My partner doesn’t do much on the computer except web browsing and writing. The Scrivener writing program had a Linux version at some point that was abandoned.

I wanted to see if anyone personally has used Scrivener with Wine and if it is fussy or not. How has your experience been?

I could set it up for them, but they’re not a tech person and will probably reject Linux if it breaks all the time and they have to get me to come fix it.

Extra irrelevant info: trying to decide on having them try Mint or Ubuntu. Fedora is my daily driver and I typically use a headless Debian install for servers, but I heard Mint and Ubuntu are pretty perfect and low fuss for Windows users.

  • nottheengineer@feddit.de
    12·
    1 year ago

    On the distros: Go with mint. ubuntu has snaps which are the perfect way to scare new users away. They make everything super slow to launch and cause errors that make no sense if you don’t know how snaps work.

    And worst of all, if you type “sudo apt install firefox”, hit enter and press Y, you won’t get what you asked for. You’ll get the snap version of firefox and the only way to know that is if you read and understand the output of apt.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        2·
        1 year ago

        They are definitely pushing it there too, but not as hard. There isn’t a way to disable this shitty behaviour, you need to manually set apt up to not pull snaps for every package individually.

        • alteropen@noc.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          @nottheengineer well thanks for letting me know anyway, this probably explains a lot of the docker issues I have been encountering which are “snap only” problems, despite me installing through apt

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
            1·
            1 year ago

            Oh yeah, I learned about snap the hard way with docker as well.

            I’d highly recommend using a different distro for that.

            • alteropen@noc.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              @nottheengineer what do you suggest? problem is I’m limited since my home server is a raspberry pi so I’m limited to distros that support arm

              I should probably give Debian a try, but I never had a good experience with Debian desktop.

              • nottheengineer@feddit.de
                2·
                1 year ago

                I’d say debian is a good pick. I have debian LTS on my ventoy for whenever I need to partition a drive and it’s been great.

                I never had any issues with it, what drove you away from debian on the desktop?

    • Zatujit@reddthat.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      You do realize non tech people have absolutely no idea about package formats and such?? If you don’t understand something you should probably not worry about it

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s exactly my point. They shouldn’t have to worry about it and if you pick a distro without snaps, they don’t have to.

    • joel_feila@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Well non tech literate people probably wont notice the start up time and they shouldn’t be using the terminal

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        2·
        1 year ago

        Normal users do care about whether their browser takes 1 or 5 seconds to start up. That’s the difference between a new device and one from 3 years ago.

        And for those that aren’t comfortable with the terminal, snaps are an even bigger issue. All their apps will be slow and glitchy and they won’t have any idea why.

        • joel_feila@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          I doubt it. Shooing the cat away take more time then that. Looking a the headlines on the tv takes longer. I can’t picture any member of my family actually noticing.

          As for snaps . shrug sure if any app is glitchy all they know is check for updates, hopefully they do.