 I love Linux, I think that everybody who has watched this channel knows that I have a passion for everything to do with Linux. But I'm not one of those guys who looks at Linux and thinks that it's perfect and you can't say anything wrong against it and if you do you're a Linux hater, I think that's all complete nonsense. So what I'm going to talk about today is one of the biggest problems that Linux has. Now I've talked about a lot of problems that Linux has, but I think that out of all of them, this is probably the worst problem that Linux has. It's the one that seems to plague almost every single distribution. It seems to be the one that is overlooked. I think it's the one that is hardly ever fixed. Some distros do it right. Most of them do not. And what is that problem? That problem is websites. Linux has a website problem and I don't know what it is about web development, but maybe there's something that doesn't correlate between being able to put together a Linux distro and actually designing a functional website. Somewhere along the line, those things aren't meshing because pretty much no matter what distribution you look at, their website is horrible. Now there are some distributions that do it right. So for example, Linux Mint has a wonderful website. Now they didn't use to their website used to be horrible. Now it's pretty good. Ubuntu does an okay job with their website and a lot of the Ubuntu flavors do also do okay. But outside of those examples, it's kind of hard to find a website that features a Linux distribution that is actually good. So for example, let's talk for a minute about my favorite distro, Arco Linux. Now Arco Linux has a lot of problems in terms of complexity that they need to solve. It's definitely a very complex distribution. They have too many ISOs. They have a problem with overdoing it in terms of features. Those are all reasonable things. But the first thing a user is going to experience when they hear about Arco Linux is probably this and this is their website and it is the most confusing thing you're ever going to see. Now they have their blog and stuff like that, but the blog is not the problem. Their problem comes when you go to downloads and you get a brand new window and then you have options. You have a ton of options. Now I love my fellow human beings, but we're all lazy mofos. We don't read things. We're going to go to this website. We're not going to read any of this stuff and we're not going to know what learning path means or click on any of these links. Nope, we're going to go up to the download links. We're going to wonder why we have to load a new page in order to do it, but whatever. And then we're going to get here and like, which one do I download? Which one do I download? I don't know what any of this stuff means. You've got to remember, didn't read any of the instructions. And even if you had read any of the instructions, you still might not know what it means because it is very complex. This website is broken. It's not very good. It is somehow better than the website they had before because their website that they had before was worse, if you can believe me, but this is definitely not the most intuitive websites you're going to come across. Now, the saving grace for ARCO is that they do not target brand new to Linux users. This is very much a established Linux user focused distribution, at least in my opinion. I would never say your new user to Linux go use ARCO. That's just not something that is a good idea. So because of that fact, at least you're dealing with people who are more used to actually going through and reading documentation and stuff like that. So you have a chance of catching their attention when it comes to telling them what ISO they need to download. So the thing is, I don't want to pick on ARCO. I love ARCO. It's my favorite distro. Let's talk about this nonsense. I'm going to actually reload this so you guys can see this. Look at all this animation. Like, okay, this is brutal Linux. Website, bloated. Okay. I don't like the word bloated, but it is bloated. Get rid of the animations. Now I've got to remember this is more of an opinion on terms of animation. I don't think that it's a great thing. You don't really need it. The good news about Grita is they do put a download button right there up front. You do have to go through and kind of scroll down it to actually get to the downloads, but that's probably a good thing considering that you, they want you to actually know the things. Your people are more likely to read some of this stuff if they have to go through it. Keep that in mind for when we talk about endeavor here in a minute because I have some complaints about them too. But I don't like the design of this website, but then I don't like the design of Grita either. So this is just as garish as their operating system. That's an opinion, but I think it's true. Moving on to Linux Mint. This is an example of a good website, but this is brand new. They just made this last year and before this, it was really bad. But now it's an example of a really good website. Download link right there on the front. If you want to know information, then you can scroll down. All the stuff you care about right up there at the top. Very simple, very pretty, no hideous animations. It's really good. Now I know what you're thinking. Matt, don't you hate Linux Mint? I don't hate Linux Mint. I don't care for their developers, but they have a really good website. So whoever did their website, good job. Let's talk for a minute about the website that spurred the idea for this video. And that is endeavor. And the reason why I even considered this is because my