>>1779
Not what I said, and also false. The beauty of Linux is that distros have a lot more in common with each other than most people realize. I just happened to use Debian and Ubuntu as an example, because I was talking about Mint. I'm sure most things you learn in the Debian side of Linux could be applied in the Arch or Gentoo side of Linux, etc etc. It's all Linux anyway.
>>1772
>But the way I see it is that with source-based distros you at least have a fighting chance so to speak, as long as you know what you are doing. With binary-based distros, if something breaks or doesn't work, you are pretty much cooked.
What do you mean by "fighting chance"? It's not like there aren't workarounds for things in binary- based distros, and some break less often than others. I'd much rather have a system that is stable and somewhat hard to fix than a system that breaks often but is easy to fix.
>Can I recommend Debian to a newcomer when I know that writing a .ebuild is significantly easier than writing a Debian package? Can I recommend either when I know that both these things are relatively complex technical tasks?
Newcomers, and even some tech-savvy users don't write their own packages. In fact most people don't even need to do that. Why should that be considered?
>I don't have experience running binaries made for Windows on Linux, but I have a vague idea of the whole stack being finicky, fragile and error prone - it has to be, because of how both X11 and Wayland work.
It isn't. In my experience, at least on X11, a lot of things just work with vanilla Wine, and setting up Lutris or Heroic with GEProton, or even running stuff through Steam isn't complicated. Of course it's not perfect, but don't forget that you're trying to run a binary made for a whole different OS.
