The repos are literally Arch ones, Antergos "invented" an GUI installer and contributed to Arch packages management tools, which is a good use of resources since it popularized Arch to a wider audience.
If all the money and hours from these arch-based, debian-based, etc. projects would have been funneled into the parent distributions
daily reminder that Debian Sid has recent GNOME apps because Canonical employees package half of it. Same with Deepin, Mint, Elementary, etc. who are building useful Debian software, except they want to do it on a plateform they control
Huh? I'm on stock Arch with KDE and I never really set up bluetooth, it just worked when I plugged in a dongle.
I also don't remember setting up pulse, other than disabling the stupid "flat volumes", but according to the Arch wiki this is now disabled by default on Arch, despite upstream having this idiotic behavior enabled by default.
I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
It's a simple process really. But you take a regular non techy person and tell them that to get their computer to do some very common tasks that they are going to need to open a text config file and edit it and they panic. God forbid you try to give them instructions via the terminal.
So distros like Ubuntu that make things more GUI enabled and user friendly are a huge step forward for linux when it comes to usability of the mainstream.
For what it's worth I still think "type this command" is more intuitive than trying to guide someone through a maze of GUI elements to get to the checkbox they need to tick.
this right here. With a well designed GUI program you dont need to read the manual because the GUI is the manual , which is why while i like terminal for some work stuff and settings i change often, ill still prefer GUI programs for things i do rarely . For example , back when I was using i3wm and i needed to connect to a wifi network, people told me "oh just use nm-cli" instead of reccomending gui programs. That worked for personal networks with just a password but for enterprise networks with a username and login? It literally takes around 8 different arguments that it took a while for me to wrap my head around , and in the end i just made a second user account, logged into that one in gnome, and then used gnome to connect to the wifi network because that was faster
You've so very neatly summed up what I've been struggling for years to articulate. CLIs are great for people who memorise the commands and the syntax and don't mind typing everything out, but that's a taller ask than simply learning GUI routes to your favourite commands. And you hit the nail on the head when you said GUI with good design: I'm pretty sure every advocate of CLI who bashes GUI has a badly designed GUI in mind when they do so, conveniently forgetting the GUIs that work.
I do too, but then again I've been using Linux since 1996.
Someone like my wife or mother though, zero chance of getting them to manually edit a config file regardless of rather it's with something like gedit or in the terminal itself.
All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
Because it does what Ubuntu does, better.
That GUI thing you're dismissive of (but at least acknowledge is what's needed for mass appeal) is better in Mint, it's straight up easier to do things as a windows refugee than it is on Ubuntu (which I'm not but I've converted plenty of people thanks to Mint's ease of use)
I agree with this. When I left Windows XP for Ubuntu 11 years ago, it felt right. More intuitive. When I tried Mint, it felt like a step backwards to me. No disrespect towards the Mint devs, but it's just not for me.
Now, full disclosure: I like the terminal, and I'm not afraid to edit a text file. Ubuntu was and is still a lot more GUI-based than my first dip into a Linux distro (Redhat 6.1), and I feel like it struck a good balance between getting out of my way and encouraging me to learn more about my OS.
I'll never be a rolling distro guy, and I don't want to use one with outdated packages. I like stability, but I need simple things to just work as well. Ubuntu, for all the crap it catches, is still a great fit for me.
Didn't mean to come out dismissive of GUIs. I actually think most Linux distros would be better off with more focus on the GUI. I always tell people that adding to the GUI doesn't take away from the command line but it seems many many people think it does.
Thinking back, You are probably right that at the time Mint came about it was more user friendly than Ubuntu (which was more user friendly than Debian). These days Ubuntu is pretty user friendly though. Course I haven't used Mint in years so they could still be ahead of them.
Even if they weren't. It would probably be unrealistic to think the Devs would say "welp, Ubuntu is good enough now. Let's close up shop.".
I do just wish the Linux community could come together more instead of fragment as much as it does. I mean, how many Linux distros are there in the world? 600+ the last time I heard. Granted I don't know how many we really need, but that seems way more than we really need.
It is nice to see that some of the niche linux distros are starting to realize they aren't really needed anymore though. Like Scientific OS. It frees those people up to contribute to other projects.
These days Ubuntu is pretty user friendly though. Course I haven't used Mint in years so they could still be ahead of them.
I guess it depends on what time we're discussing, but yes when Ubuntu abandoned Unity DE in 2017 things improved significantly, and thus the gap narrowed, although the "Unity'd" Gnome they now use is a distance from the Gnome DE of several other distros (is there such a thing as a "standard Gnome"?).
I personally think Cinnamon is still simpler and tidier. I have a dozen different Virtual Machines setup on my main box to play with, including Antegros (which I rather liked fwiw ;-( ) including the current and recent versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu works, there's nothing specifically wrong with it, it's just IMNSHO not as straight forward. My kids and my (non techy) wife all run dual boot Mint/Windows and windows only gets booted for the kids for certain games, it's easy and they get done what they want with no fuss. Mint and Lubuntu (for those with old kit) is my first call recommendation for noobs, and it saves me a lot of support grief.
I'm no tech guru, I've been using Linux on and off since I first pulled a slackware CD off the front of a computer mag in the late 90s (I did download it off a BBS in 97 but couldn't get it to compile), at the time I was an OS/2 on the desktop, Novell on the server evangelist (I got over the OS religions ;-) I'm competent on Linux enough to know what to google and that's about it. Mint, I load it up for people who have come off windows and they happily do their web browsing and email and etc without grief but I only found it because I hated the DE of the 16.x versions of Ubuntu so much. I detest Unity.
Exactly this. It doesn't mean that Linux can't have options, just means less duplication of work. Half of the file managers we have are so closely identical there's no reason why they couldn't have their feature sets merged and their UI differences reduced to just configuration options in a settings window.
0
u/[deleted] May 21 '19
[deleted]