Damn. Looks like I really should stop being lazy and check out some mobile clients that weren’t abandoned like Sync. It’s even reformatting my manually typed spoiler tags to the wrong format after I submit.

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Adding onto that, the app StreetComplete makes contributing stupidly easy. You basically get a bunch of quests generatef around you with missing or potentially outdated data that you can fill in by answering simple questions. Basically Pokemon Go, but infinitely more useful.

Not sure why exactly, but if I had to guess it’s probably a lack of marketing people in the FOSS world in general.

Recently I’ve only really seen recently the End of 10 campaign from the KDE folks gaining a bit of traction, but even that’s more vaguely pointing in the direction of Linux than anything.

From what I gather, the only thing they’ve got going for them is that they’re actually contacting key people to try out the distro, as well as timing that campaign to coincide with the EOL of Win10.

But yeah, so annoying to see when there’s so many better alternatives by better people out there.

As for the latter, I haven’t confirmed this myself, but I’ve been hearing that there’s a lot of curling into bash going on, so yeah.

I mean, verification doesn’t really help because in the end it’s still mostly human posting the AI slop (I think).

That said, we’ll probably need some sort of reputation system. Something like a revamped GPG or Web Of Trust, where you a) can tag users/websites you find trustworth and b) can see what other people you trust think about someone/something.

Over the last year or so NVIDIA massively improved their Wayland support. May not be perfect, may not be as good as AMD, but it usually cones with lass drawbacks than the X11 experience.

It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

For me, that’s indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I’ve seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.

That, and it’s neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.

Agree. It’s neat for file transfers and simple one-shot backups, but if you’re looking for a proper backup solution then other tools/services have advanced virtually every aspect of backups so much it pretty much always makes sense to use one of those instead.

I’ve also done the math a few times and every time the cost of GamePass was higher than the amount of money I would’ve saved in that same timeframe.

The only way I could’ve saved money would’ve been to not purchase any games not on GamePass and limit myself to (worse) games included in the subscription.

So if I, someone who purchases and subsequently abandons a lot of game, so basically the target audience, can’t make GamePass work, I wonder how many people just run on copium when they mention how much money they save. Either that, or they treat gaming like junk food and don’t care about quality.

Then you deserve them even more. Fuck privacy and freedom I guess?

I know I will get downvoted for this opinion

Well yes. That’s what happens when your only argument boils down to “It could be worse”.

Oh please, stop the act, we can see your shitty referral link.

Yup, that’s how it works.

If you the flea caravan has already moved you’ll be out of luck for now. You’ll be able to fight it later on though in a slightly different spot.

I do think those featues have become pretty common in PC gaming nowadays, which is why I’m more in favor of openSUSE as the beginner distro if I had to pick just one, but sure, let’s put that aside.

When it comes to Linux though I just don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all distro yet that I can safely recommend to everyone. And getting beginners onto a distro that fits them can greatly benefit their initial experience, so I think it’s worth it to give them a few simple choices. That said, you’re completely right that the way OP tries to explain the differences isn’t how you should do it. Ever. Less choices, less jargon, less mentions of fringe distros. It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.

Do you really want to recommend btrfs to beginners?

I mean, it’s the default on Fedora with all its spins, openSUSE, CachyOS and even SteamOS for its root partition.

So lots of people use it nowadays without even knowing.

Chiming in, I’ll say that I mostly agree with your points, except for one:

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

They won’t care about X11 vs Wayland, sure. A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works, and that’s where proper Wayland support becomes a must.

If you recommend someone a distro that can’t do those things and later have to tell them that they have to switch distros for that chances are high they’ll just go back to Windows.

Yeah, that’s why I’m currently only recommending Mint to people who don’t do any gaming. It’s kind of a shame that Mint doesn’t have a KDE spin. It would be my unconditional beginner distro otherwise.

Personally I run CachyOS + KDE with native Wayland and HDR enabled system-wide. It’s kind of amazing how I don’t even need to clog the launch parameters of every game with a bunch of variables and tools like gamescope anymore. I just have to hit launch and all the fancy features just work.

I see.

HDR depends a lot on the monitor I guess. Mine isn’t really brighter in HDR mode than normal because it’s an OLED, so the big difference is that the darks can get darker and more detailed as opposed to the brighter brights on HDR LCD/LED panels.

As for VRR, I’m a huge fan of it and I can’t recommend it enough. Particularly on high refresh rate monitors and demanding game it’s a big win not having to tweak your settings so that the framerate always stays above the monitors specified refresh rate. No tearing. No penalty from not reaching the required framerate. Just a smooth presentation.

You can actually use VRR on X11, but only on for single monitor and it will introduce tearing on the others.