I think it’s just general fear of the command line. I’ve had a friend who always owned a mac, and started using it for his programming course. While assisting him in trying to compile some programs or use something like git from the mac’s zsh terminal, I can tell it’s a stressful event for him, even though all I told him to enter were simple commands like ls, mkdir, g++ etc.
I have a machine that runs fedora with no trouble at all. I never needed to debug anything, multimonitors and sound outputs all work. But every once in a while, something happens which can only be solved through the command line, because linux simply does not have a settings utility as extensive as windows control panel. It’s fine for me, but telling that friend to bring up the terminal and enter a cryptic line will probably freak him out.
Beagleboards are great. Good Support and nice community. Nearly as good as Pi. I used BBB because it was the only open hardware SBC available in my area.
BTW: Please recommend me other good Open Hardware/Open Firmware SBCs. I am always looking for something new. Maybe for a Router or Selfmade-NAS.
I would love to replace my tp link archer c7 v5 with something more powerful, but it has to be flashable with OpenWRT and kind of an all in one box router with wifi (i know, seperation of concerns would be better, but i don’t care atm).
I’m watching this thread to see the recommendations. The only SBC I have seen that was designed for routers was a Pi that was on Vilros; you had to get special permission or something to even order it.
They specifically mention running WRT on the R1 Plus, so there’s at least some path to using it as a router.
I’m using one of their Orange Pi 5 boards as a Plex server running Debian and it’s been a tank.
NanoPi/FriendlyElec has a ton of multi-Ethernet boards. I haven’t had as much luck with their hardware, but they’re still trucking along, so it might work for you.
I was looking at the same situation. I decided to give an Orange Pi 5 a chance as the new Plex server and so far it’s phenomenal. Once I got the OS onto the M.2 SSD everything started flying, which makes sense when comparing an M.2 against an SD card for R/W speeds!
I’m using an external USB SSD for the media and aside from a spinup time after the disk goes to sleep, it’s worked great. It’s even handling h265 encoded files, which my RPi couldn’t do due to the extra CPU overhead from the transcoding compression. The OPi 5 is doing very well.
Simple tasks can take you way more time than needed. For example, I have an old laptop under Bunsenlabs (based on Debian with Openbox). The other day, I wanted to connect a secondary monitor. I wasn't expected the nightmare I had to setup this thing. The layout was totally off with a dead space between the two screens where the cursor disappeared and ArandR was very rough to use. I ended up editing txt file if I remember correctly.
I absolutely love Linux but this kind of thing happen quite regularly to be honest.
You could install the linux-lts kernel alongside the one you have already installed to have the option to just boot into that one when a kernel update seems to be the problem.
Another thing would be to look into backup solutions that execute automatically when updating your system. Personally I have my system on BTRFS subvolumes and a package called snapper to manage the snapshots (backups). Alternatively the package timeshift gets mentioned a lot when discussing backup solutions.
Otherwise you did exactly what I have done to fix almost every issue I ever had. Downgrading the likely culprit and updating again a bit later.
I second btrfs with snapper. With snapper, you can set it up so that it automatically makes snapshots at a timed interval and/or when you run your package manager. You can restore any of your saved snapshots from the snapper app or even from GRUB.
It’s a bit hard to set up, but some distros come with it set up by default. You could install one if you don’t want to figure btrfs setup out and are open to OS hopping. OP, you mentioned you’re using arch, Garuda OS is an Arch based distro that comes with btrfs and the grub snapper configurations set up by default.
I used it for a year a year or so ago and changed for some reason. Recently did a fresh install and I am seriously unable to think why I left it.
It's insanely fast, performant, resource-friendly and much more community driven than other distros with the void-packages repository on GitHub. Oh, and it doesn't have systemd so my install boots in 3 seconds flat, compared to the 22 seconds for Fedora 38.
Fedora 30 - 36 were phenomenal releases and I mostly used them, recommended them elsewhere.
I had to start using the Spins because the default GNOME desktop is just becoming unusable. Stripping functionality to make it prettier, not fixing longstanding issues.
Then Fedora had that kerfuffle with the licensing issues with codecs, and I couldn't play a certain type of HEVC video that the vast majority of my video library is encoded in.
Then, more recently, I had issues with Python in their repos. That was the last straw. I'll definitely check it out again in a few years to see if they've fixed a lot of these problems, but I wouldn't recommend the distro in its current state.
The general community is probably going to catch any issues that pop up extremely quickly. Like my main machines are all on whitelist firewalls residing on external devices. If any software tries to make odd connections, the connections will get dropped and logged. I wouldn’t hesitate to report anything odd. I don’t run sketchy proprietary junk for the most part.
I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging, but I think that something important to remember is that computers are hard. I’ve spent my entire life studying computers and I’m still learning every day.
Most people grew up with Windows and learned how to use it over the years, but remember that it took years, and most of them still aren’t very good at it. Linux requires different knowledge than Windows, but it doesn’t inherently mean that it’s harder. If everyone grew up using Linux we wouldn’t hear about “how hard Linux is” but instead about “how hard Windows is”.
At least when something is broken in Linux, it probably has a cause (usually the user) and solution, and a way to debug what happened. When something breaks in Windows you’ve got about 3 things you can try before the solution is to reinstall.
As for solutions, I don’t know if there’s a certified pathway into Linux - I think installing something like Linux Mint and just using it like a computer would go a long way towards getting you comfortable with how Linux works without forcing you to study. Once you’re comfortable using the GUI, you can take a peek behind the scenes at your leisure - there is documentation everywhere for everything on Linux.
