She finally allowed us to extend past ball-shaped chickens in a vacuum.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding my point, as I didn't mention the average person's intelligence in any way. All I'm saying is that minimizing the effort required to really try multiple distributions is a terrible way of introducing people to Linux. It will only lead to frustration and rejection. Choosing your bread doesn't require investing dozens of hours.
No, it absolutely is hard, and those are bad comparisons. Growing up you interact with bread and cars, and you build a preference based on what you're taught and what you experience. If I go into a new store and see a dozen types of bread I've never eaten, I can still make inferences about their taste, texture etc. This is not the case with Linux distributions - if I've never used Linux before, I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing.
And it's absolutely unrealistic to expect your average person to try a few out. They won't be able to decide on technical grounds, and they'll have to use the distribution for some time to build enough experience for a preference. Going back to your car example, it's like suggesting people buy a few cars and decide which one they like (since they don't have the experience to make judgements based on short test drives) - you're asking them to invest a lot of time for something they don't really need or want.
People learn how to do that while growing up. The same doesn't apply to software, people usually choose what they know.
It's 2024 and this guy still can't read.
Do you have an example where Rust devs wanted to break backwards compatibility? The complaints I've seen were mostly "I don't want to learn another language, so your Rust stuff will be broken by us"
I'm not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.
Ah yes, the old "I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere" defense
Not everyone can afford a full wit. Maybe consider that not everyone has your priviledges
Okay, but why do you tell me that I'm wrong and keep going on about unrelated points? I don't care if the user-facing name is different from the binary name. I have no position on the topic.
I corrected a wrong statement (who is responsible for the .desktop file of an application). You tried to counter-correct me, but did so on an unrelated point (who displays the application name? I'm still not sure). Positions on whether .desktop files defining separate names is good aren't relevant.
Your Mint/Xed example doesn't show what you think it does. Mint doesn't just ship with .desktop entries for a bunch of applications, they are still managed by the respective developers and part of the packages themselves. Mint is also the developer of Xed, so the repository is in their organization, but the .desktop file is still part of the package. If you install Xed on any other distribution, you'll still get the same .desktop entry, because it's part of the package.
That is all I've been talking about. I'm not sure how your reply relates to that, but it would help me if you tell me what you're arguing against.
No, your Desktop Environment doesn't have a huge list of package names to app names. It has a list for all your installed packages, but the list entries are part of the packages.
If your system doesn't have gnome-system-monitor installed, you won't have the corresponding .desktop file, because it's part of the package. It would be incredibly wasteful and unnecessarily complex for your system to get shipped out with .desktop files for all possible applications.