Wasn’t this the OS of freedom? Hmmm

Yes, you’re also free to shoot yourself in the foot. Do what you want, I’m trying to prevent you from hurting yourself, but you’re free to do so of you so wish.

I tried to install ISO image writer on Ubuntu, on my laptop.

Ubuntu already comes with an iso image writer.

Went straight to the package manager, no terminal bullshit, downloaded it, open button is greyed out.

What program? How did you run it? What are you trying to do, you need to be a lot more specific,

Fantastic. Stable version btw. Solved by uninstalling and installing another version available on the manager.

Package managers only have one version, so that shouldn’t be possible.

Linux is literally problems after problems after problems.

Again, at least once you didn’t installed it via the package manager, so at least once you shot yourself in the foot. I’m guessing it was the first time, and you installed a snap/flatpacks which maybe required especial permissions for accessing USB devices.

Like, download the APK, enable Unknown sources, tap on the icon? I don’t use android since 2017 but i’m pretty sure is the same, isn’t it? Not an happy comparison.

Yes, it’s the same, try explaining that to your grandma who doesn’t know how to answer a call and you’ll quickly tell her to first learn to use the basics before wanting to enable external sources and installing random stuff from the internet.

When i want to uninstall and app and all the dependencies connected to it (autoremove, right?) is Linux able to tell if some of those dependencies are necessary for other apps and “whitelist” them?

Yes, it keeps track of which things use what, autoremove removes things that were installed as dependencies but nothing else depends on them now. So for example if you uninstall Ark and that was the only thing using unzip, running autoremove would get rid of the unzip library.

If i got a beginner friendly distro how will i learn how to use linux properly?

That’s like asking how will you learn to swim if you start in a pool where you can reach the bottom. First of all under the hood Ubuntu and Gentoo are 99% the same, the main differences are philosophical, almost everything you learn for Ubuntu will carry over to any other distro. But if you try jumping straight into the deep end you will be overwhelmed. I mentioned Gentoo because you usually compile your own kernel when using it, how can you possibly learn Linux without compiling your own kernel!? But the majority of people who know Linux nowadays have never done so, and you shouldn’t need to either. The same applies to all the thousand paper cuts you’re inflicting to yourself for choosing a distro whose philosophy doesn’t include being beginner friendly.

So if an app is not a package manager i’m fucked?

For the time being, yes. But here’s the thing, if everything else is working, figuring out how to install a package manually is simple, but if you’re struggling with 100 other things you will be overwhelmed by it. Tell me, when was the last time you downloaded an .APK from a random site on the internet to install something on your phone? It’s the same thing.

I tried, it did nothing, i went online to search for a solution.

Weird, that used to work last I used Debian based with KDE.

This is mental. This shouldn’t be a thing even for pros. I need 15 minutes to install an app? Sorry i won’t go out this evening, i need to install an app and god knows what can happen.

Nope, I could install that in 1 min, because I know what I’m doing, so I know how to install dependencies. But you don’t, so you shouldn’t try to install stuff manually. For starters I would have added a PPA instead of manually installing a .deb, that way the package would get updated and apt would install the dependencies automatically, if that wasn’t an option or I was feeling lazy I would have just installed using snap/flatpacks, or if I had to install using a .deb, I would just use apt to do it to autoresolve dependencies. The fact that half of what I said there sounds like gibberish is the reason why you shouldn’t do it. It’s equivalent of someone who can’t even use Android properly asking you how to install an APK not on the play store, first learn the basics, then you can do complex stuff.

Well, yes, of course. Also i read some contradictions in your post:

No contradictions, let’s go over one by one

the installer only installs what is supposed to, but it needs dependencies to actually make the app usable.

Yes, but each dependency is its own package, so when you install one package you might be installing several. But if you try to install one package manually (via dpkg) you don’t get the packages it depends on (because dpkg is a glorified unzip, it doesn’t know how to fetch dependencies).

But that’s what package managers do, right?

Exactly, unlike dpkg, apt does know how to install the dependencies, so it would do it automatically.

Different apps could use the same libraries but also different ones, so the system could become bloated nonetheless.

