Ooooh should Pinball Dad stick his toe in the Linux Discourse

I've been on it since 2010, I guess I should maybe?

How about I stick my whole entire foot in, maybe if I poison it with my footstink then it'll die down a bit

Linux is a bit shit sometimes,

There's your headline. I don't care whether you use linux or not; ten years ago that might have mattered, I might be trying to get more people to use it so that adobe or whoever would put more effort into supporting it, but that doesn't really matter anymore, these days everything either Just Works or there's a native equivalent that's better and I've no selfish reason to recommend linux anymore, so if you're happy with windows stick with windows.

If you're *not* happy with windows, here's the other half of that sentence at the top of this post:

Linux is a bit shit sometimes - but when it's a bit shit, it's a bit shit in the way of a cat who watches the mouse run across the living room floor, not in the way of a cat who suddenly decides to bite you for no reason. It's not *actively malicious,* it's just a bit shit sometimes, which these days is tbh pretty damn good compared with a lot of stuff.

Like, it's not bad because it's being hollowed out for investors, it's not bad because it's spying on you to make more money, it's not bad because its makers know you've gotta take it anyway, it's not bad because it knows it can get a lot worse before you look elsewhere, it's just... bad. But bad in like a normal way, like a bike with a wonky gear shifter and tyres that keep going soft, not like a bike that shows you adverts.

There's my linux recommendation.

LINUX: It's A Bit Shit Sometimes™

Your computer's always gonna be a bit shit, but if you'll just take my paw, I can 🎶show you how it can be 🎵shiiit in a different waayyyyy🎶

If you want my *specific* linux recommendation, I've been happy with Ubuntu Mate because it's been the same old familiar shit for like fourteen years now

Specifically, it came about because Ubuntu changed from having a slightly shit interface to having a REALLY shit interface back in 2010, and so Mate came along as a continuation of the old GUI that was only a bit shit. It's been getting updates twice a year since then and instead of RADICALLY OVERHAULING THE INTERFACE they've just made it... slightly less shit

Like... if you look at Ubuntu Mate from 2010 and Ubuntu Mate from today, it uses a slightly easier-to-read font now? The colours are a bit nicer? The icons are better? But everything's still in the same place, I haven't had to re-learn anything.

Instead of spending ten years falling over themselves trying to Innovate and Revolutionize and Reinvent, they've just been slowly and carefully sanding off the rough bits, and hoo boy, you spend ten years sanding the same wood, it gets niiiiiice

I've heard good things about Linux Mint also, and I think you can choose to have Mate as the interface to that as well.

The Thing: you can choose an interface. That's a thing that makes Linux both brilliant AND shit, because first thing going in you've got to make a decision with basically no information or context. JUST LIKE YOU DID WHEN YOU JOINED YOUR FEDI SERVER, HAHA! And you wondered why there were so many Linux weirdos here, didn'tcha!

There are three ways you can deal with this decision:

1) Spend hours meticulously researching each one because you like spending hours meticulously researching things (this explains why half of Fedi is The Way It Is)
2) Blunder on YOLO style with one that has a cool name and see whether or not you regret it later (this explains the other half of Fedi)
3) Bounce off the decision entirely because it's self-evidently an unreasonable thing to ask (this explains the world outside Fedi)

Anyway yeah you can choose whatever interface you like, when I say "Interface" I'm talking like the start menu, all the various settings menus, the borders and controls around each window, you can make it look and act like however you want, and oof, you can make it So. Damn. Pretty.

That's what I did, the first month of running Linux. Just fiddled with the skins and interfaces. Made it look *gorgeous.*

Here's a theme I ended up using for a while, until the default one got so good I didn't want to change anymore: https://www.mate-look.org/p/1080261

This ability to retheme the whole OS reminded me of stuff like RainMeter or WinAmp, but for the Whole Computer, it was and remains Absolutely Banging

(that's why when you look up a tutorial on how to do a Linux thing it'll involve the terminal, it's because everybody's made their computer look completely different according to their own personal tastes and the terminal's the only thing anyone's got in common anymore)

One more post about Linux and then I'll shut up about it.

(I can do that, because I outgrew the evangelical "Oh my god you have to try this it's so much easier" stage like ten years ago, it's possible for me to shut up about Linux now, which is nicer for everyone involved)

If you have to choose between something that used to be crap but is slowly getting better, and something that used to be alright but is getting inexorably worse, the best time to jump is gonna be when you get to see and take joy in the getting-better bit.

If you leave it too long and the thing you're jumping from has gotten intolerably, unusably bad, you'll be in a hell of a panic and it'll probably be at a super-inconvenient time. Give the New Thing a good sniff ahead of time and play around with it a bit in a non-vital setting, so that you're not moving in a horrible panicked rush.

@ifixcoinops I've been following the whole "Windows goes into shit(ter?)" and "Praise Linux" thing slightly amused. A friend's son asked me why I switched from Windows to Linux. I told him I didn't switch. There's confusion. Told them I started using Linux before they tried to sell Windows as an operating system.

@apzpins @ifixcoinops

My reactions to this:

1. Wait, that happened?

2. Oh yeah; it used to just be thing that ran on top of DOS.

3. And I was *also* primarily using Linux before then.

@apzpins @ifixcoinops

Remember when you had to recompile your kernel to change your device drivers? Good times.