Alright, don’t take this diatribe personally, but it just set off a chain of thoughts for me I’m gonna post now because loudly hating on AI at all times is the morally correct thing. You don’t seem like a person looking to be convinced.

In a capitalist society our only real power is as consumers. I know even that’s not really terribly true these days as they largely dictate the markets at us but it’s all we’ve got. An overwhelmingly negative public sentiment does still erode value and makes it harder to support the illusion, we’ve seen that recently with the DLSS5 stuff. It also fortifies community opinion by creating a unifying front. It can slowly shame susceptible targets into changing their stance and help convince people who may be falling for it when they see their friends and respected individuals take a firm stance. Anyone who says armchair warriors can’t accomplish anything just wants you to shut up so you don’t accomplish anything. Ideally you do more, but what other options do we have against this currently?

I understand how AI works and what its legitimate intended use cases are (largely referring to the current crop of LLMs/GenAI here and not broader ML) and that’s exactly why I don’t use it. People who say that they have figured it out and that their specific use cases are legitimate are practically indistinguishable from those who have drunk the Kool aid. Are you one of those rare people I don’t even fully believe exist who has a valid use case or are you another mark who’s fallen prey to the lying machine that lies, was built off plagiarism, destroys the environment, and was purpose built to devalue labor? One of these things seems slightly more likely than the other.

Fuck AI.

I’m still not a Linux expert myself, but I’m gonna take a shot at answering this question as I understand it so maybe others can help correct me. I use Arch (btw) but the ideas should still apply,

You’ll want to use the Debian packages for anything foundational to your system. These packages are tested to work with the distro and can be considered a part of it, just ones you haven’t installed yet. This would be important for something like bluez bluetooth (or whatever Debian uses).

Aside from the space issues you mentioned, this is less important for heavy apps that sit on top of everything else, like a game. Especially if you’re on a slower moving distro like Debian this may be ideal for more updated versions.

Usually I go: distro repo (HIGH PREFERENCE), AUR (not really an option for you), Flatpak, AppImage, whatever other jank manual install is available (but only as a last resort if I really need the thing and there’s no other option, I like a tidy system). I find this offers the best stability and as someone who obsessively updates their system every day because they’re a bored tech nerd, I’ve had better stability on 3 years of Arch than I have with Windows (but that’s a low bar)

Mmm, this is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m certainly not knocking Nobara as a distro or people who prefer it, but taken from their FAQ,

1. Will there ever be other Desktop Environment versions? No. The ‘Official’ modified KDE release layout was designed for myself and my father out of personal preference.

5. I heard Nobara breaks SELinux, is this true? No. We have completely swapped SELinux in favor of AppArmor (this is what Ubuntu and OpenSUSE use).

6. Is Nobara compatible with SecureBoot? No. Nobara ships with a kernel that has been custom patched and is built and hosted on COPR.

7. Can I upgrade from Fedora to Nobara using the Nobara repositories? NO. This is a big large huge NO. The Nobara install ISOs have a ton of packages that get installed which are specific to Nobara, and not installed on Fedora on fresh install.

10. Just how modified is Nobara aside from what I can see? Heavily.

11. This project is quite new, is it going anywhere? Is there anything to say it won’t just up stop development? Is it something that is recommendable to daily drive? (I am quite technical, and can troubleshoot my issues). As long as I am alive and using linux this project will continue. It started because I needed something both myself and my father could easily use from clean install without time consuming troubleshooting or extra package and repo installation.

It’s been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006

These are exactly the kind of points that a casual, new user would stumble across and in attempting to troubleshoot things from a Fedora perspective could trip them up severely.

My point is that casual users are already averse to making the switch and they are likely going to do ONE install and it needs to be as vanilla and stable as possible. If they turn into Linux nerds who want to distro hop later, they’ll find their way, but we need to keep things absolutely stock and simple.

The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.

Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.

Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.

(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).

I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.