captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

In my 10 years around the Linux ecosystem, I’ve never seen anyone recommend Red Hat to new home desktop users.

Ubuntu has joined Red Hat. It’s a corporate server distro now.

Go look at their website. More corporate logos than a Cup series stock car. Just figuring out which version you should download so you get a “normal desktop” is a task bigger than it should be. Back on the stupid bad old website I came across a guy who said he “installed Ubuntu but it didn’t come with APT” and I’m like “wtf…did you install Ubuntu Core, their Snap-only IoT thing?” And he stopped responding.

Actually I’m going to accuse Fedora of doing this too. You kind of have to know “Fedora WorkStation” is the Gnome version which is considered the default, “Spins” are the versions with other DEs, and “Silverblue” is the immutable file system version.

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullshit about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.