My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.

well…

That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”

This appears to be true on the surface but is not accurate. I am a structural engineer and when people need to do something with their buildings, the engineers (structural, mechanical, fire, etc.) and the architects need the plans or at least a survey. If a side has the plans and the authority on the plans, that side has huge leverage over the building. Fortunately, this is never the case with buildings. Plans are considered public information. It would be so much better if the same applied to software.

That’s a fantastic description!

Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.

One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don’t have to use any particular distro if it doesn’t fit your use case or preferences. I don’t use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).

Is that all? I can live with that! A few months ago that I checked there were a lot more open issues.

I guess my biggest difficulty will be that the Macbook is my wife’s new laptop and she’ll kill me if I change the OS… again!

My first comment would be that free software made by a corporation is still free software. Like Eclipse, which was originally made by IBM and is a huge ecosystem, especially for “java and friends.” So, there is nothing wrong with VS Code(ium). It is a “proper” open source editor and a very good one (I don’t use it though - I prefer EMACS).

As for community-base alternatives (which is probably what you mean), you could consider kdevelop or pulsar. There are other alternatives which are equally good and surely one of them will fit your purpose. You mentioned Kate and I can’t find anything wrong with it, especially once you start installing the plugins that are relevant to what you do. Same with Gedit.