Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

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BatteryMountain

The best path forward for home users and small business for non-technical users:

Install Fedora with KDE.

Install Firefox, Thunderbird and Chrome.

Install uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger.

Install LibreOffice & bookmark Google Docs.

Install multimedia support, h264/h265, VLC/mpv/ffmpeg, enable DRM in browser.

Install Steam if applicable.

If they have a printer, connect it and show them how to print a page.

Configure & tweak KDE to be cleaner & more user friendly (its already near perfect out of the box). Show them how to manage wifi/lan connections.

Stick with Intel & AMD hardware, Nvidia drivers breaks on most kernel updates (and it messes with luks/secureboot/dracut). Intel & AMD, Just Works.

Educate the user on how to do Software Updates, install/remove software, how the file explorer works, maybe some terminal stuff if they seem inclined. Give them a high level overview of the benefits of linux.

With Fedora and KDE you can accomplish 95% of your computering needs, including software development. Only a handful of games & creative softwares don't work.

It will only take 6 months to have them permanently converted.

I don't have issues with Nvidia drivers in Archlinux (using cinnamon and X) after pacman updates that sometimes update kernel and/or Nvidia drivers, I'm curious what's different in your setup to get these issues

Also, how are the graphics drivers affecting LUKS for you? They are two independent and unrelated things for me, Nvidia drivers aren't doing anything disk or pam related

> If they have a printer, connect it and show them how to print a page.

This however is the thing that doesn't "just work" for me, even with a common hp printer. The one time in a year you need to use the printer, something will have broken about its drivers again in Linux. I just transfer the pdf to the printer with a USB stick now

Same here; I have had crazy hardware work out of the box in linux, but printers remain a mystery.

Furthermore, last time I tried printing, it was a surreal non-deterministic process. It wouldn't print, then it would, then it would get stuck in a handshake or something, rebooting wouldn't fix it, but rebooting twice would, then turning off the printer would break it again, and so on. No system update in between attempts. I genuinely want to know what the fuck the engineers for those machines are doing.

[Disclaimer: in the above process there was the extra hurdle that the printer was one of several on a local university network that may also have had cooky configuration]

It’s really surprising how printing from a Mac or iPhone just works. The foss people screwed up printing somehow.

I would take this a step further and recommend a Fedora-based immutable distro like Bazzite (for gamers) or Aurora (for everyone else). These come with codecs and even proprietary drivers (nVidia), so you don't need to install anything manually.

Immutable/atomic distros are rock solid and extremely hard to break, the automatic updates/upgrades are a godsend for newbies, and in the rare event something does break, you can boot directly into the previous version right from the boot menu - no command line wizardry required. Immutables also don't suffer from the dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular distros, so I would highly recommend them over a regular distro for most newbies.

>Educate the user on how to do Software Updates

Sorry to tell you that, manual updates are not a thing your average user is familiar with. In Windows land, updates install themselves

Then activate the automatic updates in your Linux distro? In contrast to Windows programs also won't block on startup and you need to wait for updating, because updates work in the background.

FYI last guidance is saw said privacy badger provides no additional benefit if already using ublock

Yet Privacy Badger blocks disqus from loading where ublock doesn't.

Ublock doesn't rewrite search engine tracking links, PB does.

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