this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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As a newbie in this space, I had interactions with a few distros over the years and lately switched (hopefully) permanently.
My first experience was with Mint 10 years ago. Installing it would cause some GPU driver defect (AMD card) and would turn the whole login screen into an epileptic checkerboard pattern with no way of doing anything. It took me a few reinstalls and a ungodly amount of googling to find a solution which involved opening the terminal at boot process. You can only imagine how frustating that can be for a newcomer.
Later in time I had Ubuntu on my laptop which had a bug that wouldn't spin up the CPU fan and it would simply overheat and shutdown. I had to take it to a technician to find out what was causing the random shutdowns.
A year ago I decided to try Debian on my desktop PC as many have praized it for it's rock-wolid stability. It didn't want to work on my PC. No internet connection and some weird bugs. Took me two-three days to get ti to work and I still don't know what exactly fixed it as I have applied every possible solition I came across.
Much later, aka now, I decided to go with Bazzite on my desktop as many have claimed excelent support. I wanted to install the mimalloc because I play Factorio a lot and a few reddit posts claimed 20% UPS improvement over the stock scheduler. After downloading the source code and following the 4 very easy steps, cmake would throw some random eerors at me claiming some critical files were missing, although they were right there in the usr directory. Turns us Bazzite some some issue and Fedora 40 compiled the code in seconds without any issues.
Conclusion: Linux users, which are very tech savvy or work in that space, know what to do when things don't work out, while the rest of us keeps googling and crying over error messages for things that seem trivial. You never seem to know if it's you, the system or your hardware.
It's something we'll take for granted. With enough time and experience, you could fire off a one liner to fix a problem in less than a minute. For most people thst could take an hour, and they'd probably give up within 10 minutes