I think I should have qualified that with "beginners" are the ones we need to nudge
Distro Bashing - everyone needs a hobby.
- Thread starter dos2unix
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I don't like using the built-in moderation tools whenever they can be avoided. I will use them, but I prefer alternatives.
Except for spammers. I will ban the everliving snot out of them. Yesterday, it took a long time but I found a whole nest of spammers with a collection of traits that tied them all together - beyond all reasonable doubt. I nuked low-triple digits worth of spam accounts.
I despise spammers.
If I've gotta play the SEO game legitimately, so don't they.
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
I'm sure users who want to try out Kali are very eager to do so, so they'll either get help with it or turn to other site, thy won't listen to you no matter what you say.
Your chance of making them try another distro is less than 5%
Your chance of making them try another distro is less than 5%
they may be eager to try it out, but you can't just get a car and go drive it. You have to learn how to operate the car, then you have to learn how to operate the car on pubic roads with other people. You have to learn the rules next. So pointing out they want to learn Kali means they have to learn. This learning starts with other distros so they can know what to do.
Basically explain that the learning curve of Kali includes at least one other distro.
We are not discouraging them, we are trying to make sure they don't give up because they jumped into the deep end of the pool before they learned how to swim. So the idea is to convince them of that. Not say "No Kali for you" but instead say "you want Kali, we will teach you but here is where you start to learn it"
Terminal Velocity
Well-Known Member
I suggest Debian to new comers only if they mention it but they are not sure. Also I suggest it if they mention the word stability or reliability. I think it's a mistake to suggest everyone everything and whatever suits you because there are lots of things about a distribution that not show with the first glance and only appear down the road. No, not all distributions are good for every task, And if you want the jobs done use Debian. That is because I want to be useful to people and to my favorite distribution
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CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
Me too, if they don't tell what distro they want I don't recommend any particular.
If they mention Debian or stable system I suggest them that.
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It would good to have well crafted and pinned install instructions for each distro in "distribution specific" subforums.
Because there is a lot of questions about installing a distro but nobody is willing to write the whole bible on how to do it, and guiding someone step by step is PITA.
Brickwizard
Well-Known Member
I did a basic one, I didn't include for macs, & Chromebook's it would have made the guide too long and as we know most newbies don't like reading past the first line, [we do get the odd few who do read most of the pegged post]
How Do I Install Linux (A General Guide) • Linux Tips
There are also derivatives and forks that may not use the same installation process. So, it would be quite an undertaking.
You can use a search engine of 'how to install * Linux' and find detailed articles with pictures and videos that explain it step-by-step. I suppose we could duplicate the work and put it here, but that's a lot of work to do well. My suggestion would be to install in VirtualBox (or some other VM software) and take screenshots of each step, adding arrows and notation where needed.
Agreed.
If you don't like one Linux distro try another and another until you find a Linux distro that fits your usage needs.
That's a good question with no good answer imo.
I see a lot of OS and Linux disto bashing on the Linux forums including this Linux forum.
Best I can figure it gives those who bash something to do.
Some folks just ain't happy unless they are bashing something.
We've all been guilty of bashing at one time or another myself included.
Whatever makes one happy power to them.
Good day or evening to all depending on where on the planet ya call home.
Heh.
Me, I must be the complete opposite of most users.
I've run "Puppy" for more than a decade now. I won't say I don't look at anything else - I will, on occasion, and have a couple of OSs that have been on my 'faves' list for a long time.....and accordingly, I keep an install of them to hand - but by & large, I always return to the "sanity" of 'the kennels'.
For me, 'Puppy' literally IS the "mutt's n*ts". She does everything I could possibly want from an OS. I know all her foibles, all about the hacks & workarounds.....I am very, VERY comfortable with her.
So; would I recommend her to anyone else, because I happen to like her so much? Um.....NO. Not exactly...
???????
O-kay. Let me qualify this a wee bit further...
It's not an 'elitist' thing at all. It's not me looking down my nose at others, saying 'This is beyond you'. It's not some exclusive 'members-only' club. Uh-uh. Far from it. I won't recommend our Pup to newcomers for one primary reason.....Linux 'know-how'. (Maybe that would be better defined as 'distro' know-how.)
Most 'mainstream' distros tend to do a lot of stuff in very much the same way. The package management systems, for one thing. The DEs, for another. We humans are very much creatures of habit. You learn how to do stuff in one mainstream distro, you can - with perhaps some slight 're-learning' - find your way around most of the others, with minimal effort.
If you cut your teeth on one mainstream distro, you can happily distro-hop for years, and not really come to any kind of major grief. IF, however, you cut your teeth on Puppy, and THEN look to move to a mainstream distro, you will have to re-learn how to do an awful lot of stuff all over again......because so much of how Puppy operates is just sufficiently different that even veteran Linux users will scratch their heads and mutter to themselves, "Huh?? WTF is going on? Why won't this... or that...work the way I expect it to?"
