Arch is a bad distro for newbies. Go find an ISO for Kubuntu and install that. The install wizard is idiot-proof. I use KDE-based distros like Kubuntu even though I’m a fairly advanced user so don’t view it as some kind of failure. There’s no virtue in using more complicated stuff. Get comfortable with the easier distros first.
I sometimes play around with Helix and I almost always have a good time, but there are too many vim features that I have integrated in my workflow that there isn’t any good equivalent to in Helix. I use ex commands, the quickfix list, snippets, the fugitive plugin and just little custom commands and mappings that I’ve accumulated. I don’t see myself switching to any editor full time that doesn’t have a replacement for most of these features, but Helix is very nice and fun to use occasionally.
I’ve been in your shoes a few months ago. I tried a few distros in VMs and ended up using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It comes with different GUIs and I decided for KDE. As a beginner TW helped me with the built in snapshots mechanism. So before I did anything, I took a snapshot, did it, and if I fucked up, I could easily rollback and try again. Since TW is a rolling release, I now make a snapshot before and after the system update So I always have some stable Rollback snapshots. Gives me so much safety to fiddle around and learn more about Linux. Been loving it so far.
Make heavy use of ChatGPT. I’ve been chatting about Linux with it for months now.
All colours are and should be under the full control of the user, as it always has been so. So called “accent colours” removed critical functionality from Windows as well as breaking the UI since windows 8.
As a software tester of 10 years and a CS Degree holder, I certainly would have never passed software that didn’t meet these usability tests.
I’m colourblind. I must have full and unhindered colour modification options, the GUI will look the way I decide based on what I want and how my eyes perceive it. This especially means I must have full control over titlebar colours and any other colours that used to differ based on window focus.
At work in Win 10 I have chosen an “accent colour” which seems to me a massive limitation, having had used superior GUI’s since Win 3.1 where the user is able to chose and adjust anything from the colour of title bars when focused or unfocused to the font used on numerous UI elements and widgets.
The problem is simple. Windows 10 grants (I say that in a sarcastic way) the user have the option to chose a so called “accent colour”. This however fails to do two things. Firstly it forces the design choices of the development team onto every user, something that is clearly wrong for Linux as history shows it was a plus over windows. Secondly, the accent colour fails to address several UI modal changes, completely obliterating them yet the modal elements remain part of the UI!!!
How in windows 10 can I tell if a window has focus or not? In Win 3.1 to 7 and anything running on Linux it was easy: the title bar colour was different. But since Win 8 that was dropped, windows still have focus and modal dialogs but you, the user, can not determine which has what and when.
Now, like I said I’m colour blind which means maybe there is a difference but I can’t see it. So what do I do? Well I randomly start typing commands into the wrong powershell window, or I want to control the browser using the keyboard only to discover that Outlook has focus and has started doing things in response to me banging keys. I have two monitors at work and focus moves between them and windows gives me no indication what has focus at all. Nothing I can see, out of the corner of my eye that is.
Thing is there is just one difference, the focused window might have a bold titlebar text or not. Note I bolded that. But I can’t see this difference without pixel peeping.
Every day I have to put up with this in the windows world and it annoys the hell out of me because the essential functionality was always there and has been removed because someone tossed a coin*. Maybe GNOME won’t fall into the trap of preventing full customisation of the UI, I hope so, user accessibility needs require it. I moved away from GNOME when they moved away from the desktop metaphor as I thought the alternative was terrible, and it still is, so this won’t affect me but it will affect loads of new colourblind users from the start.
The user has the last say and should be able to override anything.
HCI (Human Computer Interaction) rules exist for a good reason, stop chucking them away and make them options if needed.
And finally, take it from an actual colourblind computer users and electronics geek. Colour blindness accessibility filters DO NOT WORK. They simply don’t because everyone has a different kind/degree/combination of colour blindness. Normal visioned people are easy to demonstrate to as all we have to do is apply such a filter in reverse and they are like “Whoa what the hell” yet they fail to see (pun intended) that it’s a simulation that barely represents our individual colour ranges. Windows 10 has a colourblind mode, does nothing. Android has one, which has me try and sort colours to determine my specific adjustments, works better but still barely is used by myself.
