I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.

mythical “average casual user”

Mythical? You realize people like this exist, right? This is why programs like this exist. Take Audacity for example, it was made with non-professional audio people in mind. Just people who have odds and ends to do with audio. It’s simple enough that someone with no prior knowledge can start poking around and figuring things out, and it’s advanced enough that it can get the job done for most people who need to work with audio files.

I’m not saying that GIMP needs to prioritize the first time user experience. If making the UI/UX more approachable for new users would necessarily make it worse for established users, then it may be a decent tradeoff. Denying the existence of people who just need to edit an image here and there is absurd though.

Hopefully someone more technical can pitch it, but it did feel very easy to set up and use. The utilities that it comes with just feel very well designed and thought out. If Debian was gone tomorrow, I’d probably try openSUSE again.

That’s a good point. I think Canonical offers some services where they will actively support your system, so it makes economic sense for them to make choices that limit transparency a bit for stability and predictability.

I think the dislike comes from the fact that Ubuntu was and still is many people’s intro to Debian based OSes, and it’s just not as user-centric as it used to be. Thankfully alternatives like Mint exist to bring it back a little bit for people who care.

I remember in college we had access to a Unix box via these computers that remoted into it. I don’t know the technical details, but I was able to log in with my account and it was presented as a GUI on my end. We used No Machine as the client if that’s relevant. I wonder how something like that can be set up.

They could call it SIMP, for specialized image manipulation program.

Well the comparison I’d draw is not even needing to worry about that kind of thing on Windows. I went from getting about 200 to 300 Mbps on Windows without doing anything besides connecting to a network to getting 10 to 30 Mbps on Pop!_OS and Linux Mint (Before fixing this issue.)

The strength of Windows is not easy access to more settings (especially after they split the setting between the new settings app and the old control panel), it’s not needing to access most of them in the first place. That will vary between users and use cases of course. Some people moved to Linux well before the enshittificafion of Windows got really bad because it suits their needs better.

No maintainers yet. Any volunteers?

I would look up your games on protondb. Generally it is correct regarding how much work it takes to get games running. Between changing a few settings in Steam and the Heroic games launcher, you should be able to get most games running fine. I haven’t been able to play one (HROT) without some major FPS issues despite all my tinkering, but that’s been the only exception so far.

I did out of curiosity once. It worked out of a VM on my desktop, but I couldn’t get it working on my laptop. I think it didn’t have drivers for that Wi-Fi chip, but I can’t say for sure. It makes you appreciate how refined Linux distros have become.

I don’t know if I agree with entirely. A good UI lets you configure your system without knowing much about it. E.g. if you want to change Ubuntu’s Wi-Fi power save setting you edit a hidden text file (I don’t remember where it is off of the top of my head.) I didn’t even know that this file existed without a helpful AskUbuntu thread and that editing it would greatly speed up my connection. If a UI option existed, I would probably have found it while poking around the network settings screen.

That’s what a good UI does: it lets you mess with your system without need for a help forum or leafing through documentation. You can look at where settings are supposed to be, find what you’re looking for, and even explore new settings that you don’t know about.

Is the grub in trouble?

I wonder if you could make it sass you every so often to complete the effect.

Fucking shutdown

Chill my man. I’m on it.