could do on an immutable system, but if we’re talking Linux as a concept there are definitely some common practices today no one would’ve even considered 15 years ago. We need to make it irrelevant whether my installer is called pacman, zypper, apt, dnf or what have you. AppImages can give us that freedom and portability right now. Maybe we could combine the convenience of packaged apps with the beauty of centralized package management.

But we know why Snaps and Flatpaks started existing. I also think they are architecturally ugly.

And I think you have a point in terms of patches potentially coming too slowly onto an immutable system. But that problem isn’t an inherent one, it’s just a problem if distribution updates are slow because community support is lacking. At which point you’re just trying to compare Open Source to Proprietary solutions where support is explicitly paid for. I’ll trust a year old Linux kernel over the latest and greatest Windows release any day.

Of course people can have different opinions on this, but the point for me is that I am of the firm belief that immutable is a must for people that just want their OS to work indefinitely without having to take care of that aspect. And once you got that covered, I feel that you need some sort of “App Store” app out of the box where you can get whatever people may need. Ubuntu has Snaps, which to my understanding is just a different take on what Flatpaks are accomplishing.

Currently the Top 5 of the past 6 months on Distrowatch are all mutable, 2 of them are Arch-based, one comes with Xfce. I have been a Mint user myself and again, of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me the ship of using Debian derivatives has sailed, which might also subconsciously be the reason why no Ubuntu-based immutable distro has made it into my experiments. (No disrespect to Canonical and what they have done for the community since 2004, my first ever hands-on with Linux was on their 04.10 release.)

Either way I just can’t see myself recommending any of those Top 5 to people who just want to use a PC reliably. And if I’m going to be the one they turn to with their problems I don’t want those to potentially be about system-level breakages. When filtering by the “Immutable” tag on Distrowatch it seems that they just bunch those spins into their main distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. I guess you can say VanillaOS is niche in comparison, but Fedora Silverblue is basically an immutable version of a well established distribution with Red Hat backing no less. And once it is set up like my pilot is now it works just fine. I guess the plan now is to keep that installation running and see how it behaves across updates/upgrades and such.

I’ve been a “heavy” user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I’d like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.

Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don’t see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but with Flathub I feel that there’s not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people’s needs, there’s even stuff in there that you can’t get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.

Anyways this isn’t even the story I’m trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I’m ever going to recommend any distro to someone it’s gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I’d say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn’t come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you’re talking outdated hardware.)

So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn’t supposed to happen, it’s probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there’s any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I’m going to recommend to them.

Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome “Software” app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there’s a second “chance” to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It’s a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them “don’t check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app”.

It’s weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn’t even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the “Year of the Linux Desktop” meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we’re talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I’m not exactly a visual artist who stands to lose something in this armsrace, but that’s how I tend to look at it. As a software engineer I’m fascinated by the possibilities. There were people who despised the camera when it came to be. I firmly believe that once the AI hype dies down “real” human-made art will not have suffered any setback. At the end of the day this is still people building tools to imitate something worth imitating. Nothing is ever fully original.

If someone can’t see the value in art that took actual human effort to make then that is on them. If a tool is built upon millions of existing pieces of human artistic effort to make it available to the general public I’d see this as less deplorable than copying a CD to a cassette tape in the 80s. If someone tried to make money by selling what is essentially other people’s work then that is obviously a different story, no matter what is being misappropriated.

I was team Gnome before Gnome 3 came out. Nowadays I don’t mind it for auxiliary computers that I don’t interact with regularly. It has a huge community behind it and that is a quality in its own right. But since MATE never really managed to become a worthy successor to Gnome 2 I guess I’m team Plasma now. I got it “forced” on me by my beloved Steam Deck and I can definitely see why Valve went for it.

Currently I’m experimenting with Hyprland but that is definitely too early to call it my forever pick, so Plasma it is.

So the career intelligence muscle who is in office since 1999 can’t possibly be a dictator but the comedian who only became a politician 6 years ago has already managed to dismantle a democracy while spending 3 of those 6 years commanding a wartime army against a goliath of an enemy. The things you learn on the internet.

