People use mainstream software because they're used to it or it came bundled with their hardware. We are used to Microsoft bundling it's software in with most PCs because it aggressively built those relationships with manufacturers and that's how it got massive market share.
The point about Linux is that is not a commercial piece of software designed to maintain Microsoft's grip on your life and now your data and sell you to advertiser's. Linux is just software that does the job and does it well without any compromises to keep a big corporation in control
The point for the average user is not that Linux is better in itself - it is that Linux is just as good but without all the compromises we've taken for granted in terms of poor data security, privacy, being sold as a product to advertiser's or having features locked away or restricted for the benefit of the company rather than consumers. Linux lets you do what you want with your hardware, choose any software you want, and do whatever you like on your device.
We're so no used to the compromises forced on us by big monopolies like Microsoft with Windows that most people don't even realise the value Linux gives in restoring those basic consumer rights ans freedoms.
Linux does what Windows does, it just doesn't ask you to give up your rights, your privacy or your data to do it. For the average user the benefits are hidden which is why they don't see the point in it.
I think many people coming to Linux having experienced some significant problems. Something didn’t work for them and they started to look for alternatives
Let’s call typical user David, he maybe has an older PC or laptop. He tried to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and now everything runs much slower. He cannot understand why and answers online are unhelpful. Meanwhile he cannot come back to Windows 7 because it’s support is over. What to do now?
All David’s data (calendar, mail, contacts, chats, documents etc etc) is locked in proprietary systems and now it’s difficult to get out of there. He tries to move to another platform but can’t because he’s restricted by little quirks and lack of support for features he needs.
Still believing that he could unbloat his system David comes across community of an open source app cloud platform – nextcloud. Surprisingly this platform doesn’t want his money or tries to lock him in. It works on any system, it’s got amazing support and community constantly creates new exciting home made modules to do some small but very welcome adjustments.
He realizes that such community is there for operating system as well. A year later he “runs Arch, btw”
This is just one path of a person who wanted his laptop to run as fast as it used to. Other people may dislike overreliance on big tech or would like to support the underdog – independent devs.
Bonus:
First thing I ever gotten from Linux was KDE connect: it didn’t work on Windows but it’s amazing on Linux. It connects devices between each other and let’s you sync the clipboard, use PC keyboard on your phone, send files locally (real fast), switch music tracks on other devices, change volume and a lot more.
At 700MB, it can no longer be called “damn small”, especially considering there are much smaller distributions out there, such as TinyCore @ 23MB and SliTaz @ 43MB (yes, SliTaz is still around).
Way back, I used to have the original, 50 MB DSL as a default PXE boot option in my lab. Was awesome for quick troubleshooting or to test hardware without having to mess with USB keys.
Alright it seems as though I’ve got it figured out. I’m so confused though.
Re-installing fontconfig, libXft and their additional devel packages fixed the problem, but I performed this exact step last night to no avail. I have no idea what changed since then but I can finally launch st. I wish I could provide more info on my troubleshooting but it really seems to have boiled down to re-installing the packages listed in the error message.
I’ve confirmed that fontconfig, freetype2 (although it’s listed as “ghc-gi-freetype2” in my package manager, not sure if that’s bad), and libXft are all installed. Seems like something may have changed with where they’re located or that make is looking for them in the wrong spot all of a sudden? As I mentioned above, I had no issues installing this previously.
Note: What may have caused an issue is that on one of my reinstall attempts last night I accidentally installed st to the root folder. I ended up removing it and re-installing back in my home folder, but is it possible that the process of removing it from Root caused this?
Please, never run plain “sudo make install” on a package managed system. With linux from scratch it might make sense… Doing so will “install” the thing (copy the files), but the copied files are foreign to the package manager. You cannot easily undo this, and can cause issues in future.
You had a compiler error about missing header file, libXft is from Xorg project. “devel” versions of packages usually provide these files.
st is from suckless project so it doesn’t need much to be “installed”: copy the built binaries into ~/bin/ or /opt/ and set your user PATH to look into those dirs. Check your user env if you need to modify the PATH.
If it matters, most of the TDE development team use Debian or related distros, so if you have no other preference, Debian will probably get you the best support.
If you want to try a live image before committing, Q4OS and ExeGnuLinux both supply ISOs with TDE.
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