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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

> I can't really recommend any single distro, can't recommend even a single desktop environment as good for most people.

I can and do all the time: KDE Plasma + Debian Testing

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KDE has its own problems, though they’ve been improving in recent years. Out of the box defaults still need some work for example, and settings can still be confusing and difficult to navigate for less technical individuals. It also still has some behaviors that aren’t found on other desktops that can put off switchers.

The best DE for switchers would be one that brings as few surprises as possible and has defaults good enough that the overwhelming majority feel no need to change them. Basically, there needs to be near-perfect clones of the two big commercial desktops that don’t try to be clever or shake things up in any way so the switch is close to seamless.

Debian Testing packages may also still be too old, depending on the user. Anybody having to work cross platform or collaborate with people using other platforms is going to wind up dealing with version mismatch issues, since commercial OS users have most of their apps auto-updated to latest without Testing’a lag.

Debian Testing packages are not too old. They are mostly very nearly bleeding edge, if not they’re a month or so behind. Ridiculous you would blindly say Debian Testing is outdated.

Debian Testing KDE Plasma version: 6.3.5-1 [0]

Arch Stable KDE Plasma version: 6.4.3-1 [1]

[0] https://packages.debian.org/trixie/plasma-desktop

[1] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/plasma-desktop/

Based on what I’ve found it varies greatly between packages. Some are just a few weeks behind, others months or years.

Probably fine for most people, but not a good choice for low-hassle setup with "recent" nVidia cards (last ~10 years). That's almost all nVidia's fault, and I can't say any distro handles their cards flawlessly, but Debian is one of the worst: the drivers are (accurately) classified as "nonfree" and so not available by default, setup may require config file tweaking, and KDE Plasma prefers to support Wayland while nVidia prefers to support X11, leading to weird issues (more than usual, anyway).

Although gaming on Linux has come leaps and bounds, and is actually in a pretty good place with Proton and all that, it is still a hobbyist thing.

For most non-gamers (modulo some workstation users doing number crunching, but that’s pretty niche), the iGPU is the way to go.

Yeah, it's kind of niche to find someone who has an nVidia card, uses it for gaming/compute, has some reason to run Linux, and is afraid to dig into config files etc. But Microsoft's behavior of late is creating some demand here, and I too get tired of having to fix things after random kernel/driver updates.

My experience is that distros with traditional package management can't be counted on to work over the long term without manual administrator intervention.

Debian in particular would not be my first choice, or my second, for people who can't do their own system administration.

(And this is a bit of the problem: nobody can agree on this stuff)

Nobody agreeing on this stuff is freedom and beauty. If you want a managed OS there are already many options.

You look at Linux as an issue because someone you know can’t do system administration, something Debian almost requires none of. I look at Linux as an opportunity to rip people off their safe OS and introduce them to something that works but allows deep customization when they’re ready.

You’re operating out of fear, I’m operating out of faith. I really don’t care if the user “gets it”. They barely get their mobile device.

This touches on a larger problem that I think we tech people don't address as much as we should. That the modern big tech OS (Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS) has a huge advantage, which is that it's managed. Actively supported by the vendor, well after the purchase. That, and the heavy restriction of the user makes the computer orders of magnitude more stable.

With Linux this is not the way. The closest I can get is unattended-upgrades.

I think Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite, et. al. is the right direction for linux on PCs. It still feels a little immature yet, but also I'm way more confident in the system's durability than I've ever been in the past.

Based. I run the same setup myself, but "testing" does mean testing, and while it usually works fine, you have to examine apt output and make sure it's sane, before you update your system.

I don’t have problems unless I run apt-dist-upgrade before a release cut (which I never do). Otherwise things have upgraded without pain or issue packages are held back until they’re ready for testing using apt-update/upgrade

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