Yes, but you’re missing the point, a single library doesn’t weight that much, a dozen copies of that same library do. You installed KDE, so you probably had these apps (among others):

• Dolphin
• Okular
• Kwin
• Konsole
• Ark
• Kate
• Etc…

The KDE library is 150/200MB, so on Windows each of those application on it’s own weights at least 200MB, so probably you’re looking at 2GB for 10 apps that use the KDE library. On Linux they weight very small amount, because all of them use the same KDE library which is installed system-wide. Maybe some of those also use other libraries, but if you install anything else that uses that same library the library won’t be duplicated the same way it is on Windows, where each installer is self-contained and brings all of the libraries it needs to work.

I don’t see how is this beneficial for the user.

There are two main advantages:

• Smaller footprint for the system. Like I shown installing all those packages on Windows would be a few GB, but on Linux it’s probably less than 1. Expand that to an entire system and you’ll see how you can have a full Linux system filled with packages occupying less than Windows with some programs installed
• System-wide updates. Imagine a vulnerability was discovered in SSL, on Windows you would have to manually figure out which programs use SSL, figure out if the latest version of it uses an SSL version that fixes that vulnerability, update them to that version, rince and repeat for all programs installed. Whereas on Linux a system update fixes everything. Same thing for new features or bug fixes.

And the disadvantages are:

• Complicated to install a package (because you need to resolve the dependencies). Which is not an issue if you use a package manager.
• Stuff might break if different programs depend on different versions of the same library. Again, not an issue because the package manager ensures everything is up to date so you get the latest for all apps and libraries which work together, but the moment you install something manually you need to manage this manually for that package.

So overall it has 2 huge benefits and no downsides as long as you use the package manager.

People downvoting you are very self-centered, they don’t understand the importance of a job for lots of people. Until we have UBI, jobs like these will always be necessary.

How? I’ve installed Debian with KDE

Mistake number 1, Debian is not beginner friendly.

downloaded the .deb from steam website

Mistake number 2, this is windows mentality, if it’s not in the package manager it’s too advanced for you for the time being. Beginner friendly distros would have had steam in their package manager.

learnt to install that using sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb

You could have also double clicked the Deb file, but this is a bad way, dpkg does not resolve dependencies, so you would need to figure those out and install them by hand, which can be tedious at best.

opened the app and i’ve been welcomed with a text inviting me to press enter to continue, pretty simple. The program downloaded stuff, steam is ready now. Not bad.

You lucked out, your system had all of the requirements met.

Repeated the exact same thing on Debian with xfce, that apparently doesn’t come with a software installer, nothing works. An alert says i need to download dependencies (i know dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies). Where’s the “enter to continue”?

No such luck therez remember when I told you to use the package manager? This is why. Possibly missing something stupid like an i32 library, which you could manually install, but you shouldn’t, you’re making things hard for yourself for no reason other than wanting to avoid beginner friendly distros.

How is this my fault??

It’s your fault because like I’ve been saying since the beginning you’re trying to use Linux as if it were Windows and getting frustrated because it behaves differently. Trying to do this will be frustrating and you will become angry because nothing works like you expect, but you must understand that it’s not that things don’t work, it’s that they work differently.

You might be thinking this is stupid, an installer should install everything it needs, right? Nope, that’s a windows mentality, in Linux the main idea is that an installer only installs what it’s supposed to, any dependency should be system-wide. Why you might ask? Simple, imagine if every single GUI app had to include it’s own copy of the full GUI library it uses, your system would quickly become bloated, not only that but each program would open it’s own copy of the library using more and more memory, not to mention the interoperability problems between programs using different versions of the same library. In Linux the standard is for programs to use system libraries, it’s the convention, just like how on Windows it is to not (which has its own set of problems). This is why package managers are important, they’re not just downloading an executable and running it, they’re doing lots of stuff behind the curtains, all of it can be done manually, but like you found out it’s troublesome, so best is to avoid.

That’s one of the things I miss the most in Gentoo, having the packages of your system defined in text files so a fresh install was just copying those files and running an update.

I’ve tried similar things with other distros, but it’s never the same, the list of packages ends up getting out of date or ends up with too much garbage.

Currently I have a home server so I took the time to get an Ansible playbook setup for running, maintaining, and maybe migrating the server if needed. Since some stuff is also run on other machines that I have (update system, update some docker images I run in multiple systems, etc) I did setup some minimal packages that I need on my main system, it’s easy enough but I wouldn’t recommend using Ansible just for this (but if you also have dotfiles it’s a great tool for automating lots of the initial setup).

