Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.
I have a 5 year old niece and 73 year old father in law running Ubuntu. Everything is relative right? To me they’re Linux illiterate, if not computer illiterate. It’s not meant to be an insult, and I’m regularly amazed by some folks inability to get what they’re looking for out of a search engine.
All I’m getting at, is that Debian isn’t “easy” to everyone.
Setting engine timing when replacing a timing belt is easy to my brother in law who’s a car guy, but if I watched a YouTube video on it I’d probably still botch the job and blow my motor. It’s easy to him. Not to me.
To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.
I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.
Using toolbox to force out of tree software to function is not nearly as simple going to the discover app and clicking “download”
Remember we’re talking about a kid. Not a power user. We’re talking about people that don’t know and don’t want to know what a kernel module is. Are those extra steps fine for you? Great, knock yourself out. They aren’t feasible for a child or grandmother who wants to just click shit and see it launch.
I use EndeavourOS without a desktop environment and install and configure Hyprland for myself. I enjoy those extra steps. Someone unfamiliar with my system wouldn’t even be able to open the web browser. That’s fine for me. I’m not going to suggest it for my 74 year old father in law. He uses Ubuntu.
Is it making sense yet?
Using literally anything that requires an out of tree kernel module, for one. Have some peripherals with features that aren’t supported by drivers already present in the kernel? Good luck getting any DKMS packages running on your machine.
I’m hearing a lot of very poor advice in here, at least from my perspective as a Linux user who’s been through the gamut of various distros over the years.
Fedora atomic desktops are not beginner distros. That is not their purpose, and their limitations make many things a person may eventually want to do with their machine a lot more complicated.
Debian? Are we joking here? Debian is an amazing distro for what its purposes are, but it’s not beginner friendly. Debian is bare bones.
Linux Mint is the easiest answer here. Ubuntu LTS (or its classroom based fork edubuntu) is another great answer. I know every Linux user on the internet recoils in horror at the mention of Ubuntu but it really is a drop in plug and play solution for kids and old people.
Another way to fix this, would have been to navigate to the pkgbuild file in question, right click, open with, Kate. I’m more familiar with Gnome than KDE but I assume there’s an option to make Kate your default for opening files of that type.
I could be mistaken, but that editor looks like nano, which is just a super simple text editor. Ctrl-x should bring quit the editor and ask if you want to save.
How were you editing PKGBUILD files before? A GUI based editor?
Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.