That’s really not the case, there’s no proprietary parts to inject this into, and pop is one of the most heavily watched distros for a reason.

The minimal things they add to their particular distro are essentially just theming, and it’d be really obvious if they injected something malicious into it.

It would also NOT be too late because they’re a stable distro and have regular releases, it’d have to be a completely last minute unexpected change for that to be the case.

It really isn’t, though

Really? Being sure that your system is essentially unbreakable isn’t valuable to beginners? I can’t see how. It has massively helped the beginners I have given it to feel safe in tinkering with their system.

It was important to me, one day my arch just decided to not boot anymore, so, i switched to nixos.

Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10

I explained in my comment why cinnamon is a terrible choice for beginners, if you had read it you’d know, why even bother replying to a comment you won’t read with such a lazy response?

“Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.”

There’s so many reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:

1. Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
2. Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
3. Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.

and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.

I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv… it’s much more common than you think.

In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

I don’t agree that he’s a nazi but he did some pretty heinous things, like tricking these people into writing this horrible sign:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14605060/pewdiepie-disney-deal-lost-nazi-anti-semitic-imagery

and he did a hard-r on stream.

I don’t think this qualifies for being a nazi (he doesn’t advocate for an authoritarian dictatorship or a protectionist economy, nor does he want to scapegoat a group for all of his countries problems), but it is awful, racist, and disgusting.

But I don’t really care if people do call him a nazi, to be clear, it’s probably more effective messaging anyway.

I consider that recent, but… yeah, they’re the fedora atomic desktops. Bazzite is identical to them, you can pick kde or gnome, so it isn’t just kinoite or silverblue, so, atomic is more accurate in this context.

Actually there was a recent rebrand, https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-atomic-desktops/

I meant identical to fedora atomic.

The developer is just kind of insane. They reimplemented wlroots from scratch all on their own, a feat that cannot be understated, and the reason they did that is because of how massively they were outpacing wlroots development in terms of features.

just some things:

1. a full proper animation stack for eyecandy
2. single window capture (sway still doesn’t have this)
3. keypress forwarding to specific windows (like xdotool)
4. global hotkey support
5. insanely good documentation: https://wiki.hyprland.org/
6. color management and HDR (sway is just now getting this)
7. proper permission management for screencopy (coming in the newest version, first compositor to implement)
8. a full plugin system for extra things you want to do
9. a proper app not responding dialog

If the feature exists, hyprland has it, almost guaranteed, they are not minimalists, which I appreciate right now while wayland is still getting everything sorted out. It’s also the only compositor i’ve used that mostly works with a certain dumb app i uses clipboard.

And just check out the rate of changes:

https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/pulse/monthly

vaxry is crazy.

Why?

because I realized I could improve it and you hadn’t replied yet, I just added the link to kepler gpus

No, it’s a fact for everyone.

read: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

My source is a survey with thousands of respondants, your source is dude just trust me. It’s a fact, you can cover your ears and go lalala but it changes nothing

…no, it’s a statistical fact, look at my sources.

I demonstrated that was statistically false

…you mean western countries where nvidia gpu’s are the most common?

If we’re including beginners in developing countries this is even less common of an issue, when I was in india, not a single person I helped with tech had a graphics card, why would they have a 470xx series driver gpu and not an integrated system? It’s not even the cheapest choice. I recently built a PC in india, coincidentally, and we ended up going with an integrated system for a gaming PC.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

i mean, look at these stats, it’s such a minority it’s hardly worth mention. You’ll probably say “these are just the steam stats, most of them aren’t on steam anyway!” But if they’re not using steam/proton… they almost definitely aren’t using xwayland anyway so the issues don’t apply to them in the first place.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5204/~/list-of-kepler-series-geforce-desktop-gpus

compare that to the list on the hardware survey and you’ll see how unbelievably rare this problem actually is. They don’t even make the list, it’s less than a 1% issue.

…the vast majority of beginners do not have 10+ year old hardware.

I want everyone except those who use 10+ year old hardware to move, and in fact, that’s exactly what i’ve recommended in the past.

here I am making that exact recommendation:

https://lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz/post/53716147/18224187

We shouldn’t be recommending things for a tiny niche, we should be recommending what’s best on average, and as we learn about the specific needs of a user, then recommend things specifically for that user.

And it still is. Being expected to use slightly different software when you’re using a 10+ year old hardware setup is not weird. Furthermore, this is an issue with the nvidia driver support, which is proprietary, the open source drivers have no such problems. And again, this will be nearly completely solved once steam/proton stop needing xwayland.

I desperately want a smithay based hyprland clone… hyprland is just so unbelievably good, shame about the dev.

Bazzite makes it ridiculously easy, there’s just a dropdown to select the nvidia version of their ISO. It’s also a great distro for beginners for a lot of reasons:

bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically, this is fantastic for reliability, but it also has pretty up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

there’s also aurora if you want the same thing without some addons for gamers.

I thought you were referring to having to install ancient drivers that are no longer properly supported, that is still a problem on x.org, but if we use nouveau, the problems go away for the most part.

it appears the only real issue with nvidia drivers from back then on wayland is accelerated xwayland according to the arch wiki. I don’t think we shouldn’t be recommending wayland because over 10 year old gpus have a relatively minor issue but still work.

Sure, if you have ancient hardware, I actually recommend XFCE, but outside of this one niche case, it’s not wise to be recommending it.

Once steam and proton/wine get rid of xwayland… there won’t be many xwayland apps that are used on a daily basis, however, when that happens, I don’t think this will still stand.