All of that being said, the reason I never bothered with this until I had a home server is that usually there are years between system installs, so even if what you had was exactly what you wanted the last time you installed your system, it’s unlikely to be exactly what you want next time you do. Since the last time I installed my main system I switched from X to Wayland, from i3 to Hyprland and then Sway, etc, etc…

I’ve never, ever got a virus on any of my pcs. I grew up with internet, since the ADSL days, i know my shit.

Therein lies the problem, you’re a windows expert, moving away from your comfort zone will always feel bad. It’s okay to stick to Windows, no one should be forced to use an OS they don’t like. But if you ever want to try again, I recommend taking a step back and accepting that for all your years of experience in Windows you are a noob here, and trying to jump into the deep end is more likely to get you drowned than learning how to swim.

Also I recommend dual-booting, so you have the safe heaven of a known OS to reboot into in times of need. Most of us started that way and dealt slowly with the difficulties in using Linux with a windows user mentality, until at some point we realized we were spending the majority of our time in Linux and Windows had become unusable because we were now thinking like Linux users. I’m sure that if I had tried to do what you did I would also be frustrated, so I completely understand you. But let me tell you something which you might not want to hear, and will possibly even get angry at me for telling you, but there’s a fairly good chance that the majority of issues you encountered were self-imposed. Linux has near infinite possibilities, but that’s like saying the ocean is nearly infinite, it doesn’t mean you should try to swim across it just because you’re used to doing it on a swimming pool, you’ll drown fairly quickly and get nowhere.

I see a common trend here. You seem to be very tech savvy and a windows power user, and get frustrated with Linux because you’re trying to solve problems with a windows mentality and failing.

Yada, yada, yada.

That yada yada yada is the most important part from my entire answer, choose a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Things to do to install an app on Windows: download the exe, double click on the icon, follow the instructions, done.

Nope, things to install an app on Windows: Open a browser, search for the program, click the wrong link, download a virus, go back, try again, find a more reputable site, download another virus, run anti-virus, discover your computer has been completely overrun by viruses, format, reinstall everything, find the right site, download the installer, click next 20 times, accept to have a new service running when you start your PC by accident, done?. You don’t do all of that every time? That’s because you know what you’re doing, I certainly don’t do half the stuff you mentioned for Linux.

Things to do to install an app on Linux: check the package manager

That’s it, if it’s not there you shouldn’t worry with it until you’re a bit more experienced. This is why I recommend beginner friendly distro a, they will have more stuff and possibly have snaps/flatpacks by default which should cover most of your use ases and are installed via the same GUI.

Man, there are hundreds (nonsense) distros out there, i need something like 3 lives to try them all.

Precisely my point, don’t. Pick a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Apparently not. I’ve saved a copy of the saves folder and simply pasted it in the retroarch folder on linux but the game doesn’t read anything.

Have you tried saving something new to see if we have the correct folder?

There were no errors. Screen went black and then everything was reset.

That’s crashing, there should be some log somewhere, can you reproduce or is it random?

This is actually fun: i have Ubuntu Budgie on my laptop and i was trying to create a bootable win10 on my pendrive with ventoy given that jesus christ woeusb is super complicated to install with all those manual dependencies installs and woeusb-ng gives problem with python. Installed ventoy, copied the iso, pasted it, nothing shows up in the drive. Copied the iso again, pasted it again, file already existing. ???. I’ve extracted the drive, plugged it back in, nothing. Extracted it again, plugged it in on my desktop, iso is actually there. Wtf is wrong with linux?

Did you installed Ventoy properly on the drive? Did you unmounted before removing the first time? Otherwise you might have corrupted the file, remember how people always say to eject before unplugging a USB drive? This is the reason, the GUI that shows you copying stuff is just a FE to the calls to the kernel for writing, the kernel actual writing to the disk is done afterwards, so even after the GUI closes the file was not totally written. Again, regardless of OS, unmount/eject drives before unplugging them. Also is your desktop Linux or windows? Does the bootable drive works? You need to learn to provide more information if you expect help, saying “stuff doesn’t work, what’s wrong with Linux?” Will get you a lot of answers of the type “the problem is between the keyboard and the chair”.

