compared to clicking “next” on Fedora, Debian, or Mint

I’d say using a simple straightforward GUI is much easier than an arcane combination of commands and keypresses

There are certain parts of the guide where i really wish it went into more detail.

Last time i installed Gentoo i had the Arch wiki open alongside the guide to help translate

That sounds pretty nice. More installers should have something like that

I’ve never “debloated” Windows so idk about the top half.

The bottom half is accurate. Debian, Fedora, and Mint are easier to install than Windows 10 or 11. Not that Windows is difficult, it’s just a bit clunky and idiosyncratic.

I assume Microsoft doesn’t care much about the installer since it’s generally only used by OEMs, whereas for Linux distros it’s a first impression so it has to be polished.

My first real job was forklift driving on a warehouse dock, maybe we crossed paths

Thanks! I appreciate learning the magic incantation

And lastly, Windows (even Windows 11), just works with everything. Any software you want, you just install it. On steam you don’t have to check proton.db, you’re 100% guaranteed for it to work. Any software you see, it works on windows.

This is not my experience at all. I was recently trying to play Command and Conquer: Tiberian Firestorm, an older RTS on Windows. I own the game through Steam. On Windows, the game wont open. It crashes immediately on launch. If i run the game in XP compatibility mode, it launches but when playing the game there is some sort of microstutter: every unit is blinking, the mouse cursor is blinking, and the game plays at a crawling pace. Also everything freezes whenever you move the camera.

When i boot into Fedora on the same PC, install with steam and launch with Proton, the game works fine. I was even able to install a resolution patch for windows to get higher resolutions available.

I find this to be a pretty common experience for me when trying to play older Windows PC games. There are quite a few I cant seem to get working (or playable) on Windows, but that work fine on Linux. I mostly play older games anyway so for me, Linux is more of a game console OS.

Sorry to hear Battlenet doesn’t work for you. D4 is another one i play only on Linux, in thas case because i get some weird graphical artefacts when playing on Windows. I haven’t bought the new expansion yet though, maybe after the holidays are over.

TBF it’s only happened to me once on 8.1 and once on 10. I think it’s an uncommon bug

That’s wild. Mice are a generic driver just like on Windows. It should be plug and play on either OS.

Why did it take an hour? Any idea what was happening?

I found it impossible to set up 11 pro without a Microsoft account. Did you put one in for install and disable it after?

On 10 if you cut network access during install it’d let you set up offline accounts. On 11 it refuses to finish the installation until you connect to the internet somehow. I had to put my linux laptop in AP mode and connect a patch cable to the windows PC because i hadnt loaded the wifi drivers on the USB i had.

They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.

Gentoo has cflags and cross-building

Nix has Nix configs

I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it’s no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.

Sabayon Linux

I used it for a few years, great distro. I think it’s dead now. It was based on Gentoo but with thoughtful defaults and a very good binary package manager.

also Funtoo Linux, but i never really used it

I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo’s mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.

it’s only distros

thank you!

What are you using to get the window buttons in the panel?

That’s a good point, i agree there are also plenty of folks who use niche distros partly as a hobby

KDE Plasma? The top panel layout is very slick

My gpu twin! I was also on Kubuntu at the time for the same reasons.

Lots of folks use those “toy” distros to accomplish specialized tasks that are cumbersome or impossible on other distros. I’d describe it more as “general purpose” vs “niche”

Both are tools