Not trying to whitewash or anything but I figure it’s more like Democrats won’t threaten 4 years of legislative work against you unless you play ball. Under a Democrat majority Apple just has to lobby in their own interests wherever necessary, federally or otherwise, as you do. With Trump you can’t sway a Republican senator’s vote unless you pay his boss as well.

I hope he wrote Tim Apple on the cheque so orange man will know who it’s from.

To me it’s like the old saying from Win9x days “Help, I’ve deleted the internet”. Removing an Internet Explorer shortcut from the desktop might be easier than nuking a Linux installation, but I think if the point is to be of service to absolute tech-illiterates then you need to be ready for anything, any edge case. And like you say, if Flatpaks and all that just work then what would be the downside of immutability?

I mean in theory one can make deep-rooted changes to macOS, but I haven’t once seen it fail to upgrade successfully. And I definitely wouldn’t consider Windows immutable with how many things can go wrong in practice. I’ve had more than a few customers who lost wifi drivers through no fault of their own, in one case the entire device wasn’t visible anymore, so reinstalling a driver wouldn’t have done anything, all I could do was roll back the feature update and ensure it won’t install it again. In that sense, immutable Linux might even be the best offering out there today. The only thing it lacks (besides Android and SteamOS) is a multi-billion dollar company backing it for wider desktop adoption.

I think it’s a fair point that immutable distros are still a developing concept and probably not ready for primetime, but I do feel that eventually this must be the answer to make things absolutely bulletproof for people (of which there are many) who have a natural ability of nuking their OS.

Why would it have to be KDE or XFCE? GNOME as it exists today is probably the closest to macOS’ design language, and whatever you do designing any kind of operating system UI, macOS needs to be the benchmark. GNOME 2 in the olden days was my favorite DE so today I have to go for things like KDE or MATE but I’m not a novice and I can fully acknowledge that what works for me isn’t what works for everyone. GNOME probably made the right decisions to lower the entry barrier towards Linux.

XFCE to me is purely a choice for outdated hardware so unless your extreme beginner has an extremely old PC XFCE is a non-starter. Whether KDE can be made more accessible to the non-initiated I can’t say. Anything that has a Windows-esque taskbar is probably ill-equipped from the start as well. Again, macOS is as easy to use in a keyboard and mouse sense as tablets and smartphones are with our fingers. This is the way.

This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.

Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.

Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.

World hunger can’t be cured for profit. The hunger of the many is directly caused by the greed of the few.

But I’d love to see them try of course. The billions Musk has evaporated with his purchase could’ve also been spent less egotistically.

Windows can definitely be a nuisance these days especially during the setup. But you mention a key aspect at the end. Touch-based devices these days are super intuitive compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to on our desktops for decades. And they aren’t just miniature PCs anymore, they can do all the same stuff, regardless of whether they’re actually being used for the same things we associate with desktop-work.

Linux has a huge userbase in the form of Android and therein virtually no entry-barrier or learning-curve to speak of. I feel that that’s where we need to go. Mac OS is already there. Windows is just living and breathing off the fact that its market share was once virtually 100%. I think a good example of what I mean is how Valve are leveraging Linux on their Steam Deck. It’s still intimidating when you switch over to the KDE desktop, but as a regular user gamer you won’t ever need to. Everything this device has been built to do can be done in a tailor-made UI for its purpose. Or think ChromeOS. I can install a virtual Debian beneath ChromeOS if I want more control over what I can install but other than that the OS is dead simple to use.

Linux deserves mass adoption but it needs to think user experience first just like the big corporations do. I firmly believe that that’s possible even when the big bucks aren’t being thrown around.

I have a middle aged customer who is legitimately using Mint on one of those old Athlons today in 2024 for her day to day. There literally is no reason for her to upgrade hardware unless her usecases evolve into something more demanding.

