turboSnail

I think it really depends on the type of refugee we’re talking about here.

If they’re interested in tinkering, the starting point doesn’t really matter that much. Just let the refugee know that distrohopping is allowed. If you hear that some new distro has an awesome feature, give it a go.

If we’re talking about a person who hates tinkering and tweaking, the first distro suddenly begins to matter a lot more. That’s the distro they will be stuck with for several years, so Mint is definitely a solid option. Actually, most distributions that are Debian or Ubuntu based should be fine.

Thanks for the explanation.
I’m only vaguely aware of the concept of an atomic distribution, so there’s a lot to learn. I guess it’s about time I sacrificed my spare laptop to silverblue.

When it comes to recommending a distribution to a newbie, I have mixed feelings about atomic distributions. If the newbie in question just wants to leave the OS alone and focus on gaming, Bazzite sounds like the best option.

On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

I think it’s pretty simple to understand if the system just pulls packages from the repos and downloads what needs to be updated. If you add flatpaks and appimages to the mix, it just adds another layer of confusion. Totally fine for your second distro though. After all, getting to experience new and interesting ways to do things is the joy of distrohopping.

And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake. Those newbies who want to know how these things work may find an atomic distro a bit overwhelming.

But do you really need to understand any of that to get started? Do you think it’s enough for most newbies to just install a few flatpaks to get the apps you need? Do you think they would need to involve rpm-ostree within the first year?

No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?

Care to elaborate?
I know many people who use Teams at work, and they aren’t complaining. Quite the opposite actually. Various announcements are no longer emails since they have been migrated to relevant Teams channels. This means that it’s way faster to scroll past announcements that are not particularly relevant to your work, and none of them clog up your inbox any more.

The only real problem is CPU and RAM usage, but as long as your IT department is reasonably funded, that’s not a problem either.

But I guess that’s still technically correct, the best kind of correct. Still sounds odd, but I guess it kinda works as long as you use the term because of historical reasons.

Regardless, now that Lemmy/Piefed has become such diverse platforms, it’s getting harder to nail it down into a single convenient term.

I think the defining feature of these platforms is the topic focused approach. On Mastodon, you care about the people who write whatever, while on Lemmy/Piefed, you care about a topic written by whoever.

Yeah… That works in the context where people actually share links. Various news communities definitely fit that description, but then there are several discussion communities where links aren’t the main point. Take ask lemmy or no stupid questions for example. Oh, and then there are also picture communities like superbowl.

Lumping all of them together with “link aggregator” platforms doesn’t fit very well. From a historical perspective that’s fine though. As far as I know, Reddit started as a link aggregator, and diversified later.

Phew. Picked my instance based on vibes alone, but it turned out good anyway. Didn’t even know about the speed ratings.