Big 2nd for Fedora. Fedora isn’t Debian stable but isn’t exactly unstable either, and I think having fresher packages in your main repo is worth it.

K

For me, it was always just a good excuse to distro hop and find something new to explore. There have been plenty of problems that I’ve fixed, but when I failed to find the culprit a reinstall only takes about 20 minutes.

This is the level of error that would usually lead to me, backing up my important files on a removable media of some kind and reinstalling my operating system

Maybe I’ve been hitting the hopium pipe too hard….

Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.

Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.

So they’re all just going to spring for new machines when Microsoft pulls the plug on win10?

I have a 5 year old niece and 73 year old father in law running Ubuntu. Everything is relative right? To me they’re Linux illiterate, if not computer illiterate. It’s not meant to be an insult, and I’m regularly amazed by some folks inability to get what they’re looking for out of a search engine.

All I’m getting at, is that Debian isn’t “easy” to everyone.

Setting engine timing when replacing a timing belt is easy to my brother in law who’s a car guy, but if I watched a YouTube video on it I’d probably still botch the job and blow my motor. It’s easy to him. Not to me.

To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.

I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.

Absolutely. One of the best parts of the Linux experience is the community helping each other in so many places on the internet.

EndeavourOS is terminal centric. If you try it out you might need to learn some new tricks, but its forums are fantastic and I rarely have issues with it. Cachy is supposed to be really good too.

I have never experienced ds4drv actually working. Maybe it is time for a distro hop if you’re feeling frisky. I highly recommend EndeavourOS as an entry level to Arch. I’m also curious about CachyOS and PikaOS.

Something like this just not working is usually what drove me on too a new distro until I found something that just works really well for me.

So yeah, this is the answer, or should be. I run EndeavourOS, an Arch based distro (btw) and I also installed ds4drv thinking I’d need it, and my dualshock4 wouldn’t connect. I deleted ds4drv, rebooted and tried again and viola, it connected immediately, with full support including rumble and touchpad. The drivers were in the kernel all along.

If FartSparkles is also correct about your old kernel after you sudo apt purge ds4drv, you can search instructions for how to upgrade to a newer kernel version, it isn’t very difficult to do.

So, I used to play valorant and pubg when I was still a windows user. It was around the time of my switch to Linux that I learned about intrusive kernel level anti cheat.

Honestly, I don’t miss them, and refuse to play a game that compromises the safety and security of my operating system, just as much as I refuse to use an operating system that even allows kernel level access to something as trivial as a game.

My latest run in with this issue was the Marathon pre-alpha. I was granted access only to find that Bungie was Linux hostile, and after making a few speeches about it in the discord I uninstalled it and left.

I’m fine with this scenario. If I want competitive multiplayer I have CS2, Apex legends, and others. If games refuse to support Linux, fuck em.

Just another lens to view this through. There’s a certain rebellious spirit that can come along with embracing FOSS, and that should be part of the appeal.

Three years ago when I used Mint I had minimal issues, but it sounds like things have declined since then.

My path went something like Pop_OS>Mint>Fedora Workstation>Mint>MXLinux>Nobara>EndeavourOS>Fedora Workstation for a solid year>and back to endeavour with hyprland.

But that’s just the stuff I’ve installed and actually kept longer than a few days. I’ve installed silverblue, kinoite, openSUSE tumbleweed, bluefin, bazzite etc just to learn them, and honestly I just don’t see the use case for average users in atomic distros. Non atomic distros are entirely stable if you don’t do stupid things with them, and doing stupid things with them is a great learning experience.

Same old Linux differences in opinion.

Totally valid. I tried Mint with my father in law before and we had issues as well before I migrated him to Ubuntu which works wonderfully for him. I hadn’t used Mint myself in a couple years and figured the issues were hardware specific.

Using toolbox to force out of tree software to function is not nearly as simple going to the discover app and clicking “download”

Remember we’re talking about a kid. Not a power user. We’re talking about people that don’t know and don’t want to know what a kernel module is. Are those extra steps fine for you? Great, knock yourself out. They aren’t feasible for a child or grandmother who wants to just click shit and see it launch.

I use EndeavourOS without a desktop environment and install and configure Hyprland for myself. I enjoy those extra steps. Someone unfamiliar with my system wouldn’t even be able to open the web browser. That’s fine for me. I’m not going to suggest it for my 74 year old father in law. He uses Ubuntu.

Is it making sense yet?

Using literally anything that requires an out of tree kernel module, for one. Have some peripherals with features that aren’t supported by drivers already present in the kernel? Good luck getting any DKMS packages running on your machine.

I’m hearing a lot of very poor advice in here, at least from my perspective as a Linux user who’s been through the gamut of various distros over the years.

Fedora atomic desktops are not beginner distros. That is not their purpose, and their limitations make many things a person may eventually want to do with their machine a lot more complicated.

Debian? Are we joking here? Debian is an amazing distro for what its purposes are, but it’s not beginner friendly. Debian is bare bones.

Linux Mint is the easiest answer here. Ubuntu LTS (or its classroom based fork edubuntu) is another great answer. I know every Linux user on the internet recoils in horror at the mention of Ubuntu but it really is a drop in plug and play solution for kids and old people.

Yeah, I’m not saying one plan is better than the other, just that it’s something to be aware of when making a choice. My steam deck sees a lot of travel and a lot of use, and I’ve never used a screen protector, because you’re really not supposed to with the matte screen. Haven’t noticed a scratch yet, so it works for me. The only protection I use is the tpu rubberized grip case, I think from spigen. That and the case it came in for travel.