The only fix is to give the user full control over all colours because then they, they can adjust the UI for the way they see the universe.
Here is an example from the linked blog. See this GUI. Which window has focus? The one on top? Well if GNOME prevents windows from always remaining above others regardless of focus, yes that would be the case. But if GNOME does allow focus to windows beneath others, well, which has focus? I cant tell.
I had intended on uploading images but that seems to not be working with this post/lemmy instance at the moment. Basically if you look at the blog there are examples. First of all the “pink” example, well that shades of grey to my eyes as pink rarely is a colour I can notice, most pinks are grey. Further down are examples of a stop clock application. Looking at the image I see most of the clocks digits are disabled, thats what grey means, disabled elements. However it turns out that they may be pink? Only the seconds are enabled, this is highly confusing as why would anyone be allowed to think a clock has digits disabled? It makes no sense and has me figure out the answer, which is bad UI design from the start. All the digits should be the same colour. It’s basic HCI rules there.
Further down you see the screenshots of the entire desktop with a window above another. In none of those examples can I tell which has focus. I can not assume its the one on top, plenty of UI’s have “keep on top” functionality, if I’m coming from something else why would I assume GNOME to be different?
Accent colours are bad. They force users to use static themes and UI choices made by other people, that is bad UI design, really bad. Windows 10 is lambasted for it often. If you are going to do it, do it right. The “accent” feature should be part of a simple customisation mode, but it all gets overridden by the advanced tickbox.
Don’t use regular Arch if you’re struggling. There are some arch-based distros that are more user friendly, though. Like EndeavourOS or ArchMan. Manjaro can be good too but there are legitimate problems with how the project is run.
I was having graphics driver problems in Ubuntu-based distros until I tried Linux Mint.
If you get crashes right before or after login, it’s often a (Nvidia) graphics issue. To get around this, you could use nomodeset in the Grub menu to get a successful first boot where you can then install the proprietary drivers.
Also, you may want to set the Desktop Environment to Xorg or X11 (same thing) if Wayland is causing you problems. It’s older, but in some cases more efficient and less experimental. Check out the section: Switching desktop environments using a graphical user interface. It should look similar to the pictures. And notice that the “gear” icon may not appear until you select a user or start typing your password.
If your problem is different than this, open a support ticket in the discord or forums of the distro you’re using. Linux Mint has a great system for this on Discord.
I dont understand how redhat is going to police this policy of “we’ll keep source code open to paying customers, but reserve the right to cancel a customer that shares said source”.
Toss in GUID’s or randomly place identity files to anyone that downloads the RHEL source hoping they get accidentally published as an identifying attribute if someone does decide to publish it elsewhere.
And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out…
They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it’s based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.
Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can’t even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can’t exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.
I don’t think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren’t small, so that’ll cost.
The companies I’ve helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.
It’s possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it’s many
I don’t know, I’ve worked in Debian/Ubuntu companies mostly. Last two had thousands of servers and both had an apt-mirror custom repo including the deb-src ones. Otherwise we just get ourselves banned from the official mirrors when thousands of VMs pull updates from the same NAT IP.
Not sure how that works exactly on the RHEL side, maybe it’s not nearly as easy or common to do that.
This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
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v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
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v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.
It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.
I kinda like Helix, I just don’t really know what’s the point of it. Some of the Kakoune bindings are marginally better than the vim default but any efficency I might get with it I instantly lose when trying to re-learn things or getting confused when I hop on a vim terminal on an other machine.
Kind of the same with the editor, it’s like a ‘batteries included vim’ but I can just get that with a really light vim config and not mess up my workflow.
I guess it’s might be cool if you are getting into it as your first modal editor but even then, if you want to use other stuff or need to use some different tools getting a vim extension will probably be easier than getting a Kakoune one.
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