The thing with autocorrect is that you don’t have to accept the correction.

If it’s a her, you mean fiancée, fiancé is used only for men. And, it’s basically a chromebook in how she uses it. But, chromebooks are designed so that you never have to do any system administration. You never have to upgrade drivers or figure out how to get to the next release.

She probably hasn’t had to deal with that yet, but eventually the system will have to be updated. Over time, cruft piles up and makes it harder and harder to upgrade and manage. Atomic distributions are designed to be much more like chromebooks. Someone else manages the upgrades and the tricky choices, and then you just install their base image.

Until I realised I should just work inside a container.

Yeah, it’s a game changer. Especially if you have different projects on the go. I’m used to having to deal with an ugly path with all kind of random things in it because I need them for one project. But, with containers / distroboxes / toolbx you can keep those changes isolated.

Yeah, I only use flatpak for GUI apps that don’t need any special handling. To be fair, that’s a decent number of the things I use most often: Firefox, Thunderbird, Signal, Kodi, Discord, Gimp, VLC. I think it’s also how I installed some themes for KDE / Plasma.

Console stuff I’ve either done in a distrobox using the conventions of that OS (apt for the Ubuntu one, DNF for the Fedora one), or I’ve used homebrew. But, I haven’t used too much homebrew because I want my “normal” console to be as unchanged as possible.

There are a few things I’ve used distrobox-export to make available outside the distrobox.

It took me a little while to understand how you’re supposed to think about the system, but now that I think I get it, I really like it. My one frustration is that there’s an nVidia driver bug that’s affecting me, and nVidia has been unable to fix it for a few months. I think I’d be in exactly the same situation with a traditional distro. The difference is that if they ever fix it, I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until the fix makes it to the Bazzite stable build. I suppose I could switch to Bazzite testing and get it within days of it being fixed instead of weeks. Apparently just use a “rebase” command and reboot. But, I’m hesitant to do that because other than the nVidia driver, everything’s so stable.

So, there are multiple ways of installing things. For GUI apps the standard way is flatpaks. Some non-GUI things are installed that way, but it’s less common.

For CLI apps, homebrew is installed by default and it’s recommended as a way to install CLI things.

The method I like for apps that have a lot of interdependencies is to use a distrobox. If you want a development environment where multiple apps all talk to each-other, you can isolate them on their own distrobox and install them however you like there.

I currently have a distrobox running ubuntu that I use for a kubernetes project. In that distrobox I install anything I need with apt, or sometimes from source. Within that kubernetes project I use mise-en-place to manage tools just for that particular sub-project. What I like about doing things this way is that when I’m working on that project I have all the tools I need, and don’t have to worry about the tools for other projects. My base bazzite image is basically unchanged, but my k8s project is highly customized.

If you really want to, you can still install RPMs as overlays to the base system, it’s just not recommended because that slows down upgrades.

More details here:

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/

Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn’t in the Debian stable repositories?

If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.

Debian is fine as an introduction to Linux, if that’s what you want. But, as a beginner, you’re going to screw up, and Debian doesn’t do anything to protect you from that.

Atomic distributions let you use Linux but make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s much harder to break the system in a way you can’t just reboot to fix it.

It all depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to learn Linux by using it, then by all means, go for a traditional distribution. Debian is nice, but I’d go for Ubuntu. But, if your goal is to have a stable system that you can’t screw up as a beginner I’d go with an atomic distribution. If your goal is to play games, Bazzite is hard to beat.

You can still learn Linux if you use an atomic distribution. Configuring and using the desktop environment is basically the same. But, you don’t need to worry about your drivers, and you don’t install packages the traditional way. If you want to learn those things, you can run a VM or a distrobox.

I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.

It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.

For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.

I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.

I don’t think I’m the confused one here, to be honest with you, as shown by the other answers and upvotes in this thread

Yes, other people were confused. That doesn’t mean that you’re not confused.

The question is clearly asking if Americans are aware that they’re now a rogue state, and I answered appropriately.

No, what you answered was “How do Americans feel about being a rogue state?” That’s a completely different question, even though it’s the one most people answered.

I fully understand and acknowledge that we’re seen as a rogue state externally

The question was whether Americans in general understood and acknowledged that. I would say no, because most Americans don’t follow foreign news sources. People who are getting their news from Fox News, OANN and Newsmax are probably not aware of that. Instead, they probably think the US is even more respected than ever.

How can you be this confused?

You’re basically proving the point of this meme.

The question is basically “Are Americans aware of how the world perceives them?”

Possible answers to that question are: “Yes, I read DW news in English, and BBC news too. I’m aware of how the world perceives the US.” Or “No, I can imagine how the world must view the US, but I only read US news so I can only guess.”

Are people in the US

Yes, go on…

aware that they are now definitely a rogue state

The question isn’t your awareness of what the government is doing. It’s your awareness of how the US is perceived by the rest of the world. A rogue state is “a nation that is considered very dangerous to other nations”. To answer that question, you have to reference other nations views on the US.

Saying what is inevitable? That other countries will consider the US a rogue state?

You’re one of the few people who actually understood the question. As a result, you’re one of the few who actually got the right answer.

Doubt it.

What non-American news sources do you read? Do you really think that more than 50% of the US actually consults non-American news sources?

It figures it takes someone calling themselves “CanadaPlus” to actually see the actual question and answer it.

Everyone else is answering about how aware Americans are about what’s happening, but the question was about whether Americans were aware of how the world perceived the US. The answer, of course, is “no, Americans have no idea because Americans consume almost no non-American media”.

Note, that this isn’t actually the question. It’s not whether Americans are aware of what’s happening, it’s about whether Americans are aware of how the rest of the world perceives the US.

This is the closest anybody in the thread has actually come to answering the question. The full answer is that Americans almost never consult non-American news sources, so of course they’re not aware of how they’re perceived in the rest of the world.

This doesn’t seem to be actually answering the question. The question was about how the US was perceived by other countries, not how Americans perceive their own government.

Interesting, but not surprising that this doesn’t really answer the question. The question was about whether Americans were aware of how the US was perceived outside its borders.

I don’t think that applies here. 1/3 in each group is fair for domestic matters. But, OP is asking about perceptions of the US by people in other countries.

In that case, even the 1/3 that is opposed to what’s happening will contain a lot of people with no idea how the rest of the world sees the US. For example, of the 1/3 of Americans who deeply oppose what’s happening, what fraction do you think actually read Le Monde or Deutsche Welle, or are even aware that they have an English-language service?

And, the 1/3 that is fully supportive of what’s happening will contain a lot of people who think that this is improving how the rest of the world sees the US. Sure, some will be aware and will still be defiant in the face of how the rest of the world is reacting. But, others will be watching Fox News or Newsmax and will hear propaganda that convinces them that the rest of the world admires and respects the US more than ever for taking a decisive stand against the deep state.

So, as with anything involving something happening outside the US, I’d guess more than 50% of Americans have no idea what the rest of the world is thinking.