I’m a 20yo, Hella Autistic, ADHD-riddled spaz that likes to tinker with programs and software settings alot. I’m building a pc for the first time right now, and while I am tech savvy; or more tech savvy than most; coding, programming, tech engineering is complete and utter gibberish, and it seems like the only people that use Linux are HEAVILY experienced with those things I just listed… HOWEVER… I’m not. I just like digging around various program settings or messing with things, or personalizing them as much as I can.

The more I delve into tech or tech related spaces; whether its through building my pc or just- using this website; the more people wont stop yapping about “OOH LINUX, I LOOOVE LINUX.” and every time I ask about it and why I should use it, they make it out like its an absolute godsend piece of technology (im sure it is tbh… it does look nice)

But then looking into it myself, all I see is a bunch of technical word vomit that makes no god damn sense to me. and the more I ask for people to explain this to me, the worse my confusion becomes. now I’m learning there’s like 40 different “Distro’s”… Someone else told me about Linux Mint, which looks nice, but again- I DO NOT want to be forced to use a terminal just to get the most outta my operating system. I like having some kind of UI to use.

idk man… from everything they say I can do with it, ESPECIALLY in terms of customization, I’m so tempted to use it. But my mental understanding of whatever tf Linux is, is at best a toddler’s.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    63·
    5 days ago

    I DO NOT want to be forced to use a terminal just to get the most outta my operating

    Just walk away. Plain and simple, there’s no tinkering with Linux from the GUI.

    If you want to run apps as they come from the distribution it’ll work fine, usually stable as hell. But you’re not going to be doing anything you’re going to consider interesting from the GUI.

    • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
      41·
      5 days ago

      I think this reply was mostly true ~10 years ago, but is not accurate today. Not using the terminal is not a deal breaker anymore.

      But you’re not going to be doing anything you’re going to consider interesting from the GUI.

      They’re going to be able to do just as interesting stuff from a Linux GUI as they are already doing from the Windows GUI, so I’d say this is just not valid.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        I maintain a cluster of hundreds of linux boxes professionally. I run NixOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Centos currently and I’m ultimately familiar with all but Nix, as I’ve only been running it for six months. I’ve been Linux on the desktop for most of time since about 2003, all of my installs are up to date.

        Someone who’s solidly averse to the terminal is going to be in for a surprise the first time a kernel update breaks Nvidia, or if they decide to dual boot and MS breaks grub. The existing GUI management situation is a bare minimum skeletons or undocumented clutter. He’s looking for a control panel not kate wrapped into a list of files.

        The worst part is any support he’s looking for isn’t going to mention crap about whatever bolt on GUI he’s trying to use. All the support out there is run this command, run that command, cat | cut | xargs, check service status with this, check logs with that.

        I’ve never known anyone even marginally advanced in Linux that doesn’t have a strong grasp of the terminal and their way around bash. They all go back to Windows/Mac.

        I’ll stick with my suggestion that Linux is not for anyone with a strong aversion to terminals. I don’t think that’s out of date what-so-ever.

        • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 days ago

          I definitely understand where you’re coming from, but at this point I’ve had so many JustWorks™️ Linux systems, including set up on my parents’ PC for well over 5 years without one single problem or breaking update, and they certainly are never opening up the terminal.

          I’ll stick with my suggestion that Linux is not for anyone with a strong aversion to terminals.

          My experience tells me that this is just objectively wrong, or I’d be getting calls from my parents, HOWEVER, I will concede that maybe this is only wrong if you just want a bulletproof system that works without messing around much.

          If OP wants to mess around and get dirty in settings, then I’ll give it to you that they might need to be a bit more open minded about the terminal. I haven’t really tried much GUI configs or settings besides really common, typical stuff, like network config or power saving modes/settings, because I just go right to the terminal regardless.

          But its just wrong to claim that someone who doesn’t want to use a terminal will have a problem on Linux, it just depends heavily on what you are trying to do. For the tasks that most people use a personal computer for, there won’t be anything holding you back.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        21·
        5 days ago

        Lulz, I had to fuck around with the terminal so much to make my wifi work and I need to fuck around some more to make my audio hardware work properly when waking up from suspend (nothing fancy, a USB sound blaster card) and on another distro my display signal would drop whenever I put load on the GPU.

        There’s no escaping the terminal, stop bullshitting op.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                5 days ago

                Read again, did not work on one distro, works on another, two days wasted trying to find a solution, works every time on Windows, no need to fiddle with anything and if I had issues I would have just went to the source (AMD) to get the drivers instead of entering stuff that I don’t understand in terminal. What’s safer your reckon?

                • marcos@lemmy.world
                  11·
                  4 days ago

                  So you insist on using some distro where your GPU driver is broken. On the popular one it works just fine.

                  How’s that a “Linux problem” again?

                  Anyway, are you forced to use the broken distro? What is it? (If it’s Debian based, it should work just by installing the AMD firmware package. If it doesn’t, it’s because it’s badly maintained.)

                • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
                  12·
                  5 days ago

                  OMG you’re not even talking about NVIDIA… 😳🤦

                  My friend, I have wonderful news. AMD, the manufacturer that you trust to write the closed source Windows drivers, is the same one that officially maintains the open source drivers for Linux…

                  You spent 2 whole days, yet never found that you can download them directly from the AMD website? What exactly were you doing for those 2 days??? https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/linux-drivers.html

                  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMDgpu_(Linux_kernel_module)

                  AMDgpu is an open source device driver for the Linux operating system developed by AMD