Look, I’m a Debian user for 15 years, I’ve worked in F/OSS for a long time, can take care of myself.
But I’m always on a lookout for distros that might be good fit for other people in my non-tech vicinity, like siblings, nieces, nephews… I’m imagining some distro which is easy for gaming but can also be used for normal school, work, etc. related stuff. And yeah, also not too painful to maintain.
(Well, less painful than Windows which honestly is not a high bar nowadays… but don’t listen to me, all tried in past years was to install Minecraft from the MS store… The wound is still healing.)
I have Steam Deck and I like how it works: gaming first, desktop easily accessible. But I only really use it for gaming.
So I learned about Bazzite, but from their description on their main site I’m not very wise:
The next generation of Linux gaming [Powered by Fedora and Universal Blue] Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
Filtering out the buzzwords, “cloud native image” stands out to me, but that’s weird, doesn’t it mean that I’ll be running my system on someone else’s computer?
Funnily enough, I scrolled a bit and there’s a news section with a perfectly titled article: “WTF is Cloud Native and what is all this”.
But that just leads to some announcements of someone (apparently important in the community) talking about some superb community milestone and being funny about his dog. To be fair, despite the title, the announcement is not directed towards people like me, it’s more towards the community, who obviously already knows.
Amongst the cruft, the most “relevant” part seems to be this:
This is the simplest definition of cloud native: One common way to linux, based around container technology. Server on any cloud provider, bare metal, a desktop, an HTPC, a handheld, and your gaming rig. It’s all the same thing, Linux.
But wait, all I want to run is a “normal” PC with a Linux distro. I don’t necessarily need it to be a “traditional” distro but what I don’t want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.
So how does this work? Am I missing something?
(Or are my red flags real: that all of this is just to make a lot of promises and get some VC-funding?)
We are averaging 400TB/mo in ISOs and it’s increasing. If lay-users are turning away in numbers greater than random noise I’m not seeing it. If Linux users who argue about definitions of already defined words on Lemmy are – that’s not a growth target.
How would you even measure how many are turning away? Do your stats tell you how many people don’t download it? Do they give you feedback on what turned them away? And those who did download it, do they give you feedback whether and how the term influenced their decision?
But that’s all beside my actual point. I may have gotten carried away in my frustration at a recurring issue in the tech space where people proficient with some thing are unwilling to cater to those who aren’t, buillding a wall of required expertise around the good things (software or knowledge) they otherwise produce.
I think it’s an unreasonably pedantic stance to insist on using a correct term at the expense of utility. I’d expect a software description to start with what it does, not how it comes to be, particularly if the “how it comes to be” is abbreviated in an intransparent technical term, linking to a page slapping the unfamiliar with a slew of product terms and technologies rather than an actual explanation of what it means and what bearing it has on the product. Your description as it is now targets tech experts, rather than laypeople, and if other people have also suggested changing the wording to be clearer, it shows that I’m not alone in that assessment.
I feel like the tech environment - and any other knowledge-oriented environment like science or education - is better served if those with more knowledge make an effort to make it accessible to those with less. Thus, I take issue with people doubling down on hiding it behind terms specific to their field and largely unknown outside.
We probably won’t agree on this issue. You feel justified in being technically correct, while I place more value on accessible descriptions for less technical (prospective) users.