Middle and High school kids are flashing ROMs on their phone by themselves these days

No.

Some do. They other 98% are absolutely clueless and wouldn’t even know that there are alternatives to the stock OS. In fact they wouldn’t even know what an OS is or that “Android” isn’t a device brand.

cares about anything other than students committing violence

Many are just like the bad police. They care about showing off how well they work by catching someone. Doesn’t matter that there wasn’t a problem in the first place or that there are actual real problems that could use the ressources. As long as they can catch and punish someone (for purely imaginary stuff even…) to pretend how well they are doing their job they are happy.

but generally people just don’t install Windows, it’s already there

In my opinion that’s the main point.

People love to discuss how Linux isn’t fit to replace Windows (yet) or how it needs to be more user friendly or how it needs to work better out-of-the box.

Yet in reality 90% of the users couldn’t install and properly set up either OS from scratch. But with Windows they simply don’t have to as it’s already pre-installed and set up. And so they somehow fool themselves into thinking one just runs automatically while the other needs additional work…

Yes, they often do… implicitly.

Every time someone pretends that it’s a Linux problem that he had to look up and install a certain driver because it “wouldn’t work properly out-of-the-box” he is basically lying because guess what… Windows doesn’t work properly without the right (externally downloaded) driver, too. Or it required you to install the newest DirectX version for decades before you could even start any game… Yet somehow I never read complains about Windows being unfinished and needing to improve because you could not start gaming out-of-the-box.

Actually for many people rolling release is a cure for that issue because it’s the extensive version upgrades (that also like to fail) which often gets people to the point of reinstalling then trying another distro while being at it.

There’s a RAT in Arch Linux (because someone made one downloadable in the Arch User Repository) is about the same level of non-sense as telling the story of how Windows ships with hundreds of viruses because those can indeed be freely downloaded as .exe-files from the Internet which you can access via Windows. 🤣

Now that I think about it… It’s even worse. You cannot actually get an AUR package without explicitly installing the tools to get them (and most likely reading the disclaimers and warnings for using the AUR on the way), while you can can in fact download and execute malicious content with the pre-installed Windows tools.

The actual problem is (and has been for a long time) the enormous amount of absolute trash-level uefi implementations.

Updating keys is easy. Alas… a lot of them are completely broken beyond repair and fail everything but running with the pre-installed keys, which includes updating (or adding new) keys (bonus points for the really screwed up devices that even sign some their own hardware with the pre-installed MS keys thus bricking themselves if those keys are changed).

Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems […]

No.

Some Linux users lazily using shim-based Secure Boot implementations provided out of the box by some distros. Mostly exactly because that’s a setup that came with their install where they don’t have to do anything and they also don’t actually care.

Everyone actually caring for Secure Boot has the option to setup and use their own proper keys easily.

The real problem is (and has been for a long time) the amount of absolute trash level UEFI implementations still in use nthat are basically non-functional once you try to use any Secure Boot funtionality beyond just using the pre-installed MS keys.

Then here is the right model for you…

Linux is Linux. What sets distros apart are basically the config and pre-install defaults and the package manager…

The latter is Portage, developed for Gentoo and used (among others) by ChromeOS.

@squidbilly@piefed.social

The problem is that the people lacking those technical skills are struggling with Windows, too, but got brain-washed into believing that this is how it’s supposed to be. And they are somehow also the ones defending Windows bullshit the loudest because else they would need to acknowledge being wrong.

You forgot the one that is still compiling…

What do you mean by poor long term stability? It’s a rolling release. I run the same installation for basically forever, while fixed releases’ life-time is measured in just a few years before you lose support and need to do a full distro upgrade… which rarely seems to work without problems.

PS: I just looked it up. The first date in my pacman log in from 2014…

File permissions…

allowed to execute=1, allowed to write=2, allowed to read=4

grouped by owner/group/everyone.

So one of your own files you have full access to while users in your usergroup are only allowed to read it and nobody else has any permissions would have: 740 (read+write+execute / read / none).

As much as I despise Windows while also using archlinux/i3-wm as my daily driver…

Tiling is no rocket science. Basically every stacking window manager including Windows can do it well enough to be usable with just a few properly configured defaults and short-keys.

But why is this thing wasting so much electricity on my side with black text on bright white background?

That’s not wrong but a seperate problem mainly caused by lock-in strategies that are not exactly the same as marketshare or industry standards and are explicitly distinct from the actual OS’s capabilties.

I know enough people who have the exact same problem but with Apple as their employer forces them to use software only available there. Yet their marketshare for desktops is just a tiny fraction of what we see for Windows (~15% if we are optimsitic).

So will we pretend that Linux with a 10 or 15% marketshare (not that far off for an OS with already 5+%) is suddenly a valid alternative. Or are we honest and acknowledge that this is indeed NOT about Linux’ capability to be a valid Windows replacement but purely about the fact that there isn’t (an never will be…) a massive corporation spending billions in marketing and lobbying to create perceived standards simply by throwing money at the problem for even higher future gains?

But what will I do if marketshare of Linux does not increase properly? Oh, wait… who cares? I just use Linux for my daily work but are not a shareholder that needs constant massive growth of imaginary numbers.

by factor of 3 obviously…

No, because the whole Manjaro concept is bullshit.

Delaying updates by two weeks for a few more checks could help catch some bugs that went unnoticed, but not in the way Manjaro does it. Which means with no rhyme or reason at all. They don’t use the two weeks for additional tests. They don’t even collect fixes or patches based on the bleeding edge experience of actual Arch to apply to their delayed updates. They just delay updates, fixes and everything by two weeks. So your system is exactly as unstable as Arch just with 2 weeks delay.

And it gets worse from there: Arch has a disclaimer about the AUR being unsupported and requires you to install AUR helpers manually, so you did it at least once the old-school way and actually see the disclaimer. Manjaro however gives you access to the AUR pre-installed. No, not a cloned version of the AUR that is also 2 weeks behind. Direct access to one as used by Arch that expects your system to be up-to-date, not 2 weeks behind… introducing a completely new kind of dependency hell and instability.

PS: And that’s before questionable stuff on the Manjaro side… like letting their SSL certificates expire multiple times (and suggesting changing your devices clock as a “fix”) or DDOS’ing the AUR with a bug in their AUR helper, also multiple times.

Requirements: hardware (optional)