cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6028275

After being extremely annoyed with how Microsoft was trying to force me to use their worthless Outlook programme, and learning that Windows 11 (which they’ve also been pressuring to try) is polluted with advertising, I decided that it was time to migrate to another operating system. Somebody recommended EndeavourOS to me, and after backing up my valuables and following these instructions, I am finally trying a better operating system.

If I’m being honest, my first impressions are… not good.

One of the first things that I notice is that I can’t easily modify the /usr/ directory. I tried to install Java there but the OS would not let me because I lack the permission. How do I get the permission? I don’t know. I am guessing that it has something to do with Terminal Emulator, and the fact that I have to use this program so much immediately tells me that this OS was made for programmers in mind, not ordinary users. On Windows, I could click an executable, click a few more buttons and be done with it, but here the OS wants me to mess with a DOS prompt terminal.

Then there is the scaling. I managed to adjust the scaling while keeping the resolution so that everything on my screen didn’t look microscopic. The problem is that when I open certain tabs or windows, they stretch out so far that the monitor can only show part of them. Here’s a screenshot so that you can see what I mean:

This is just lousy design. I can shrink the window, but not by much.

I want to uninstall a font. How do I do that? Well, I read on the EndeavourOS forum that I need to run ‘pacman’ (meaning the terminal) to uninstall a font. Nobody elaborated on that. So after entering the terminal, typing ‘su’, then my password (another annoyance), then entering “pacman -R /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoColorEmoji.ttf”, the terminal spits out “error: target not found: /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoColorEmoji.ttf”, even though I am 100% certain that it is there. I would just remove it by simply clicking it and deleting it, except that the OS refuses and tells me “Error removing file: Permission denied”.

Speaking of which, I actually find this more annoying than Windows’ worthless ‘administrator’ function. At least I could simply click the administrator function and be done with it. The process here looks much less straightforward.

I want a calendar with scheduling, which is part of the reason that I am quitting Windows. I downloaded the Orage application hence, then I clicked on ‘orage-4.18.0.tar.bz2’ in my downloads folder. My cursor spins like something is loading, and… nothing happens. I don’t even get an error message.

There are some other things that I could mention (where’s the color filter?), but these are the worst offenders. I’m not calling it quits on EndeavourOS, and I am sure that eventually I’ll get the hang of things, but so far this has been unenjoyable.

  • itsoctoberEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Hey, I am also recently learning to use Linux. I am definitely not a tech person at all. I went with Mint, as it’s one of the typical generic recommendations for beginners. So far the learning process has been manageable. I can see that in the long term, I will probably eventually switch to something other than Mint, but I would say it was a good choice for me to learn on and in the short term I am going to keep learning on it as I’ve gotten it to satisfyingly do all of the basic stuff I needed. When I change to something else it will be because I want to go beyond that and start doing things in new (to me) ways.

    I ended up asking a lot of questions to chat bots which actually helped me out a lot. I found that when I tried to search up issues or questions I was having (which was already hard, because I often didn’t really even know what I am trying to ask or what words to use to ask it), a lot of the time I would find someone posting about the same issue, but a lot of the replies were just people telling them to just google it or calling OP lazy for asking. There’s definitely many patient and helpful people too (like many of the people replying in this thread), but initially I still struggled a lot with comprehension of their help because I was so unfamiliar with even very basic computing terms. A lot of the material I find that is intended for beginners would be a bit demoralizing because, for my (quite) low level of tech knowledge, it felt a bit like this:

    xkcd comic titled Average Familiarity, saying "Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate average person's familiarity with their field"

    This is where chat bots were pretty helpful for making things more comprehensible. In addition to asking chat bots my basic questions, I also did a short command line tutorial (in my case, this one: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners) and I started watching a YouTube channel called Veronica Explains. I can see I have a lot of stuff I still need to learn but I feel I am past the first hurdles now. It was difficult and kind of intimidating and frustrating at first and I still run into frustrations but now I am more and more excited about what I’ll eventually be able to do as I learn more.