I see! Sounds fun. Maybe I’ll switch to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Just maybe.

What’s your machine?

I see. Yea, someone I know has used Tumbleweed before and it seems fine. Stable and solid. Just out of curiosity, what Steam games do you play? Do you use Proton?

I’ve only meddled with openSUSE a little bit but I suspect it’s due to several reasons. Firstly, perhaps the lack of marketing. You hear news about Ubuntu and Fedora and NixOS and stuff, but never really about openSUSE, I think? Maybe they do promotions but I don’t know about them that much. As you said, they do a lot of stuff but in the background. Perhaps they’re really more of a technical distribution, for sysadmins and some users?

What makes you enjoy Void?

I see, that’s what Nix is! Interesting. Perhaps someday it can change and improve until it becomes a seriously viable distro for most people. It’ll be a sight to see.

Hey thanks man, I appreciate it! Thanks for this conversation too! Hopefully we can have more conversations like this in the future. 😄

I just knew it. D’oh! I feel silly now.

This is the final form of the Linux user. Returning to a popular stable distro.

I’m sorry though since this meme kind of makes fun of Void / Arch / Gentoo / Slackware users. I promise you it’s just a joke though. 😆

Fedora go brrr indeed. Fedora go brrr.

Right! Should have put Mint.

I have a good feeling I’ll be switching again to try that one out!

Ah, the eternal distro hopping. I can relate. Frankly, I do think that Vanilla OS and even something like NixOS are genuinely exciting development in the world of Linux distributions. I’m unfamiliar with Fedora Kinoite, but skimming thorough its page, it looks really good! In general, I do like this side of things where Linux distributions tend to focus on being “universal” and “reliable”, even if it means fundamentally pushing forward and away from the traditional this-distro-does-this-uniquely-and-manage-packages-like-this thing. I’m not super well versed in Vanilla OS but I did watch The Linux Experiment’s video on it. I believe that it is immutable and installing packages through GNOME software defaults to the Flatpak format. Another thing is that you can create/launch containerised systems inside your OS, perhaps for developers or tinkerers who want to mess with different OSes.

NixOS on the other hand, well I think it’s a package manager as well as a distro (?), and it basically builds packages in containers or in isolation of some sort. I do like this philosophy of containerising things to manage them by themselves individually (I think? sorta like Flatpak?), and NixOS also makes it immediately reproducible by its declarative system management. I think this sort of development is really good since it is a battle against the naturally occurring fragmentation in the Linux environment. Perhaps, there will be less “apt snap pacman yay zypper dnf yum emerge etc”, since the method of having unique repos for each distro can be a bit annoying and time-consuming for the overall Linux and open-source ecosystem, though I think it’s okay for the most part. Making the fundamental design and maintenance of the systems and packages modular is really great, since we’ll have better hardware and software in the future. It is pretty exciting, for me at least.

Well I think you’re selling yourself short here

Haha I’m flattered, thank you! I promise you I absolutely suck at all in these things, I just have some really minor interest in *-nix stuff. I’m not in the tech field (at least not right now), I’m just a postgraduate student studying solar cells. I used MX Linux for about a year during my final year of bachelor’s degree, and right now I’m toying around with Arch. I’m that new kid interested in Linux, you know? I think in general I’m more interested in the free / open-source software (FOSS) world. Throughout several years, I played around with Ubuntu/Lubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, even tried FreeBSD, and experimented just a tad bit with Alpine. Read about UNIX, GNU, Linux, FOSS stuff, and then OS, software, programming, web, technology stuff. Then I just have my own setup using almost entirely FOSS for personal use (mostly browsing, writing, learning programming, and some light retro gaming for leisure), and also for academic work (LaTeX, Zotero, Taguette, just a little bit of Python). I’m also using Vim. Again, I’m that excited kid, ya know? Anyway, I’m just a science student, but only now getting quite interested in Linux, computers and software in general. No experience in the tech field at all. Thank you though!

He represents the meme well in the sense that these memes are all made by people who tried to climb up the bell curve but fell back down to the start, and think that’s the same as reaching the end.

That’s true, that could be a trap! I mean I’m currently toying around in Arch and so far there’s been no problems at all, but I’m just a casual user and I’d say that I fall left-side to the curve. I’m one of those in the “OS is a bootloader to the browser and maybe other applications” camp. I do feel though that it’s possible that some people may not want to think about maintaining Arch (Arch is just an example obviously), and would rather turn off their brain when it comes to system maintenance and use something like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint, which is the point of the meme. He said that it’s not worth his time figuring it out, not that he couldn’t figure it out, if that’s worth any distinction.

