That wasn’t the issue. A portion of the community was much angrier and much more entitled.
Dealing with inexperienced users doesn’t bother me. Dealing with angry people who are abusive while demanding your help is less fun.
Having to manage the chaos that went on there at times was exhausting. Especially during the periods where I was the only active moderator.
Getting death threats. Having people threaten to harm my family. Being blamed for basically everything that anyone was upset about was draining over time.
Sorry, you have to deal with that. Luckily you don’t have to anymore.
This community is one of the least toxic places online I’ve ever seen.
It’s refreshing to be a part of community that is super friendly and helpful.
That’s what kept mere here from the start.
I demand you tell me how awesome EndeavourOS is to use as a daily driver!
But on a serious note that’s horrible, I’m sorry you had to deal with all that. I was mildly frustrated with this recent grub issue, but I can’t even fathom saying things like that to anyone because of it. If it helps at all, I think you and a handful of others here are a driving force that speaks politely and is always very helpful.
That is true about some of the dev team too. The community was actually fitting for some of them.
But seriously, that’s a rough place to be a mod/helper. I didn’t know about the death threats, but the entitlement/anger there was thicccckkkkk. It’s surely not a place I wanted to hang out and make friends with folks really.
Although I say that, and some of the best linux friends I’ve made and had the pleasure of chatting/talking to over the years are from there. We bonded mostly over our detestement of the distro/devs though hahahahahaha So. I guess take that for what it’s worth. Cheers to those of you who I’m talking about. You know who you are, even if we don’t talk as much as we used to.
Not everyone carries an install disk around, especially if someone else did the install for them. And because the bootloader is FUBAR’d, any snapshots or backups become unusable without install disk. Also not everyone has a 2nd computer.
If you don’t have a second computer, you should always have a liveusb on hand.
4-8gb USB drives are basically free in 2022. I was literally just at an event and one vendor was giving out free USB drives with their logo on it they’ve gotten so cheap.
If you have zero access to a spare USB to keep an iso on, and no other computer access at all. . . I’m really not sure what to offer to help as being able to chroot and fix things is pretty important.
Perhaps an arch based distro was not such a good idea for these hypothetical people in the first place then.
Pop OS has an embedded rescue mode which essentially can reload the iso from disk or something the like to repair or reinstall the OS. In case no USB at hand. That is pretty handy.
That’s a great point. There’s only maybe 2-3 distros I would install for someone else.
And nothing Arch based is on that list. I would install Pop realistically and if the new user is ambitious enough to seek out something else, then their Linux journey has officially started.
I pretty much only recommend a few distros to people these days.
Beginners - Used to be PopOS, but now I’m leaning towards Silverblue/Kinoite for less breakage
Moderate to advanced - EndeavourOS, now that pacseek is so well developed
Servers - Rocky Linux, I’m just more familiar with it than Debian
Embedded gaming devices - HoloISO for now, but I’m keeping an eye on what ChimeraOS is doing, they’re talking about including GNOME and making RetroArch a little more accessible
Beginner: Linux Mint or Pop, Mint if low end hardware is used, Pop if gaming is necessary. Fedora uses stock GNOME which simply doesn’t have many of the paradigms Windows and most other DEs have like minimize / maximize button, a panel with app icons, icons on desktop etc. Kinoite is currently alpha.
Enthusiast: EndeavourOS, Garuda or openSUSE
Servers: no idea
Embedeed gaming devices is currently a niche and non Deck devices are a niche of a niche but I’d still recommend Pop.
gosh why do they all start with M
