I don’t really rate zsh personally. I find the additional features/syntactic sugar it adds are a poor tradeoff for lower portability. I also end up changing the settings in my zshrc to make it behave more like bash.

Stephen Fry the comedian/tv presenter is also a huge linux advocate. Specifically Ubuntu. He’s been using it for decades at this point.

If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.

I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.

Agree, it’s literally all I need for my browser in terms of add-ons. NoScript is nice to have but not essential.

In my opinion the intermediate stuff on windows is just as conceptually complex but presented with nested GUIs. People internalise that complexity out of familiarity.

Windows -> MacOS -> Windows -> Ubuntu (2012) -> Arch (2013) -> Gentoo (2016)

Gentoo cured my distrohopping

I used scoop as my package manager on windows. It even lets you install gnu coreutils like ls, cat and find to run in powershell.

Emacs is the only app you’ll ever need once you’ve mastered it.

Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I’ve not used much Discord but potentially the “gamer” culture might put people off.

Matrix seems good but it’s not quite there yet from what I can tell. It’s got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.

For IRC I’m on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.

*More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason

I believe the DE is packaged separately so you could install that

I love when people say they hate Hippocrates on social media

This is the main development path for most distros - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

Issues are tracked on bugzilla and then the patch is sent to the developer mailing list citing the bug ticket with git send-email. Not sure about Debian but in the case of Gentoo they accept contributions via their git mirror and email. The developers keep both in sync so that new contributors (who likely use github) are encouraged but more established users can stick to the mailing list.

Yes I’ve observed small examples of this at various places I’ve worked where the devs want to use linux but the company want everyone on windows or macOS.

The problem is that enterprise software like RMM which the companies usually need for compliance/security/insurance reasons don’t have working linux versions. It’s particularly intractable because most devs think of this software as basically being malware so you’re never going to get a coordinated effort to assist the SAAS companies with compatibility/integration.

I’ve had great results asking about emulators such as PPSSPP

Potentially SteamOS might be an option for you if you are wanting a gaming oriented distro. I believe you can boot it into desktop mode and it ships with KDE.

Gentoo has a lot of nice quality of life features if you want to roll a custom kernel. You can do it on any distro though.

Gentoo is a good alternative to this - at least after you are done setting it up you will have a useable, updateable OS.

I think some of the hate is from the main systemd dev, Poettering, being so abrasive on social media. He’s got a hateboner for certain distros (which don’t ship with systemd as the default).

The rust standard lib uses unsafe in various places too. Even if you avoided every other category of error in your code logic, you could still end up with UB.