I know there are several reading orders available depending on which stories you want to prioritize, but I like publication order because you can see him creating the world. As in you can usually see him writing some one liners that prompt some ideas which are fully explored in the next book, I don’t remember any specific things but it’s stuff like talking about Gods being as powerful as how many people believe in them right before small gods.

What’s wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They’re easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

Replace Arch with Ubuntu and the answer is yes. Arch based that’s not a good idea.

The reason is that in 6 months lots can have changed, and Arch is not guaranteed a stable base, so updates might assume you have certain versions or things might break because you should have done a middle step during the upgrades that you didn’t which is now buried in months of update news in the wiki.

If you want to only update your system every six months, Arch is not ideal, it’s likely to work, but not guaranteed.

The Navidson record is a movie though.

Acknowledging DRM free games on steam is absolute proof that steam is not DRM, you cannot hold both views at the same time, they’re contradictory. Either all games on steam have DRM or steam is not DRM. Again, replace steam with an actual DRM software like Denuevo and you’ll see why.

“Any” has those two meanings, the fact that you chose an ambiguous phrasing is your fault, and the fact you haven’t apologized while making clear what you meant, but in fact doubled down in the aggressive tone tells a lot about you.

Also the phrase doesn’t mean what you think it does, you should have said"you can play all games on steam without steam", which would be correct, not all games can be played without seam, but some can, you yourself recognize this when you say that the odds are against me when picking a random game, therefore there is a chance. And this is the thing that seems hard to comprehend to everyone who claims steam is DRM, they that same phrasing with Denuevo or other actual DRM things and you’ll see why it’s bullshit.

In other words, a software is DRM if and only if every game that contains it is DRM protected. Let’s go back to logic school: if A then B is negated as A and not B, for example"If a dog then an animal" is true, so the negation would be false: “dog and not an animal” is in fact a contradiction. Or on the other side “if animal then dog” is false, so the negation animal and not a dog" must be possible, and indeed it is.

In this case what you’re stating is that steam is DRM which means “if it’s on steam then it’s DRM protected”, that statement is false because the negation"game on steam and no DRM" is possible. On the other hand “if it has Denuevo is DRM protected is true” and the negation “has Denuevo and is no DRM” is an impossibility.

Writing is hard, huh? According to the dictionary Any means “some, or even the smallest amount or number of”, therefore “you can play any steam game without steam” means “you can play even the smallest amount or number of steam games on steam”, or in other words “you can play one steam game without steam”. And like I said you can in fact play more than one steam games without steam, therefore you’re wrong.

claiming […] you can play any steam game without Steam is flat out wrong.

You should go inform yourself, many games on steam can be played without steam. I’ve even shared my copy of a game with a bunch of friends and we all played together in LAN, with a single copy of a Steam game, and only I had steam installed since this was at work.

Steam does not enforce games to require steam, it is not a requirement, it’s available for those who want to use it.

It’s probably fine, but you can accidentally short it when moving it around by touching it or resting it up on something conductive, even if you’re careful dust might short it as well, but this is much rarer.

As a general rule I would try to avoid it, but would not be my first concern.

If you read the first story (The colour of Magic + The light fantastic) you will know the story of the librarian, he start as a human there hahahah.

You must sign into steam the same way you must sign in to GoG, i.e. to download the game the first time. After that you can just run the binary. In fact you can copy that binary to another computer without steam to play there. However Steam is not against DRM, therefore some games there do have DRM and need either steam or in this case PSN to run.

That’s an important thing, games CAN use steam as DRM, but they’re not forced to, so there are games in Steam without DRM, therefore Steam is not a DRM by definition.

If for every 41 games that had Denuevo one didn’t had DRM Denuevo wouldn’t be a DRM software. However Denuevo is a DRM software, a game cannot both have Denuevo and not have DRM, however a game can be on Steam and not have DRM, therefore Steam is not DRM.

Btw, I think the ratio is way off, the vast majority of games on steam are Indy which don’t usually integrate with DRM.

So i really wanted to ditch windows once and for all

Why?

so i’ve tried Linux for a week trying different distros (debian, manjaro, ubuntu, opensuse, mint)

Why? Choose one and stick with it, preferably a beginner friendly one like Ubuntu or Mint.

and first of all why? Why are there so many distros out there?

