Tom’s Root Boot.

One floppy disk, one Linux machine!

Discord does provide a .deb, but I’ve never found a repo that carries updated versions. I’ve found plenty of hacks that download the latest one and install it every night, but for whatever reason, it’s not kept in the various Debian repos out there.

The kids mostly use Mint with one Ubuntu machine (driver issues that worked on Ubuntu, but not Mint).

I’ve only barely used steam myself (no time for games: see having many kids), but I know the kids often do have to do various tweaks for games at times. I let them have full sudo on their own machines with a scorched earth policy if something goes wrong. Mostly, it seems to work and they don’t bug me much.

Thank you. I’m very proud of all of my kids (even the Windows user).

I haven’t put anyone on the Arch path yet. So far, apt, video drivers, and Steam have been giving the crew enough trouble.

If nothing else, just keeping Discord patched is getting them lots of experience with sudo and dpkg tools. Why doesn’t Discord have a repo?

The crazy moment was when one kid was about 10 years old and he busted open the terminal without promoting to get something done. He already knew it was faster and more powerful so he just started learning the tools.

I danced a little jig in my head once I realized what had just happened.

That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.

I’m a die hard Linux user. I don’t spend much time telling people about it outside of actual tech conversations that should include the topic. I did raise my kids with a lot of Linux desktop use on their machines. They uniformly find the Windows 10/11 experience to be horrible, so I guess I’ve managed success on that front.

Mint is my go to Linux desktop distribution. There’s plenty of solid choices, but it’s served me well ever since Crunchbag Linux closed up shop.

I used WSL for a job and it worked fine. It’s kind of a weird VM that doesn’t really integrate with the host OS fully, but it works for many use cases.

Git BASH has more direct system integration and hardware access than WSL, though it’s been a couple of years since I had to look at WSL at all. Hopefully they’ve improved the integration over time.

If I’m stuck on a windows machine, one of the first packages I try to install is git-scm.org’s BASH.

It’s not actually Linux, but it’s got a command line and enough programs to really help get work done.

Mint is my go to desktop option. It usually does the job.

I don’t usually worry about older packages. Most things run fine. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to make my UI pretty. For me, the GUI is a place for terminals, web browsers, my IDE, and general tools, not some kind of whiz bang thing to tweak all the time.

Debian: good enough and stable. No worries > new features.

I dunno. Maybe an orange dog? Give it big brown ears.

Based on the various other descriptions of the DBUS features, I kept thinking “this sounds like a message passing model with a bit of CORBA hiding in there”. It’s got a bit of SLP and AMQP/MQTT to it, just on a local machine instead of a distributed network. It’s solving a lot of problems with service discovery, message passing structure, and separating transmission layer details from service API design. Raw sockets/pipes can always be used to pass data (it’s how DBUS does it!), but there’s additional problems of where to send the data and how to ensure data formatting that sockets/pipes do not have the capability of solving by design since they’re simple and foundational to how interprocess communication works in the kernel.

I live and die by ssh and scp. Sometimes rsync for larger moves.

Once you’ve got ssh for terminals (used to be x sessions too!), then port forwarding and socks proxies, add in scp for file moves, and layer in sshfs for whole file system mounts it’s a potential combo for remote work and network tunnels. Such a phenomenal toolkit.

When teaching programming classes it’s awful trying to figure out every IDE’s git interface that my students are using. Each IDE puts the buttons in very different layouts and they even change the names of the buttons because they don’t like the way git itself named operations. It’s untenable to know them all and actually be efficient and helpful as the instructor.

Instead, I say they’re welcome to use the IDE, but the class materials use the canonical underlying command line tools and terminology. They just need to search for how to translate the real git interface to however their chosen tool does the same operation, but it’s up to them to figure it out.

When they do ask for help, I bring up the terminal (usually even inside the IDE) and run the git commands just like we went over in class.

One of the other commenter made the analogy of being in a restaurant. With a mouse you can only point and grunt at things to communicate when you want. A terminal let’s you speak out your order and any other requests you might have.

What makes you not want to use Linux anymore

Your question is malformed because even the odd troubles of Linux these days are absolutely nothing compared to the hoops I used to go through to try to get a Kernel built for my hardware 25 years ago. The occasional non-working speaker or other config issue is tiny. It doesn’t even register as a problem.

Compare that to the shit show that is Windows? Fuck that OS. I try not to be very vocal when I meet people about it, but Windows just won’t be a choice for me. I’ve turned down jobs because it would move me to a Windows house for tools. It’s not worth living in that kind of hellhole UI design and wrestling with whatever enshittification MSFT has driven down your crop with the latest updates. I have a life to live and wrestling with my OS isn’t what I’m going to spend it doing.

I don’t know much about the current MacOS environment these days. I stopped in the OSX 10.4 days. I just don’t have the hardware to consider it, so no real opinion.

So… your question is malformed because it’s not even worth considering and I’ve got a quarter century of experience to back that one up.

The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn’t an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it’s been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there’s a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn’t use anything else. I’ve got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There’s just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.

All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That’s why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.

For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you’ll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.

I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.

For simple documents it also doesn’t work well, but at least it’s expensive and slow so it’s got that going for it.