I’m all for more people switching to linux, but a lot of your windows issues sound less like windows issues and more like your specific installation is messed up somehow issues.

One thing I will mention though is that Windows does have native per-application volume control, you don’t need to install EarTrumpet. You can right-click the system tray volume icon and open the mixer, or just search for “volume mixer” in the start menu.

Dear god can we please stop it with the “My Linux Journey” posts. Create a new community or post to instagram or something.

EDIT:

Be the Change You Wish To See in the World

[email protected]

Dear diary,

Today I ate a burger. For real this time.

I’m surprised nobody said it yet. Welcome back!

Sounds like you should get a Mac.

Be that as it may, I would like to be constructive for a change:

Why does every distro need yet another package manager? Yay/pacman I get because it seems to build it. Though I don’t understand why, other than AUR. APT is so nice and easy… I hope DNF is the same.

RPM - which DNF uses - is the standard package format for Linux ;-) The problem seems to me to be that every distribution does not attach any importance to something like common standards.

If you need games, use the OS that gives you these games. And if that OS gives you headaches, you need to decide if you want games, or a working OS. Maybe you can’t have both always. Or maybe an XBox or PS5 is a better option for you.

I’m an artist and I need photoshop. Adobe is evil, but Photoshop just works. But I still stayed with Linux. Now I use a combination of Gimp and Photopea. While Photopea is 90% there to what I need, Gimp is a disaster in terms of usability (I’ve been using Linux since 1999 btw, off and on, so I’m not new on Gimp). But I still stay with Linux, because it aligns with my beliefs that software should be open. I want nothing to do with corporations injecting tracking or ads on my OS.

I go as far as using a Macbook Air because I like the how its trackpad feels, but I don’t always run MacOS. Most of my actual work happens on Debian on my other computers.

As for Fedora, for games you might want to try Nobara, which is based on Fedora. The default Fedora might, or might not have everything setup for you to run games at higher speeds or compatibility. Running Windows games is not Linux distros’s first priority you see, but Nobara’s is.

Fyi, if you have an Nvidia card, KDE plasma on Wayland is gonna be a better experience.

As for why every distro needs it’s open package manager… Nobody knows, that’s why flatpak exists.

And if you’re using fedora… Just use the graphical app store.

for the package manager remark, you can get by with the GUI on most popular distros now.

I like using the cli but every now and then I challenge myself to only use GUI and I feel like it works fine on fedora, ubuntu etc.

I particularly like that fedora workstation keeps the system updates/upgrades in the GNOME app store, it feels cohesive and intuitive.

Which C++ redistributable do I need to run this program? It’s not the newest one or the year before that. It’s not the one provided by the installer. It’s 2013 (in this case only)!

Luckily, the Linux equivalent (glibc) is mostly backwards compatible. You can still hit issues if you have a binary blob that’s been compiled against a newer version of glibc than what comes with your distro, or if it’s compiled against an extremely old version of glibc, but that’s not too common.

Why does every distro need yet another package manager

A lot of them have been around for a very long time - dpkg (then apt) since 1994, RPM (then yum then dnf) since 1997 - and there’s no one package manager that’s clearly better than the others.

APT is so nice and easy… I hope DNF is the same.

dnf is just as easy, and in my experience, Fedora’s repos are pretty comprehensive and have a lot of things that Debian’s and Ubuntu’s don’t.

DNF is as easy as APT. Now many distros start to use wayland by default Thanks to great Improvement with stability.

I always like these posts. Comments are usually useful despite snide remarks and it’s nice hearing from other people that struggle(d). Glhf I say. Worth it in the end.

Why does every distro need yet another package manager?

1. Some are improvements
2. People hang onto the one they designed

There are some formats with excellent features like segregation of build and use, consistency of product and signed manifests. BUT, if you don’t get why that’s important you’ll take a deb-based distro or one that builds continually in-situ and never realize it’s a risk.

Having said that, apt4rpm was great, yum was bad, dnf is featureless shit, and redhat is quickly broadcomming under IBM because #ibm. So go get PCLinuxOS and ask where the box templates are. And that’s my 25-year summary of package management.

Why does every distro need yet another package manager?

I think most package managers - the ones actually part of a distro - are old. It’s not a question of why they all use different package managers, it’s a matter of them having developed them long ago before any single one matured.

That said, there are other considerations, which is also where new ones come from - different distros will have different approaches to package formats, dependency management, tracking of installed packages and system files, some might be implemented in a specific language due to the distro’s ideology, some might work in a different way (like NixOS), and there’s probably a whole bunch that just want a different interface.

You wouldn’t ask why Linux has a different way of viewing installed programs from Windows, and in the same vein packages are not a universal aspect of Linux, so each distro has to make its own choices.

Also I like pacman, some people complain about the commands being obscure, but I feel like they’re structured in a much more logical way. Don’t confuse it with yay though, pacman doesn’t build packages, and yay is specifically a wrapper around pacman that has different commands, while adding the ability to interact with the AUR.

I have a tinkering laptop set up with Fedora, DNF is as simple as APT and friendlier imo. I’ve switched to Nala (an APT wrapper that enables concurrent downloads) on my Debian PCs. YMMV.

Simply put: every distro needs its own package manager because the distros handle packages differently, from the way software is bundled and distributed, to where files reside in the filesystem.

E.g. APT is so friendly because of how rigid Debian is about the structure and info that is bundled within the .deb archive, which Pacman users tend to consider as unnecessarily restrictive bloat that impairs download/installation times. Meanwhile, yay (and other AUR helper programs) compiles the packages from source.

Although there are some that work across distros, like Nix or Homebrew. Plus there’s always flatpak or AppImages or (shudder) Snaps.

And of course, if you want people to think you’re basically a programmer, there’s always

$ git clone <git repository>
$ cd <git repository>
$ sudo make install

(for software that is packaged with a Makefile)