'Puppy' was always intended to keep older hardware, blessed with older & fewer resources, functional & useful for as long as possible. And due to the community's principle of 'do-ocracy' (yup; it actually IS a word, with a well-defined though perhaps somewhat 'vague' meaning):-
Definition of 'do-ocracy'
....much of Puppy's infrastructure, software, methodology, etc, is either "home-brewed" OR little-known, featherweight stuff. Which in turn means it's not the same as what mainstream users have become used to using.
If veterans are having issues, what's it going to be like for noobs? Maybe it would be easier for them....I couldn't say. All I know is that if I hadn't had several months running 'mainstream' - in my case, it was Ubuntu - I would have had a hell of a job figuring Puppy out at all.
I don't think it's fair to wish that unnecessary "re-learning curve" onto anyone. I genuinely believe that it's far easier - for everyone - if the potential Puppy user has at least a few months of 'mainstream' experience under their belts to begin with, because at least the principles are the same, even if the execution isn't.
Our Pup is very much a 'hobbyist' distro. Designed to be modular, and suitable for anybody who's so inclined to pull to bits and re-build in whatever way suits their fancy. She's meant to be used.....used hard, in fact, by folks who love titivating & messing around purely for the sake of it, although it also means you CAN end up with a highly unique OS that does exactly what you want, in whatever way that you want it to do so.
Most people are happy if they can install something, it'll fire-up without hassle, and.....it just 'works', OOTB. And there's nowt wrong with that, either.
IF anybody expresses a genuine interest in how Puppy does things, and how she operates in general, then of course I will happily discuss it with them to the nth degree. But this is why I don't get involved with much of the day-to-day discussion here on the forum.....because I don't know enough of what's being discussed in sufficient detail to be able to help. I've become "narrowly specialized" on one specific family of lightweight distros; maybe that's a bad thing. I don't know. You form your own opinion of that.
I'll say just one thing. Despite cutting ties with Puppy a decade ago, handing over the reins to the community and branching out to concentrate on his own, often highly-experimental stuff, our former "Puppymaster" - the inimitable Barry Kauler - will always have MY everlasting gratitude.
In spades.
(I see absolutely zero point in 'distro-bashing'. It achieves nothing, and only serves to make the 'basher' - as opposed to the poor sod on the receiving end - look as small-minded as they truly are.)
Mike.
Me, I must be the complete opposite of most users.
I've run "Puppy" for more than a decade now. I won't say I don't look at anything else - I will, on occasion, and have a couple of OSs that have been on my 'faves' list for a long time.....and accordingly, I keep an install of them to hand - but by & large, I always return to the "sanity" of 'the kennels'.
For me, 'Puppy' literally IS the "mutt's n*ts". She does everything I could possibly want from an OS. I know all her foibles, all about the hacks & workarounds.....I am very, VERY comfortable with her.
So; would I recommend her to anyone else, because I happen to like her so much? Um.....NO. Not exactly...
???????
O-kay. Let me qualify this a wee bit further...
It's not an 'elitist' thing at all. It's not me looking down my nose at others, saying 'This is beyond you'. It's not some exclusive 'members-only' club. Uh-uh. Far from it. I won't recommend our Pup to newcomers for one primary reason.....Linux 'know-how'. (Maybe that would be better defined as 'distro' know-how.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Most 'mainstream' distros tend to do a lot of stuff in very much the same way. The package management systems, for one thing. The DEs, for another. We humans are very much creatures of habit. You learn how to do stuff in one mainstream distro, you can - with perhaps some slight 're-learning' - find your way around most of the others, with minimal effort.
If you cut your teeth on one mainstream distro, you can happily distro-hop for years, and not really come to any kind of major grief. IF, however, you cut your teeth on Puppy, and THEN look to move to a mainstream distro, you will have to re-learn how to do an awful lot of stuff all over again......because so much of how Puppy operates is just sufficiently different that even veteran Linux users will scratch their heads and mutter to themselves, "Huh?? WTF is going on? Why won't this... or that...work the way I expect it to?"
'Puppy' was always intended to keep older hardware, blessed with older & fewer resources, functional & useful for as long as possible. And due to the community's principle of 'do-ocracy' (yup; it actually IS a word, with a well-defined though perhaps somewhat 'vague' meaning):-
Definition of 'do-ocracy'
....much of Puppy's infrastructure, software, methodology, etc, is either "home-brewed" OR little-known, featherweight stuff. Which in turn means it's not the same as what mainstream users have become used to using.
If veterans are having issues, what's it going to be like for noobs? Maybe it would be easier for them....I couldn't say. All I know is that if I hadn't had several months running 'mainstream' - in my case, it was Ubuntu - I would have had a hell of a job figuring Puppy out at all.
I don't think it's fair to wish that unnecessary "re-learning curve" onto anyone. I genuinely believe that it's far easier - for everyone - if the potential Puppy user has at least a few months of 'mainstream' experience under their belts to begin with, because at least the principles are the same, even if the execution isn't.
Our Pup is very much a 'hobbyist' distro. Designed to be modular, and suitable for anybody who's so inclined to pull to bits and re-build in whatever way suits their fancy. She's meant to be used.....used hard, in fact, by folks who love titivating & messing around purely for the sake of it, although it also means you CAN end up with a highly unique OS that does exactly what you want, in whatever way that you want it to do so.