next long term review is going to be endeavor OS. It's part of an arch based distro extravaganza that I'm going to be doing over the next couple months. I'm not going to call it an extravaganza because that's a stupid word, but whatever. I'm going to do some versus videos and stuff like that. So stay tuned for that. Make sure you hit the subscribe button if you're interested in that. But the point is, is that I came here, I was going to download the ISO for endeavor. So I came here and I saw download and help up there, but I figured, well, you know, there's probably like a download link here on the front site and you know, I'm going to read some of this stuff. I'm not against readings. I went through and read some of their marketing materials because basically what you see on the front page of a website is marketing material. They're always going to put their best foot forward. So I scrolled down. I read their walls of text. I mean, you can't really call those wall to text or just paragraphs of text, but it's fine. There are lots of white space, but whatever. I'm not a designer, so I can't really critique, but I'm going to critique anyways because that's the point of the video. Then we get down here to our mirrors and like, oh, cool. Mirrors right on the front page. I'm not going to have to click on a link other than to find the closest mirror. Let's see here. Closest mirror to me is going to be, well, I mean, none of these really. But the Canadian one would be pretty good. I'm going to click on this link here. What this is not a link. Why have a list of your mirrors on your front page? If you're not going to give the link to the mirror, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. It just no sense at all. This is a waste of space on your website. I'm glad you don't have to pay for a website by this, by the page or something. You know, it's just, this is silly. And even if you're going to have this here, have a link right here to the to the mirrors that you can then go click on another link. I mean, you'd think that maybe this was a link. Nope. So if you've gone through the trouble of scrolling down, most people aren't going to do this, by the way, most people are going to just click on the download link. And we're going to talk about that here. I know I'm picking on endeavor. I'm sorry. But it was like I said, the it was the genesis of this idea. If you scroll down and you're all the way down here, you either have to click on here, you know, where you wanted to probably should have done in the first place and we'll talk about that in a minute. Or you have to scroll all the way back up and then click on this link because it says download. So you're going to assume, well, again, maybe maybe you didn't see this up here at the top. Maybe you didn't. It's possible. But you did see this thing with the rocket ship and it says download. So I'm going to click this and it's going to take me to the download page. Right. And the answer to that question is no. It takes you to the release notes, but they're released notes. I lied. I guess that does actually have a link to the mirror. So you got to scroll all the way down through the release notes. But that's fine. What you should do is to click on the download page. And that's going to take you to the download page, right? The places where the mirrors are listed. No, I'm sorry. If you click on this, like, no, that's not what it does. It takes you to this page and you have to click on related release, not download, but latest release. And then it's going to get back to that page we saw earlier with all the release notes that takes a little while to load. And then you got to scroll all the way down to actually get to the download page. Now, the thing is, is that I'm prepared to love Endeavor OS. I know a lot of people like it. There's a lot of things that can be said, apparently, that are good about Endeavor OS. And I'm going to go into this long term review, putting this ISO stuff out of my mind, because I made the mistake with Debian of focusing too much on their inability to put the non free ISO front and center. I talked about that quite a lot in that long term review. And I think that that was a mistake because I should have just focused on the distro itself and just mentioned in passing that the website was terrible. We could talk about the Debian website, too, but I've kind of beat that horse to death. The point is, is that Linux has a website problem and there are two distributions that really exhibit this the most. Arco and Endeavor OS. Endeavor at least has a pretty website. But if you have to go through four steps in order to get to the download link, you're doing it wrong. You want people to download this thing, put a link to the download on the front page or just make the list of the mirrors that you already have, make those linkable. Just put some hypertext in there and make the links links. It doesn't make any sense to me. If you have to visit three pages of a website in order to finally get to the download links, you've lost my interest. And that's that that's the biggest problem I have is that unless you're deliberately trying to make it hard for someone to download like and I'm not talking about hard. I'm talking about more like tedious if unless you're deliberately doing that, then you should be focused on putting a download link right on your front page. You should do that. And I don't understand why Endeavor didn't. So I know I spent a lot of time focusing on Endeavor here. And that's just because like I said, it's the next thing I'm going to be trying out. But they're not alone in this, right? They're not alone in having a website that just