Another example I can think of is using Vim when you could just use Nano or any generic text editor. I mean I use Vim as well (for pretty much everything), but in the end some people may not want to spend time getting decent at Vim because they don’t feel it’s worth their time, not because they inherently can’t. If he spent some time, he may be able to do it. I’m sure most Linux users can. But it’s just the time and energy that you must expend to get there, and not everybody feels it’s worth it, even technically proficient Linux users.

A more general abstraction of this bell curve principle is sorta like managing depression; the left-side of the curve will say something like exercise, socialising, eating healthy foods, and having life purpose. The middle might say that we need SSRIs, multiple therapy sessions, mindfulness exercises, daily journaling, compassion training etc. But, the right-side of the curve might again say exercise, socialising, eating healthy foods, and having life purpose. A realisation that something is not worth your time is not inherently indicative of the inability to do said something, though I get your point. It’s all good though!

Ah I see! So you were/are both, that’s why you can understand both perspectives. I see, you’re your instance’s host! Nah, thank you for sharing! I’m quite new to the free/open-source software and Linux world, and this meme sort of sums up my feelings about the different Linux distributions. I guess I’m still in that infatuation phase where I think of distros as cool and looking at new cool stuff and projects. I’m not a technical person, so this is a total noob’s perspective.

Excellent comment, sir/maam!

I first like to clarify that I’m a filthy casual with only the most cursory knowledge of computer science. Now, I used to be in the GNU/Linux camp but now I’m rethinking it. Don’t get me wrong, I still deeply appreciate the GNU Project and FSF, but in contemplating it, the only sense I have right now is that the GNU Project was largely responsible for the whole free/libre software movement, and almost all major Linux distributions necessarily use GNU software for its system, especially the coreutils. So, it is not necessarily technically correct to say GNU/Linux, but rather GNU/Linux as the spirit of its free / open-source software roots. So really when I think about it, using the term “GNU/Linux” is an homage, a form of “respect”, rather than a technically accurate term.

When discussing any kind of Linux systems, you have the Linux kernel that use some or lots of GNU code, or no GNU code at all (Alpine comes to mind). Technically speaking though, whenever you use something like Debian or Arch or Fedora, fundamentally it is the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, distributed with other tools userspace programs, hence Linux distributions. It is a bundle of the Linux kernel with everything else there shipped with it.

If I were to use an operating system entirely made by the GNU Project, as in GNU with Hurd, then I would call it the GNU OS (or whatever they hypothetically name it), sort of like BSD. If people were to take that GNU OS, ship it with their own modifications and packages, then we can call it a GNU distribution, obviously. But calling the current Linux distributions like Linux or Fedora or SUSE to be GNU/Linux seems “respectful but inaccurate” at best and “misleading or even wrong” at worst, since if we think of contribution, the common argument of calling it GNU/Xorg/KDE/Pipewire/Linux or some other variant of that argument also comes to mind. Why should we prefer adding GNU or Xorg or KDE or GNOME to its name, if it’s just part of the distribution of Linux? The only reason I can think of as mentioned before is the historical element; in that, the GNU Project aimed to create a whole operating system for people to use, and they made the GPL, GCC, glibc, coreutils etc, so it’s “in the spirit of the history of free and open-source software” to call it so.

Fundamentally though, if we were to be technically accurate, we’d probably call it Linux. A Linux distribution is the Linux kernel distributed with other utilities and programs. Am I getting this right?

P.S. I have just come to know that your comment is a common response against the GNU/Linux naming comment. I feel silly now, but I’ve written this long contemplation. Oh well.

I would just like to interject…

That makes sense about the magic numbers! Though I suspect that that isn’t the case for pacman’s commands. This might be totally false but Arch is designed with simplicity and elegance in mind, and so short single letter commands to manage your entire system is preferred.

Just out of curiosity, are you a developer or sysadmin?

That’s persuasive! I’ll stick with GNOME/KDE then. 😂

This is the Arch way, I feel. Timeshift though, if I’m not mistaken, is a system restore tool, which seems pretty useful though I’ve never used it myself.

RPM Fusion is for non-official repos and proprietary media codecs, I believe? Not sure since I only touched Fedora for alittle bit.