I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.
I know I’m getting wildly off-topic just three comments deep in this thread, but comedy that warps into existential horror is a genre that I’ve recently discovered I love but probably never would have expected to be my kind of thing. This video is one of my favorites.
I have tracked down the missing word and returned it to its rightful place. Better late than never.
Man I’ve never really thought about how much having the wrong successor could fuck up the whole ecosystem.
I remember mint being billed as essentially just that like a full ten years ago. I’m actually surprised to hear mint hasn’t been enshittified itself at this point, I just assumed that would have happened by now.
I’m just speculating on reasons behind why people might feel it’s still not user-friendly. It was a pretty easy transition for me too, and that was years ago.
While there’s a little bit of getting acclimated to slightly different programs for the same tasks, I kind of imagine sophisticated needs primarily comes down to hardware. A company making some sort of computer hardware doohickey might design and test and provide support for something with Windows/Mac in mind, and maybe for other operating systems they’re not cooperative with documenting support, under the mindset that it would reveal trade secrets or decrease shareholder value in some other way. Linux support then comes from other means like reverse engineering. This could mean that it will take time before all the kinks are ironed out, or if the product was short-lived the linux community might not care enough to have someone volunteer to keep up with support. Common, time-tested hardware will have good support. Plugging in some old printer that was discontinued shortly after launch will be more of a crapshoot.
I’m aware that at some point sourceforge went down the toilet, but in the early 2000s it seemed to be a pretty reliable website for open source software. I had gone a few years coming across more and more evidence that any software I was downloading from sourceforge was much less likely to be a load of shit than software downloaded anywhere else. At some point I made the connection that maybe open source software is better in general. That made me curious about the experience of using an entire operating system that was open source. Either 2012 or late 2011 I installed Fedora to dual boot with windows (like 70% sure it was win7, might have been vista). Over the next year or two I sampled a bunch of other distros, and also PCBSD (not sure if that still exists) at one point. In retrospect I was really sampling DEs, but I didn’t know the distinction.
Discovering the philosophy behind GNU was what led me to abandoning windows entirely. I think I had already had some of the core ideas of free software, albeit in extremely rudimentary forms (gee, these EULAs sure do seem like they’re deliberately obfuscated), floating around my head for a while. The concept of free software resonated with me, so that’s when I finally removed my windows partition. I stopped distro-hopping and settled on Trisquel for two or three years.
Afterwards, I decided to move to Parabola because I thought it would force me to learn things, but the main thing I learned was how to read documentation just well enough to get everything working by trial-and-error tinkering.
I’ve kind of moved on from free software at this point. I do still agree with the ideals, but I think the goals are somewhat inconsistent with a capitalist economy to begin with so I’d rather be concerned about that.
Today I use arch and still have no idea what the hell I’m doing, but I’ve had a stable system for years and I’m too comfortable with it to switch to a friendlier distribution.
I’ve used claws for like ten years and I have never felt any reason to switch, but OP’s criticism of thunderbird is that it’s too old-fashioned. Claws was more old-fashioned than thunderbird way back when I was trying out different clients, and has had no significant interface changes in the time since.
But yeah, claws is awesome. I can’t speak for power users, but as someone who doesn’t need a lot of features other than being somewhat idiot-proofed, it works great for me.
My work uses office365 and claws does not work with those mailboxes on its own, it took me a while to figure out the workaround. There’s a libre program called davmail that will allow you to access office365 emails from any client, it’s in the AUR and for Debian users I believe it’s in the native repositories.
I’ve been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don’t want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I’ve figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.
That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I’ve had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I’ve spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn’t exist except for connecting joycons, but there’s always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.
In all honesty I still don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I’ve really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I’ve had a stable system for like ten years now though and I’m too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.