No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.

The amount of people not knowing what a “web app” is, is seriously concerning.

Anyway, I tried “old” and Alexandrite, but I just ended up sticking with the default. I find “old” ugly, and on Alexandrite, I couldn’t find my saved posts. Maybe it has been fixed since, but the default one works for me best.

I’ve switched to Gboard on Android back in the days, when it was the only one with proper multilingual features, and been using it ever since.

I’ve experienced the opposite: I actually found it rather more helpful than not, despite the occasional errors like you mentioned. But nowadays it’s quite rare that it “mispredicts” a word. And what I’ve found extremely helpful is, that nowadays it doesn’t only correct individual words, but it picks up other grammatical errors as well in the sentence. So it’s working for me.

Luckily I’m not involved in this smart-TV saga in any way, as I haven’t been watching TV since my childhood (there were no smart-TVs back then, but TV shows in my country were shit).

Now my biggest fear is, if enough people realize that smart-TVs are shit, then desktop monitors will start to become “smart” too. My life will be doomed if that happens.

You mean, MMCCCXIII people.

Manjaro, because it’s rolling release and it’s built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

In case anything breaks, there’s quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

It’s been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.

It happened to me countless times that I was suffering with a task for hours and hours and hours, then finally found what the problem was. Then a few weeks later, facing the same issue again somewhere else, I only remembered the fact that I had that same issue weeks ago, but I completely forgot what the solution was.

Weirdly enough, sometimes it’s indeed a lifelong experience and I can remember the solution forever. I don’t really know what it depends on.

In my opinion it’s not useless at all. Lemmy marks the comments as edited, but that’s just to show the fact that it was edited. But if you add the reason why you edited, that makes it a whole lot more transparent.

Sometimes it could happen that I see a great comment full of great ideas from a great user, and it could be lengthy as well. Then later I go back to see the reactions, and I see the comment was edited. If I don’t know what was edited on it, then I have to read the whole comment again. But if it’s clearly stated that only typos were fixed, then I don’t bother with re-reading the comment.

That’s why you proofread before you post, don’t you?

COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.

I beg to differ. First of all, the fact that the Rust compiler eliminates a bunch of bugs that would cause crashes in other languages, is already a major factor in making the user experience smoother. Secondly, generally speaking, according to my own experience, overall code quality has a proportional effect on the software. If it’s written well, bugs are more likely to be caught during testing and less likely to occur after release. In a badly written software there are always more bugs. This point isn’t Rust-specific, just mentioning that developer-related stuff does have an impact on the user experience. And by the fact that Rust is such a powerful tool compared to others, and COSMIC being the first desktop environment written in RUST, it is revolutionary.

Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.

Sure, I didn’t say we can only have one solution for each problem. As long as a new solution is justified (offers unique features, better performance, more stable and reliable, or by other measures), then so be it. That will make the open source world better. For example, if they decided to write the Mir Wayland compositor in Rust, that would be a valid reason to keep pursuing it (although even then wouldn’t entirely be convinced by that). I’m still saying, for the problem of segmentation it isn’t very good that many small teams are creating software that otherwise already exist. I find contributing to the major ones more useful.

(Btw you seem to have a quite deep and extensive knowledge of the history of Ubuntu components. Upvoted for the detailed insights.)

Apart from what some commenters already pointed out (about the orientation of the roads there), I’m not sure how it’s going in the US, but in Europe, we have a hierarchy, where the sign on a pole takes precedence over the sign painted on the road.

The hierarchy is:

1. Police officer’s hand signs
2. Traffic lights
3. Signs on a pole
4. Signs painted on the road

According to this, you cannot turn left, even though it looks like a left turning lane.

Is there such a thing in the US?

This old canard again.

Dude, I was just sharing my own opinion. Has anyone mentioned these before? I didn’t know about that.

Came first.

Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.

For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.

Of the mentioned UI shells, I only have experience with Unity and Cinnamon. I can’t argue about the rest. However: COSMIC is actually revolutionary, since it’s entirely made in Rust. I’m actually looking forward to it and I’m eager to try it once it becomes stable. Cinnamon was made for a reason: back in the days, when Gnome 3 was released, its UI was quite controversial. Cinnamon aimed to provide a more classic experience while running on new Gnome. Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af). Bottom line here is, if they’re developing and maintaining their own solution for something that has a popular alternative, then better do a good job, otherwise don’t try to force it on the users. Or do force it, and maybe someone will like it… but OP was asking about the worst distro, so I came up with one that I personally didn’t find usable on the long run, and still is unrealistically popular in my opinion.

Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.

Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Okay, fair enough.

When I posted my original comment, I had the assumption that someone who uses Linux (or about to use Linux) knows at least the basic terms.

But to be honest, OP didn’t even specify for what purpose they were looking for the worst distro. Maybe they meant for a docker image for their k8s cluster. Who knows. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve been using Manjaro for like 7 years. Throughout these years I maybe had two issues with updates. I’ve easily fixed one by myself (it was a dependency issue), the other one was a bug in packaging. Mentioned it on their forum, they were crazy fast to reply (I wouldn’t even expect that from a software company, let alone an open source project), and the fix was out in a few hours.

Btw their issue tracking related to updates is top-notch. This is another reason why I had a positive impression with this distro.

Regarding their own software, I am also impressed by their mhwd scripts. Even a shitty Nvidia driver can be easily installed with it, which actually works. And their OS installation framework has been adopted by other distros as well.

Which one of the popular distros has been changing its name every 3 months? Mint sure didn’t. Less popular ones maybe did. But those are generally not widely recommended.

I agree about the segmentation as a major issue, and that’s exactly why I brought it up in my original comment how it’s not okay that Canonical keeps re-inventing the wheel instead of improving an existing project.

I wasn’t comparing macOS to Ubuntu, I was comparing Apple to Canonical in a way how they approach the market. What I found similar is, that both of them are going their own way and making their product as different as possible from others. Not out of innovation, just for the sake of being different. Canonical is somewhat better though, because they’re dealing with free software, so technically you can uninstall what you don’t like, and install what you want. But why would I start to replace and configure components, when I can just have another distro that is working the way I like out of the box?

I’d pick Ubuntu. I don’t really understand why it’s still so popular. Never ever had a successful dist-upgrade with it, so technically if you wanna stay up to date with it, you have to reinstall every six months.

And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.

Are there any worse distros? Probably yes. But in proportion to its popularity, Ubuntu is the absolute worst, that’s not even a question to me.

Edit: I can see several replies to my comment praising Ubuntu for its role in making Linux platform (and free software) more popular. That’s fine, perfectly valid. In fact, my very first experience with Linux was with Ubuntu as well, through a CD addition to a PC magazine back in 2005.

To clarify myself (since the post itself is not very elaborate), when I posted my comment, I was thinking of the quality/usability/stability of Linux distributions, and due to personal experience I’ve never found Ubuntu usable in the long term. I did try it several times through the years, also installed it on my mom’s laptop (fairly simple setup with no customizations at all on a Dell Latitude, a.k.a good hardware), and even there basic things just didn’t work on the long run.

I’ve been using Manjaro for many years, and it’s been working mostly flawlessly. Minor issues arise sometimes, but that’s incredibly rare, and easy to fix.

Man page for dummies. Nice! I like it!