Post by @davidgerard@circumstances.run

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 2 hr. ago

a word on Linux usability out of the box.

Ubuntu came along in 2004-2005 and set a new standard for Linux desktop usability. It was just ridiculously better at fixing the paper cuts - stupid little things that shouldn't even be a problem.

I was on FreeBSD at the time and moved to 5.04 immediately. (Loved one brought home a CD from a friend and we tried it on a spare laptop. Rapidly got heavily into Frozen Bubble.)

I was on Ubuntu from then until recently, when I got a new laptop and put Debian 13 on. It works great, very reliable. But also it's made of frickin' papercuts.

I just got another spare laptop (a replacement for my old dead T14) and just went for Xubuntu 26.04 to get it running, and it's just so much simpler and less faff and someone paid the slightest fucking attention to the importance of shit just working.

Ubuntu and Debian are both embracing the slop hard, but also Linux is still less worse than Windows and I posit that OSes need to pay more attention to the importance of shit just working.

That said, even Debian trounces Windows on working out of the box.

0 Boosts

0 Likes

Ingo

@lasombra_br@mas.to 10 min. ago

@davidgerard Thanks for sharing.

I haven't used Ubuntu in more than 10 years.

Crow

@crow@cville.online 38 min. ago

@davidgerard so does Xubuntu have less #aislop ?

Mark Newton

@NewtonMark@eigenmagic.net 1 hr. ago

@davidgerard Get a Mac.

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@NewtonMark i've been getting regaled with all the recent vibeprovements in current MacOS/iOS

tho i have occasionally contemplated an M1 macbook to leengux

Gourd

@gourd@indieverse.social 1 hr. ago

@davidgerard agreed, although I ended up leaving Ubuntu faster for rolling release distros entirely because every time I've ever done an upgrade of an APT based distro to a new release they brick 50% of the time for me

Happened to me even on one Debian 12->13 upgrade, although that one was probably caused by some of the truly cursed stuff I did to get a working Vapoursynth install on Debian 12.

I somehow had better luck with Arch for me of it not breaking regularly for a decade after getting through the wildly non-user friendly setup. This has to be a me problem, right?

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@gourd o_0 what on earth are you running it on??

I used to get occasional issues from my habit of installing Ubuntu prerelease, on the theory that any bugs were 100% more likely to be fixed if i put them in *before* release

boy did i learn how to fix a broken debian-like

Gourd

@gourd@indieverse.social 1 hr. ago

@davidgerard ...in the late 00's? An old family desktop with an obsolete discontinued NVIDIA card even at the time (Geforce 4 MX)... and netbooks that really shouldn't have had issues at all.

The recent case where it happened with Debian 12->13 was almost certainly the dodgy Vapoursynth packages and out of package manager builds I did. Vapoursynth is an irreplaceable tool for certain kinds of low level video manipulation for high quality processing of like, VHS rips and fucked up DVDs (apart from Avisynth which was Windows only for the longest time and is worse, but it's an accursed Python framework with a packages manager for all of its own plugins that didn't work on Linux until recently and annoying to compile C code in all of those extensions.

It's also why I'm stuck with an NVIDIA card in my desktop ATM: to accelerate Vapoursynth operations and the AMD open source drivers liked to crash my system every so often when using them to accerate Vapoursynth filters.

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@gourd yeah that'd do it

tante

@tante@tldr.nettime.org 2 hr. ago

@davidgerard yeah thats basically why my Laptop is on Ubuntu (with all Snaps removed). Removing Snap kills Ubuntu's weird crap and you just get a polished Debian.

Hanno Zulla

@hzulla@infosec.exchange 2 hr. ago

@tante @davidgerard You both didn't ask, but Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE is a recent contender for the "Debian without the paper cuts" trophy. It's also snap-less and integrates flatpak. Can recommend.

Szymon Sokół 🇵🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦

@blotosmetek@circumstances.run 29 min. ago

@hzulla @tante @davidgerard can you give me some examples of those "paper cuts"? I switched from Ubuntu to Debian when they started to aggresively push Snap (4 years ago or so), and frankly I don't see much difference (might be because I use KDE).

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 6 min. ago

@blotosmetek @hzulla @tante just annoying little shit i had to do by hand, the xfce clock widget not working, stuff like that

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 2 hr. ago

@hzulla @tante LMDE's default Xfce setup annoys me a bit, I really like Xubuntu's, but I'm sure it's fine, LM learnt from Ubuntu the importance of presentation