I agree Linux is a lot more accessible than it used to be, but if I understand you correctly the people you helped transition still needed at least some initial holding of their hands. If for example you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled that initial hurdle could be cleared but I still believe there’s a learning curve at least as steep as it would be for someone learning Windows for the first time. The difference being that everything out there takes Windows into account.

If you just wana surf the web Linux can probably be as easy as ChromeOS these days but that isn’t really a usecase where operating systems can make a difference one way or the other.

Is that an Enterprise version at work? I mean even if you pause updates for as long as they allow you to on consumer versions, at some point you do have to do it. I do get nagged on one of my installations but not on my main one. Both Windows 10.

I was planning to transition to Linux completely by this autumn but laziness strikes as per. I guess autumn 2025 is the new deadline now.

I didn’t understand the “forced upgrade” argument until now. Yea I guess you’re right, at some point you have to do updates (they nag about upgrading to 11 but you can skip that indefinitely). But with how popular Windows is you have options for a lot of problems (including forced updates which to be fair shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to security patches).

If you open up Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility (https://christitus.com/windows-tool/) you basically have a comprehensive list of all the ameliorations one could ever want at their disposal. That’s really the main thing Windows still has going for it, it’s a decades-long mainstay which means there are plenty of knowledgable people out there who know how it can be made to heel even if Microsoft decide to force a Microsoft account on you, telemetry, whatever it may be, there will probably always be a way around it.

For example one of my main gripes with Windows 11 is how you can’t make the taskbar show all tray icons anymore by default. They removed window titles in the taskbar so now everything is basically a square down there meaning there’s all this empty space between my open windows and the tray. But of course someone out there has written a program to automatically unhide all tray icons and thrown it on GitHub.

To me personally it doesn’t matter how crappy the design choices are as long as they can be mitigated. If bad corporate decisionmaking is a dealbreaker (which is also a fair assessment) then you have to ditch the corporation entirely and go Linux or what have you. Not trying to be smart or anything but there really is no reason to stay on Windows left anymore. Maybe if you absolutely need Microsoft Office or something but ever since Proton came out the issue with Windows-only games has pretty much evaporated.

Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it’s an investment worth making many times over.

Yet there’s no backlash because they’re not so stupid as to say “we’re gonna take screenshots as you go so we can improve your digital life kthxbye”.

Society just needs to get over this AI fad atm. By which I’m not trying to say that AI won’t revolutionize pretty much everything in our lives eventually, but first we need to figure out what it can actually be useful for. Or rather non-tech people need to be fully introduced to both its benefits and its pitfalls before tech companies will have a clear picture of where the red lines are for people ideologically speaking. We the nerds have our moral compass figured out but we’re a minority when it comes to who these products are made for.

Leave it to Microsoft to come up with the most dystopian AI concept yet. But to be honest I’d be way more wary of a company like Alphabet for whom data collection is much more central to their business model and who know how to package their spyware neatly. Microsoft announcing this as a feature from a podium shows how tonedeaf they are but I’d argue it also shows that they’re not following some self-serving plan behind the scenes to take advantage of that thing they’re so proud of publically (a mass espionage at which I firmly believe they wouldn’t be anywhere near efficient enough if they tried). They really must’ve thought that this is what can get Windows back into the limelight. It is Microsoft’s problem of our time that with everyone being on smartphones and tablets now they are losing traction in the consumer market by the day.

Point being (as far as the valid privacy concerns go) that Microsoft were never in the data business. They’re just really really bad at understanding what consumers want out of an operating system. I got my first own PC in 2001 right when XP came out. They’ve always been bad at making things work for the user. And since Vista all they’ve really been doing is copying Apple’s eyecandy. First off of macOS (then OS X), now with Windows 11 they basically want to look like a tablet OS with app icons once again after that idea failed spectacularly under Windows 8. I’m basically just rambling at this point but it should go to illustrate their lacklustre corporate decisionmaking. I wouldn’t be worried about their potential desire much less their ability to compromise that Recall data. Yes it’s a hugely concerning concept from a privacy standpoint and every step to circumvent its analysis should and arguably must be taken, but I also wouldn’t lose sleep over the data it is collecting on other people’s machines.