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Comment by k8svet | Hacker News Reader

Give me a break. Its the kernel, drm, mesa, and proton. The distro haw scant all to do with it except a bunch of newbies loudly claiming "new distro" is the best because it includes one single extra package pre-installed or something.

I will never stop being annoyed at conversations around distros. Ever.

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I think you're underestimating how important the out-of-the-box experience is to casual users. Having Steam games "just work" and being able to do the familiar double-click of an exe file to install a Windows app in compatibility mode is valuable to those users.

I get what you're saying, and I don't know much about "ZorinOS", but the discussion is about people who might struggle to install Linux at all, so having the right packages preinstalled is important.

Okay. Now they have a distro from someone that doesn't care to respect licensing terms. And an end user who apparently can't be trained to click a few times in an app store...

Yeah, let's imagine how they react to their entire system being broken and some rumblings of "well maybe if you change time". Yeah, sure, okay, I'm sure a user that can't install a package will be able to handle that. /s

Maybe it's simply because I AM a distro maintainer, that I just roll my eyes at all of this. What's pre-installed is so trivial it's almost nothing to me when I think about why I chose my distro. How fast can they react to security reports? Are they abreast of developments in the Linux ecosystem and adjusting and experimenting with defaults? Really truly? Because even in (my distro) where I can tell you the names of owners of specific areas, there's still some gaps we could cover better.

The curse of knowing too much. Or maybe my empathy meter is way off tonight. Idk.

The conversation started, to which I contributed to, was about what's easiest out of the box for casual users. What are you on about?

"how many clicks does it take to install Nvidia or steam" is not a good measure of a distro. I will stand by that statement strongly, I think. Let imagine a totally-not-real distro that definitely isn't pushed on noobs constantly. Let's imagine that include that said distro has, multiple times, let their SSL cert expire and at least once recommended users roll back their clock. Is that a "good distro" for noobs because it slips the Nvidia package in?

Fuck. No.

I'm sorry but if the way we handle accessibility of Linux to non-Lijux-aware folks is to just push them to the latest flavor that has the most shit crammed in, well, I'm not sure what we expect the outcome to be.

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