When Windows 3.1 came out I had a hard time understanding any of it and never left my cozy DOS CLI with its Norton Commander.
Granted I was still a child, but one might think that mouse-first and colorfulness would have driven my curiosity. Instead I switched when Windows 95 arrived.
When something breaks in Windows you’ve got about 3 things you can try before the solution is to reinstall.
From the point of view of a lifetime Windows guy, I have to disagree with this. Unless you have a malware problem (where it can be exceedingly difficult for the average user to know whether they've gotten everything out), almost all failures of Windows in the modern age are the result of hardware failures. If your Windows 7 or newer computer blue screens, it's very likely a bad piece of hardware, occasionally a bad driver. The OS itself is quite solid.
... there is documentation everywhere for everything on Linux.
In my experience and perspective, I've found the documentation for Linux things to be of varying quality and usually for an audience who already knows their way around Linux. Admittedly, I haven't had to go looking in quite a while, so maybe that landscape is different today than I am aware of - but when I was looking, I found myself quite frustrated more often than not.
Finally, with Windows, if you really have to, you can pay for support incidents from Microsoft. They're not cheap, but I've found their server and server application support to be reliable. Is there something like that available to a Linux user?
I don’t have a ton of experience with Windows lately, but from trying to troubleshoot family members’ PCs, it usually ends up being corrupted drivers or bricked bootloaders/failed updates.
As for documentation, the Arch wiki (and Gentoo wiki, Debian wiki, etc. etc.) is usually a good source of information for general topics, but there’s also decades of forums and stackexchange posts on various problems if you’re just using a search engine. Every program also has extensive official man pages on how to use them (example), and you can even use something like tldr to shorten the man pages into something usable right now (example). If you’re willing to read documentation, everything you use on Linux probably has a manual behind it.
With regards to paying for support, it’s not really my wheelhouse but to my understanding that’s what companies like Canonical, SUSE, and Red Hat offer.
| If your Windows 7 or newer computer blue screens, it's very likely a bad piece of hardware, occasionally a bad driver. The OS itself is quite solid.
Okay, really, though? Windows is solid and good because it doesn't kernel panic much? Who's getting kernel panics out of Linux without faulty hardware or doing something risky? I think you've equivocated a bit here: either we're comparing kernel to kernel or we're comparing userland to userland. You're comparing Windows itself to Linux userland or using some kernel even freakier than the weird patched-up stuff I like to play with.
I feel like discussion of this topic is plagued by double standards and shifting goalposts :-\ Apples to oranges comparisons, refusals to even consider things just because they're 'foreign,' blaming "Linux" for things that really aren't its fault (neither in the OS sense nor in the broader sense) ... including of course (sometimes) turning the discussion into an "us versus them" thing. Software on Linux has iffy documentation! ... But the same software exists on Windows, or the equivalent(s) is(/are) just as bad. Linux kernel documentation is scary or weird! ... But no one relevant is touching it anyway and wasn't touching Windows kernel anything either. The UI is different! Yeah, so's the new one on every version of Windows you get forced into. Casual Windowsers all hate it every time but somehow "Linux" is unusable because they won't learn a new UI unless Microsoft tells them to.
You can buy (a licence to, if MS likes you lots, borrow) a copy of Windows and apparently buy support for it too... yeah okay, but that's business, not a software issue. There are enterprise distros and software packages with all' that business-type support, unless they've all vanished? That's how that stuff works, no?
I'm not demanding anyone switch and distro hop over the course of months to find a distro they love but I'd really prefer to see some more fairness discussing the matter. "Linux" is never going to be "usable on desktop" if it's always just the enemy to be spurned and derided.
(Also, sorry this got so wordy. It's not meant as a diatribe, just I feel like there's a lot to say and I'm not saying much of it 🤷♀)
TLDR: It's unfair or outright dishonest to blame an apple for not being tart enough and hide that your actual standard is "is it an orange."
Windows auto-recovers from almost any issue the average user might encounter. It cannot be understated just how hard it is for an application or driver to break modern Windows. It goes much farther than just fixing a kernel panic. It will reset to a serviceable state for almost anything you can think of ( e.g. bad display settings, borked application install) and even in the worst situation will still give you some sort of GUI and try to walk you through the problem.
Linux sort of just gives up and lets you shoot yourself in the foot if you really ask it to. It's up to you to then figure out how to fix things and that usually involves diving into the terminal. But even ignoring that, a lot of Linux applications have a serious UI/UX problem. I cannot count how many applications just do things like throw a config file at you even for common tasks and expect you to read a doc page in order to figure it out. I have better things to do than read yet another wall of text just to do something simple like remapping key bindings (e.g. mpv). That would be an unthinkable thing to do to a Windows user.
Linux developers seem to want to develop software for other developers. Windows developers develop software for average people. The fragmentation of 1000s of Linux distros, each with their own quirks only make matters worse by further complicating where and how to get help.
I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging
The average person would fail on step 0 of Installing the OS. In fact 90% of the problem could be attributed to Linux distros not coming preinstalled on PCs sitting in big box stores.
All of Linux's success stories for the average user (Android, Steam Deck, Chrome book) have one thing in common. They are low cost, simple, purpose built for very specific tasks with a bunch of exclusive games/software that people want to use. We need to start looking at PCs almost like they are highly moddable game consoles. It should come with the expectation that most users don't want to leave the comfort of the walled garden.
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