The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:
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~30 years old or older
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tech enthusiasts/workers
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linux users
There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.
I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?
Thoughts?
Am I too young? My age is 19-22. Oh now I think about it, there is no teenagers community. I feel old for being here.
As for tech enthusiast, maybe. I’m always impressed with open source software, but I don’t understand coding.
Linux user? Well I played around with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Tails, but at the end of the day, I still switched back to Windows just because how much they’ve dominated the world. It’s hard to find programs for linux, especially games. Wine doesn’t always work, Virtual Machine is just too much of performance degregation. Maybe Linux isn’t meant for me.
What’s keeping young people away is kids these days just like to use things that are already popular. iPhones, Nikes, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube. None of my classmates from high school know what Linux is, know about the Snowden leaks, think iPhones are the best because everyone else is using them (I’ll admit, I fell victim to peer pressure and got an iPhone, but now I switched back to a Galaxy so I can install apps without a corporation approving it, and I gave the phone to family.), wants 200 dollar shoes, constantly on mainstream social media in class, disrespect teachers even the nice ones. I mean kids these days just don’t care, they want to have fun with minimal effort, they aren’t gonna spend 5 minutes to try to understand the fediverse.
Yeah kids today are everything the grownups complained about when I was a kid. ;)
Not sure how old your experience with Linux is, but gaming is really great nowadays, thanks to Valve and Steam Deck.
I started messing with linux like around 2015? (not sure), and I last used linux around 2022. I had a HP laptop where if I try to run Ubuntu, the touch screen refuses to work, Firefox doesn’t scroll when you use touchpad gesture or mouse wheel scroll, until I found a command to run before firefox starts scrolling. Youtube videos refused to play, and installing ffmpeg still doesn’t play youtube (installing ffmpeg worked on an older laptop, but not this newer one). I try to play this niche game called FTL, and I couldn’t get a mod to work (Multiverse Mod). I tried Skyrim using Wine and lagged as hell, whereas I could play normally on Windows. I mean… the list goes on and on. I think computers these days are just built to be less and less compatible with Linux. One of these days, Intel or AMD is gonna build a CPU that breaks Linux.
Those are the last manufacturers you could expect to see pulling something like that, it won’t happen because the majority of servers run Linux, same on several enterprises’ workstations. To support that even more, the drivers by both are open source offering better/easier integration with the kernel.
I believe your playback issues could be related to missing codecs, ffmpeg on its own shouldn’t be what enables that as far as I know, perhaps in the past it pulled in a certain codec as a dependency so as a side effect videos started playing.
Those other input related things could have been using X instead of Wayland or applications running in compatibility mode (XWayland).
If you feel like giving it a try again I think you would be really happy with Nobara Linux, it’s perfect for a fully fledged installation that doesn’t need you to do much or any further tweaking, it’s also generally better for gaming, not sure if it will solve all your issues on that front, but do try to run those games through Steam or Heroic, or the more generic Lutris or Bottles
Another vote for Lutris here. For many years, my main game was WoW, and it runs fine there. Now my main game is GW2, which also runs fine under Lutris.
As someone who only want to own games through DMR-free Stores, Steam really isn’t an option. Performance still isn’t great, mods often break, still needs a lot of manual adjustments from time to time to make a non-Linux game work. But thanks to Steam, there’ll be more games support Linux. Hopefully most of them won’t be steam exclusive.
Yes, now give me your youth!
Wait what? I thought this was a horror site, not tech nerds.