confuses the hell out of me like that one feature of that website confuses the hell out of me. I don't understand why it's so hard to find a damn download link and Arcos confuses the hell out of me just in general. Like I've been using Arco now for two years, like almost full time as my favorite distro. It's the distribution that I love the most. And even when I try something different, I always end up going back to Arco because I like it a lot. But its website is horrendously complicated and finding the things that you need to find in order to know what you're supposed to do is too complicated. And the reason why I say that find the stuff that you need to find is because Arco Linux itself is complicated. You have to know what those isos are. You can't look at Arco Linux XL or Arco Linux XS. You can't look at Arco Linux BD, whatever the hell they are. And no, that's the ISO that I want. Because you can't just look at the title of the ISO, you're not going to know that. Now, once you get to source forage or whatever, you may be able to figure out something like one of those isos is the ISO that will come with a specific window manager or desktop environment. Those will be a little bit easier than the ones that kind of come with a conglomeration of stuff. The problem is finding the information to discover what ISO you want is not easy. So Endeavor is not the only website I have a problem with. I know the people behind Endeavor are very passionate. And the Arco Linux guys are too. Like why do you want us to spend so much of our effort on designing a good website when we could spend that development effort on making a fantastic Linux distribution? That's a good question, right? But the thing is with Linux is that part of the process is marketing yourself, right? It's part of the whole thing is making sure that people have access to your distro and have the information they need in order to install it and use it. And part of that is having a good website. By having a good website and having the information on it in an accessible manner means that you're going to solve about 50% of the support questions you're probably going to get. Because if people can find the information for themselves, a lot of people at least will at least take that first step in order to find it for themselves, right? If it's possible, they'll go out and find the information. Some people are just gonna go ask a question first without even bothering to do any Googling, right? But at least some people will be able to go for themselves and try to find the information. If your website prohibits that, they're gonna go into that other pool and just clog your support tickets trying to find the information. Or they're just gonna distro hop and go somewhere else. And maybe some Linux distro developers don't care if people go out to other places. And I mean, why would they? And really at the end of the day, it doesn't matter to them. It's not as if they get paid by the number of users they can get. But they're also driving away potential supporters in the future. Some of those new users could possibly transition into long time users, which would then transition into people who support you by writing documentation, support you by doing bug fixes or bug reports, will support you by supporting monetarily. I mean, most new users aren't gonna support you monetarily. At the beginning, they're gonna use it for a long time and then they'll go through and give you some dollars. You don't wanna drive them away just because your website is horrible. So a rambly video. And I have a feeling that this is going to piss some people off. But I don't care because it has to be said. Like make your websites good, okay? I don't care about perfect. Like it doesn't matter. Like the endeavor OS thing is an easy fix. Make that link at the top, link to an actual download page fixed. That's literally all you gotta do. Like link to the download page. Like you don't do that. You link to another page that you don't have to click on to go to another download page. Makes no sense, right? I fixed it. Like it's so easy. It's a HTML tag away from being fixed. The Oracle Linux one is not so easy to fix because it's a complicated distro and trying to explain all the stuff that surrounds it is hard. Like I'm not lying when I said their website before was worse because they had a website separate for each different ISO or ISO brand or whatever. Like DB, the XL, XS. They used to have URLs and websites for each one of those. And each one was filled to the brim with information. I mean, they may even still have those websites. I don't actually know. But at least now they've consolidated quite a bit. So it is better, but it's still not good. And I can at least understand why it's so hard to go through and have a website that explains everything that they need to explain in a concise manner right there on the front page. Like probably the best fix for them would be to say, hey, this is the ISO that you need to download. Everybody else can do a little bit more digging and find out that there are other ISOs, but even that's probably too simple. So that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on this whole thing, you can leave those in the comment section below. Make sure you like, comment, subscribe, all that stuff. I really do truly appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Sid A. Devon, Patrick Albin, Marcus, Megalyn, Jackson, I can tool, Steve A. Sebregaer Linux, Eric Mitchell, Archer and Carbon Data, Jeremy, Sean, Oden, Martin, Merrick, Cam, Joshua Lee, Daydogs, Peter Ray, Crucible, Dark Band of Six, Vlad A. and Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.