the Linux community needs to stop blaming individual users for being unable to handle highly technical problems that are suddenly thrown their way by the distro, or by individual packages - especially when those problems require them to go out of their way to gain information from a website that was never presented to them, that then requires them to interpret that information through a lot of cultural knowledge that was also never presented to them, and then use several highly-complex and technical tools in order to fix the problem (which were also never presented to them)

I hope it’s clear why this attitude is directly harmful to the goal of making Linux accessible to everyone

ideally I want my grandma to be able to install and use Linux. but this problem that’s being blamed on individual users is something that I think might trip up professional Linux administrators

this exact attitude btw is one of the main reasons why I can be so bitter toward Linux and especially the culture around Linux

@kasdeya is this subtooting the Arch graphics card thing? I feel like getting weird sysadmin shit thrown at you randomly is part of the Arch experience ™️ lol, but maybe that's part of your point

@aburka it kinda of is lol (as in, it’s about the Arch graphics card thing and that’s also part of my point). I’ve had Arch recommended to me as a beginner multiple times and unfortunately my laptop is currently running Arch and it’s been An Adventure™ trying to keep it running well for any amount of time

it’s totally fine to have a hobby tinkering distro like Arch but:

• either Arch genuinely is the best distro for me as someone who doesn’t want to do sysadmin stuff - in which case fuck Linux in 2025, or
• Arch isn’t, and people need to stop recommending it to non-tinkerers

@kasdeya oh yeah I don't think Arch should be recommended to non-tinkerers

@kasdeya I do admit to a bit of frustration when something improbable/rare goes wrong with e.g. Ubuntu and it gets used as an example of Linux not being ready or hating users etc, I mean sometimes it's fair but it's pretty common for Windows to get into a nigh unrecoverable state too

@kasdeya @aburka

I’ve had Arch recommended to me as a beginner multiple times

hammers from orbit upon whoever said this

@aburka my experience with Windows is that it doesn’t go into an unrecoverable state on its own. sometimes some small features stop working as the system gets updated (for example the Windows 10 emoji picker stopped working for me earlier this year) which can be kind of annoying but thankfully I’ve never had it seriously break itself

also I can totally understand being frustrated by people blowing a small Linux issue out of proportion like that

@kasdeya @aburka My experience with Linux Mint (an Ubuntu based distro) is that it never went unrecoverable either. The only time I was actually worried was when apparently there was some minor corruption on the SSD preventing regular boot, but running fsck from the emergency command line fixed it and it's been working fine since.