Because different people like different things and have different opinions. Some people like to have the latest packages and so they choose Arch, while others prefer to have a stable system until they want to upgrade core packages and so they go with Ubuntu.

What’s the difference between debian + kde and manjaro + kde?

One is Debian based and the other in Arch based. Debian uses apt, Arch uses pacman. Debian has a slower release cycle to ensure compatibility while Arch has a faster release cycle to ensure the latest versions of things are available. Like these there are thousands of small differences between any two distros. It’s mostly philosophical, so just pick something beginner friendly and stick with it until you find a reason to switch.

They look the same, they work the same. I don’t get it.

They don’t work 100% the same, that’s like saying that a car and a truck are the same because they’re both painted black and have a steering wheel. Under the hood they’re very different.

Also why do things have to be complicated?

They’re not, they’re different. Doing stuff on Windows is also complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing, excepts you’ve had years of experience, in a few years Linux will feel easy and Windows complicated.

I’ve installed debian, installed calibre to manage my ebooks, created a library from an existing library on my hard drive (not the one with debian installed), ERROR! All the files are read-only.

Is the entire hard-drive read only? How did you mount it? What format is it on? You’re skipping a lot of important questions, that if you had answered (or asked about this issue) you would know the problem. My guess is that you don’t have ntfs-3g installed and the drive was NTFS.

What??? I’ve followed multiple guides on how to change permissions and finally solved the problem.

How? This might give us an idea of what was wrong with it.

Now let’s restart my pc. files on the hard drive are read only WHAT???

Yes, makes sense, did you applied a permanent fix or a temporary one? Since we don’t know what you did we have to assume you did a temporary fix, so it’s like asking why did Firefox not opened after I restarted my computer if I had open it before.

Fuck debian, let’s go on manjaro.

That’s a bad reason to switch distros, if you switch distros every time you run into something you don’t understand you’re going to run out of distros fairly quickly. Let me tell you right now, EVERYTHING one distro can do another one can, no exceptions. Something not working is a bad reason to switch distros unless you know why the other distro makes it work and are okay with the philosophical differences between distros.

No problems at all on calibre. Managed to create the library as easy as i did on windows. My question is: where’s the fun in this?

The same thing that’s causing you problems is an awesome feature, Linux is very modular, you can build yourself your system exactly the way you want it. That is very fun.

It’s just problems, after problems, after problems and i didn’t even start gaming.

Well, yeah, it’s an unfamiliar thing, I feel the same every time I have to use Windows.

I mean i tried installing retroarch and importing my saves but of course nothing works.

Why not? AFAIK RetroArch should have cross compatible saves.

Read this guide, read that guide. Nope. Nothing works. Ok, fuck retroarch let’s customize the appearance of my desktop: move some icons on the panel, center this, adjust height, move this on the left, spent 30 minutes tweaking, very nice…

Did you saved in the meantime? Let his be a lesson, save often, you never know when something will happen.

kde crashes, all back to default.

That’s weird, I don’t remember last time KDE crashed, but then again I’m not using Manjaro so maybe the current version there is broken? What was the error? Did you submitted a bug report? That might be an important finding.

Let’s download some apps. I want as many apps that i already know as possible. Let’s see if jdownloader is available for linux. Yep there’s one. Nope, not for manjaro (officially). There’s a AUR package available. Nice.

Not nice, don’t use AUR on Manjaro, you will break stuff.

What do i need to do to install a AUR package? A wall of text on the wiki, 20 minutes videos, yay.

That’s because AUR is not meant for people who don’t know what they’re doing. It’s dangerous and unstable, the way to get an air package is to build it yourself, the way to get an automated tool to install them is to build the package for it yourself, this should prevent people who shouldn’t be building packages from doing so. BTW, Manjaro is especially unsafe because it has an AUR manager in their official repos IIRC, which btw is called yay, so not sure if that was a joke.

Ok let’s call it a day. Do i need to live another life to make linux work?

No, you just need time to learn something new, instead of jumping around thinking that things would solve themselves. If you had started with Ubuntu you might not had either of those problems, and if you had learned what was wrong with the first problem on the first distro you would know how to fix it in every other distro and solve similar problems, just like you did with Windows before and now solving things there is intuitive for you.