How new Linux users can increase their odds of success

To be fair, there's Linux From Scratch, but I found it to be a bit tedious to build out everything and manage the dependencies by hand. Walking through a big dependency DAG manually is not very practical IMO.

There's also Nix, but I am yet to learn how to work with custom patches there. I believe that it's possible, and Nix has a lot of other great features but hasn't been exactly Gentoo-like in my experience.

I don't want Gentoo.

I want Gentoo that has been prepared as if the user just recompiled every goddamned program that makes up the core os, build desiderata and all waiting for me to make another change.

So if I decide I want to recompile coreutils after messing with a single implementation file, `make` or whatever will just incrementally recompile what is needed.

Another way to think of it: (I hope) all coreutils devs have a dev environment they use where they can make such a change and have very little latency from the moment of a code change to the moment they see results from running/testing the command in question. I want a distro that delivers code and source in such a way that the code of all core programs is just waiting for me to incrementally rebuild any of those programs.

And that wouldn't even really suffice-- there are probably some core programs which still have long incremental recompiling times. Digression-- I'd bet all the browsers are such examples-- in fact I'll just claim it here in the hopes that the internet gods strike me down. :)

Edit: clarification

Interesting-- is the 20 minute duration for a full compile from scratch, or for an incremental recompile?

This article feels like it was written in 2015.

There's Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Zorin...

They're not for me though, as what I care about is pretty contrary to the idea of mainstream. I don't really care whether Linux makes it to the mainstream or not, why should that be everyone's goal?

The lack of a unified direction might seems like a weakness of Linux but it's also its biggest strength. It's the reason it's the most used OS in the world now, when you include servers and Android devices. It's just so easy to adapt if you want to do something different.

So let the techies do their techie stuff and let the mainstream OS vendors focus on their users :)

The current state of desktop Linux is that there's a category of Linux software that is suitable for beginners, which is built atop the set of features that make Linux excellent for the people who put the amount of time into learning the operating system that is appropriate for learning a professional tool. But this category of software (the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and 3rd party software intended to run inside one or the other) doesn't do much to ease the process of learning the deeper, more compelling aspects of Linux. It provides you with an interface that's recognizable to Mac and Windows users, but doesn't provide nearly as much power, and then expects you to learn Linux in all its depth to make up for that difference in capabilities.

That makes Linux great for people who just need a web browser and maybe an email client, and it makes Linux great for people who have enough background technical knowledge to learn all its depth, but leaves it vastly inferior for everyone who needs more than a Chromebook but doesn't need a professional tool. If you fall into that category today and want to use Linux anyway, you need to learn its depths, and expect that until you do, it will be worse than the OS you're coming from.

If we want to improve the situation, we need either go all the way and make GNOME just as powerful as macOS (which is a fools errand), or make GNOME better integrated into what Linux is already great at and ease the transition.

As a multi-OS user of 20+ years and developer of 15+ years they’ve never worked well for me. A more traditional floating WM with light optional tiling functions (think Aero Snap or Moom/Magnet/etc on macOS) has been more productive for me. With tiling I always end up with some windows being oddly sized and unusable, or half my windows being in floating mode which defeats much of the point of a tiling WM.

There's powertoys that offers quasi-tiling wm experience:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Could not agree more, and my hobby is writing those shell scripts in a DSL that is very close to bash.

To me the main benefit of terminals and shells is the composability of utilities that are built to run in text-only environments. Daisy-chaining tools together on the fly is immensely powerful and just not possible with GUI based programs.

What you're describing is the benefit of an open system. You _can_ customise it. You don't have to.

what makes you say this ?

That's the trade-off I've chosen: MacOS is guaranteed to work well on my laptop because they were designed and built together, for each other.

Put another way: the fact an apples-to-apples comparison to Linux is impossible is the reason macOS wins for me.

Though really I haven't had any serious hardware problems under Linux for years (but I have a small stable of machines I am not changing all the time).

Intel makes everything and is known to have good Linux support. You can buy a system where "lspci" lists nothing but Intel hardware, and that system will run Linux well.

So will many other systems. AMD CPUs and GPUs in particular are good. Nvidia not so much. The vast majority of network adapters are no problem, but a few stupid ones do exist.

But it's easier to say "just get everything Intel" than to enumerate the entire hardware compatibility list.

AMD is pretty good these days, it all mostly works. Few bugs now and then. Intel everything is super solid.