So many interests, so little time and money. Always interested in talking to more like-minded people!


Where you can find me on the internet: nathanupchurch.com/me


Keyoxide: https://keyoxide.org/31E809FAEA1532AC91BBDCF1EC499D3513F69340

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: February 3rd, 2022

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  • I agree that the learning curve is surmountable, but the fact is that many people are unwilling to use a CLI, which is valid. It’s also very easy to bork your install with EOS, which is terrifying for people who don’t have the knowledge to even begin to troubleshoot issues and who just want their system to work. IMO new GNU/Linux users, unless they specifically request a more advanced distros that will help them learn how things work, should always be recommended a distro with the lowest possible learning curve in order to keep their data safe, their confidence high, and minimise downtime. They can distro-hop later if they want to learn.


  • I love EndeavourOS and I use it myself, but inflicting CLI package management and pacnew files on someone fresh from Windows is like throwing a baby into shark-infested oceans to teach it to swim.

    My recommendation for new users is Fedora KDE:

    • Almost never has any problems
    • Works out of the box
    • Up-to-date packages
    • GUI package management and upgrades with Discover
    • Lots of useful features vs. other desktop environments (such as GNOME that doesn’t even have a minimize button)

    Mint is what I’d recommend for an elderly person who just needs to browse the internet and reply to emails, but for someone who needs to get work done it’s Fedora KDE all the way.




  • What’s a beginner to do

    Well that’s just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It’s not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don’t have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don’t want to.

    So when you ask “am I supposed to X,” the answer is that there really isn’t a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you’re supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.

    Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.


  • Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.

    What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn’t supply any.

    AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

    If I’m not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their “Welcome” app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.










  • Why not try simple scripts at first? You could write a little script in Bash, JS, or Ruby to create folders or text files. Besides the very basic stuff I did on the high school robotics team, my first programming project was when I worked as a print broker and we invested in a digital press. I needed a program to calculate the cost of a print job, so I learned a little BASIC and wrote a program on my TI-98 to do it for me. It would ask a series of questions (eg - paper cost, single / double sided, color / black and white, how many imposed on an SRA3 sheet, etc) and spit out the cost of the job.

    As for how you use the code, say you write a ruby script; to run it, you’d navigate to the script directory in the terminal and type ./scriptName.rb to run it. If you’re using a compiled language, you’d compile it (your lessons would cover how to do this) and then you’d run the resulting binary the same way.