• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah unfortunately this is a real issue. I also think it’s an issue that experienced users don’t really want to help newbies, especially those who can’t or won’t do research by themselves. Ideally experienced users would be more helpful, but at the same time that isn’t their job. There are many who learned Linux more or less on their own so it’s understandable they don’t want to help given they didn’t use any help when it was their turn. I think now that the community is growing this might start to change a bit, as the newcomers are more likely to have had help and be willing to help others.

    I sometimes try to advocate for using Linux, and I don’t mind giving friends advice from time to time. That being said I don’t want to be stuck answering stupid questions all the time that could have been solved with a google search or a YouTube video. I have my own stuff to worry about both technical and otherwise.

    That’s why I think teaching new users how to access resources like man pages, gnu info pages, google, and so on is the correct approach to take. It is empowering having the skills to work through your own issues. That being said I also think it’s important for experienced people to give advice on more complex questions.


  • I don’t think this is strictly true. They do tweak parts of the kernel such as the CPU scheduler to deal with new CPU designs that come out which have special scheduling requirements. That’s actually happened quite a bit recently with AMD and Intel both offering CPUs with asymmetric processors with big and little cores, different clock speeds, different cache, sometimes even different instructions on different cores. They also added ReFS not long ago, which may have required some kernel work.

    I can understand though if they have few experienced people and way more junior devs. It would probably explain a lot to be honest. A lot of Microsoft stuff is bloated and/or unreliable.




  • Yeah exactly. Chances are it would have worked provided they installed CUPS - which isn’t hard or slow on arch after all it’s not Gentoo. But if it didn’t at least you have defused expectations while showing you are still willing to try. Something like: I don’t have it setup on this laptop but I will try and get it working quickly, but no promises.




  • Also, you say it’s more reliable but you can get bugs in anything. Version x.y.z of the kernel can have bugs whether it’s distributed as part of an immutable core or as a package.

    The whole point is you can roll back if something breaks.

    It starts getting blurry when you get to things like systemd and over-reaching when it gets to desktop functionality.

    Systemd is a core part of the system as init always has been.

    Honestly though I don’t think you actually understand the difference between declarative and immutable distros. Unlike what some people think they aren’t actually the same thing. It would be nice if people stopped limping them together.










  • That’s not something I ever associated with microkernels to be honest. That’s just clustering.

    I was more interested in having minimal kernels with a bunch of processes handling low level stuff like file systems that could be restarted if they died. The other cool thing was virtualized kernels.