Most people are happy if they can install something, it'll fire-up without hassle, and.....it just 'works', OOTB. And there's nowt wrong with that, either.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IF anybody expresses a genuine interest in how Puppy does things, and how she operates in general, then of course I will happily discuss it with them to the nth degree. But this is why I don't get involved with much of the day-to-day discussion here on the forum.....because I don't know enough of what's being discussed in sufficient detail to be able to help. I've become "narrowly specialized" on one specific family of lightweight distros; maybe that's a bad thing. I don't know. You form your own opinion of that.
I'll say just one thing. Despite cutting ties with Puppy a decade ago, handing over the reins to the community and branching out to concentrate on his own, often highly-experimental stuff, our former "Puppymaster" - the inimitable Barry Kauler - will always have MY everlasting gratitude.
In spades.
(I see absolutely zero point in 'distro-bashing'. It achieves nothing, and only serves to make the 'basher' - as opposed to the poor sod on the receiving end - look as small-minded as they truly are.)
Mike.
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This! This is exactly me and Tiny Core. I have another distro floating around somewhere as a curiosity but I pretty much never use it.
When someone asks something like "Best Lightweight Linux Distro & Optimization Tips for an EeePC 1005HA" and says "I’m specifically looking for a distro that is:
• Lightweight and smooth, working well with only 1GB of RAM.
• 32-bit compatible, since the Atom N280 doesn’t support 64-bit.
• Usable with a responsive desktop, not too minimalist or requiring too much manual setup.
"
I might mention Tiny Core, but I usually get a feel for my victim and decide that they're either not experienced enough in Linux in general, or they're not willing to put in the effort to get the most out of it. I used the recent post by elitost as an example message but I do not mean to disparage him in any way ( @elitost let me know if interested in Tiny Core - I'll be glad to help ).
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And, for the record, I don't bash other distros - I just "sh" them.
And for those that go on and on about Ubuntu, and Mint and Arch etc etc... I just "shhh" them but that's different.
If the user is asking for distro recommendations, it's a different issue and you can absolutely suggest a distro that fits their requirements.
I may not entirely agree with the premise, but man, you do make a good case. Enough so that I actually had to do a quick self-audit. It's really quite interesting of a take because I feel much the same about distros labelled as "hard" or "not for noobs" (I'm talking general desktop distros, not Kali et al.). If someone wants to lose their Linux virginity to Arch, I'll help 'em as best I can. I think my desposition here on there being nothing wrong with anything "difficult" as a first distro is because of my Linux journey being very different than most people's (TL;DR it started with Tiny Core -- which I never found complicated or hard)...
(More on my journey for optional context)
Anyway, I have to agree with @dos2unix about Kali: The issue isn't they want to learn to use it, the issue is why they want to. They think using it will make them some sort of dangerous hacker. There's even disinformation that it's "the most secure OS" and alike. So the reason I usually point people away from Kali is because I think they only want to be hackers (like many folk on this forum claim to be, lol -- though the term "hacker" has been appropriated, it originally referred to people who enjoy tinkering). And it does get tiresome because Kali is not a desktop distro as such. It's application-specific. So I usually suggest people start with Debian or LMDE, then start using some of the Kali tools, then graduate. You can't use Kali effectively without a) a basic IT knowledge of at minimum N+ level, and b) sufficient Linux knowledge.
All in all, if I advise someone against a certain distro, it is because I feel that distro does not align with them, their goals, their personality, or a combo. Example, "<title>Kali won't boot</title><body>i burned kali to live cd but it doesnt boot. i tried alot of things but its not working</body>". Right, I know this is a "give me teh codez" type, so it's not worth wasting time on them because they want spoonfeeding so they can then show off their elite linux skillz to their friends. Nope, here, use LM, Cinnamon looks quite like Win10, get used to Linux, then follow your dream to hack the CIA.
Sure, I could say nothing... and these days I don't post anything when I see any bad question (unless I can see OP is literally just in over their head). I just don't bother to comment or make "crystal ball" gags. You get out what you put in when asking for help. It's called a search engine (some call it Google). Use it.
Ya know I only started seeking support for Linux after I learned to use it to the point it was my daily. That way I actually understood the help given. In my fledgling days of learning, a fair amount was docs, way more was intuition and experimentation, and the biggest portion was the amount of effort it took to type <insert problem/question> into a search engine, press Enter and find answers (a lot of them here and on LinuxQuestions, some of them on SuperUser).
If someone only wants to run Linux (be it Fedora, Kali, Ubuntu, or whatever) to be an edgelord-look-at-me-I-use-Linux, then, at the risk of ruffling feathers, they are not fit to be a Linux user and should bugger off back to Windows! That said, everyone deserves a chance and many people may start off with that mindset only to regret it later when they realise how much they enjoy Linux. So I suggest they use an appropriate distro. I consider any distro that fits the bill of "desktop" to be a good starting point, that includes Arch or Gentoo or something equally dubbed "un-user-friendly".
That's human nature.
The longer I live, the less I fret about these stuffs. It won't help, won't lead anywhere except making you sleepless at night.
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Condobloke
Well-Known Member
Amen....you and me both
