That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.

It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.

You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.

I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.

Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.

Bring back the good old days of ndiswrapper.

It depends what packages you need, and what they have to interact with.

If it’s all standalone then no problem until the hardware degrades.

For example I had laptop (DOS/Win98 ) with a pcmcia network adapter with BNC 50 ohm coax network dongle, 9/25 pin serial/parallell ports, maybe p/s2 port, floppy drive and so on.

I can’t think what I’d connect that to I might have a parallell port on my PC, but on that laptop I think I only had laplink so I’d need a linux app to interact with that. I do still hve a floppy drive somewhere, but how to connect that to my motherboard?

So I’d probably be limited to keyboard and trackball input, and audio + (monochrome) video output.

lemmings on black and white, blurry, slow refresh rate would still “work” unless the hdd got corrupted.

Within a lifetime current gen wifi, usb, ethernet etc may all be as rare as 9 pin serial is today - it’s still around of course, but you cant rely on it.

Beta Testing Weenie cough I mean Best Tech Wizard

Yeah but make sure you get the high mocktane stuff, too weak and you end up with punypunk.

In the 1990s all internet data was transported by snails using these things called AOL CD-ROM packets.

With the TC-AOL-CD-ROM protocol, you had to keep on gluing a copy of the same CD to another snail every day and sending it off to the recipient, until you get one back confirming the reciept.

If you do enough annoying wordplay to cause enough people to boil over with anger you can get Punpunk.

Some cafes will do it - not as standard, but a few - maybe try the ones trying to be 1-up from a greasy. https://seahousescafe.co.uk/the-breakfast-menu

As will many hotel breakfasts, there’s often little single serving marmite things in with the single serving jam packets. I’d say about half the hotels i’ve stayed in with decent cooked breakfast have had it on offer.

I’ve also seen it in little roadside food van / trailer type things too.

Anyway, you want sainsbury’s yeast extract instead of marmite, it’s way gloopier and nicer tasting.

+1. and yes use the wiki not the install script.

I think theres value to anyone with a genuine interest if they just have a go at an archinstall - I think they can setup most things of interest in a Qemu(vm), or a spare partition, or even a usb or something. Theres nothing to lose but time. I’d recommend the user knows enough about their disk setup and their incumbent boot manager so as not to screw up their main os. Though i’m very tempted to say that’s a rite of passage.

Of course everyone already has a regular backup(s) which contains some sort of list or script for all the software, configs and tweaks they normally do. If not - well another rite of passage.

Why did the hipster burn its tongue?

Soul sole

I hope the conclusion is that annual notifications work.

wikipedia is too much.

I like the way they think

Maybe it’s to do with the number of mouse buttons.

Many microcontrollers can be set up for in circuit programming.

They might be intended for one time programming in the factory, but solder some wires on in the right place and supply the right signal and it can be reprogrammed.

Is that a circuit or a computer?

RTFW

lscpu -C

January