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Unironically me as an IT professional who uses Windows. It just works. I have to fuck around with all that shit all day, I don’t want to go home and do it too.
As a windows user in corporate IT. It just doesn’t work. I spend most of my time hacking my way through useless unix pseudo toys, wsl2, cygwin, mingw… Each one for every tool because… Reasons. And because wsl2 is just painful. So we spend time creating fake unix virtual machines via docker on kubernetes using vs code remotely on expensive linux clusters… Frustrating.
Go home and turn on a linux laptop just to see a real functional terminal. Deep breath, zen, cathartic.
Windows makes my otherwise fine daily work miserable.
I hate enterprise IT. Built for sending around emails and working with excel sheets.
I am seriously thinking about starting an AI start up just to avoid risking another windows laptop switching job (they always promise cool stuff, at the end they always deliver overpriced windows garbage, my 8 years old laptop is more functional than their $ 3k notebook)
Sounds like you’re just more familiar with Linux and that’s fine. I use Linux, Windows and MacOS regularly and haven’t had a problem with Windows honestly. The most frustrating of the 3 is MacOS, and even then it’s nitpicking.
In sorry, but they’re kind of right. Windows is HELL ON EARTH to support. Fixing issues is a guessing game because no one really knows what’s wrong, its garbage driver enumeration system means a year down the line a users monitor/headset/dock will magically stop working, restarting is a 50/50 shot of getting stuck on the spinning circle, I could go on and on and on.
Within three months of starting that job windows was gone from every PC I owned.
In a big corporate/ large enterprise environment, I’ve usually had few major problems with my windows laptops. It’s just always slow as balls because of all of the security shit they put on them. So these $3k laptops take forever to load or launch outlook and teams.
I always dream of a Linux laptop, but then realized they’d butcher it all to hell and make it useless with security policies and tools. I can’t imagine using a Linux machine at work where I didn’t have the ability to “sudo” anything.
That’d be more frustrating than windows tbh.
10+ years of Windows and I still can’t say I’m familiar with it.
Linux has a steep learning curve for sure, but if I have to say one good thing about it, it’s the openness of Linux.
I dread seeing the message “An unknown error has just occurred” when I use Windows. Tell me, Microsoft, tell me what the error was!
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Agreed, the lack of proper (and often any) error messages is incredibly infuriating. It makes it impossible to diagnose anything, the only thing you can do is look for forum posts to make sense of the weird behaviour.
On linux, if something doesn’t work it tells me why and I can just follow a chain to the root cause every time without fail.
I am familiar with all 3. Power user some would say. But I must use unix. I do ML/AI, corporations pay money for the ML/AI guys and give them windows. Like partecipating to an f1 race with a Fiat panda…
For my work windows is simply painfully useless
It’s just windows being almost default OEM OS. Why should they bother to install Linux over it for you while they don’t know particular flavour of Linux you like?
Because they need to maintain multiple huge servers and virtual machines with my favorite flavor of Linux, to make us doing the job very ineffectively. Because Linux does the job they need, it is needed, no escape, while windows is just for outlook and for creating issues.
I am paid enough that I really should not complain if companies waste money on the wrong tools for the job. Most of my salary pays to find solutions to problems that exist only because of windows. They have to waste a lot of money because the former accenture guy they hired as head of IT support (or whoever decides for the laptops) told them that windows is the only possible solution for big corporations. Good for them.
As said I am seriously thinking about starting my own start up, because my experience with corporate IT has been so miserable in all places I worked (outside academia, that has many defects, but at least they can manage a decent IT).
Is it forbidden to install a different OS? I’m propably ignorant as in all my dev jobs so far (N=1), I have been permitted (and encouraged) to install OS of my choice.
Nope unfortunately. Having worked in finance and pharma I have access to systems with sensitive data (and build them). IT is responsible for everything. When we set up a cluster, for instance, we say what to do, at the level of the single command line, but the work is physically done by an engineer from IT.
Sounds like you’re just more familiar with Linux and that’s fine
While it is partly true, I can’t deny I spent the last 15years on linux, I have my fair amount of deal with windows in a professional setup, I can’t totally accept this response then, hence the word partly true :P.
Now, explain me how any familiarity with Windows can help when a vanilla installation for windows 10 pro, used for two specific application (nothing cloudy), no game, almost offline, etc… How this system decides, randomly to not allow me to literally login in, looping forever before giving prompt, or pretend there is issue with my PIN and or my profile although I use plain passphrase and my account is local and literally nothing has changed system wise since the last session! I have disabled all the auto update shit everywhere (the obvious one and the one I know about) and no updates in between.
You could say I might no know this particular register bit field. Probably but then, we are not in the easy/just works view.
Honestly this sounds like a freak accident. I use Windows myself and work with people using Windows regularly and never heard of something like that. And I guess you can achieve an unrecoverable state on any operating system given the right conditions.
Sure for the possibility for every OSes to break but what I said was just a recent example, even though it’s on a pretty pristine installation in term of alteration. There’s so many other things where Windows and its ecosystems is a mess but I guess it is more or less forgiven because you can game on it and because that particular device you would use has the driver while on Linux it must be reverse engineered and written if not, never exist.
Anyway, my whole point is about the “just works” label which has been proven to be wrong more than I can count.
I have the exact same issues as @jeanma@lemmy.ninja . Every single work day contains at least 10 minutes of waiting for windows to log me in and 2 login errors without exaggerating. IT have told me on numerous occasions there’s nothing they can do other than reinstalling windows since the error source is very proprietary.
At this point I’m considering switching jobs just to get rid of windows.
Honestly sounds like you’re just not very good at your job. As a windows wsl2 user I don’t have any of these problems. Everything just works for me.
Happy for you. I am literally the one who fixes the issues for the whole department, that chooses technologies and design systems and solutions and lead integrations. I have no issues with pretty complex technologies, including cuda on kubernetes, that is pretty tricky.
But I know c# developers are also happy with just windows and visual studio.
As suggestion, try the real thing, you’d likely never want to go back
I’m Dev ops and a developer, I use cuda daily and kubernetes is my personal stack of choice. I have to use the real thing constantly for servers etc. It works ok, would much rather a Linux server than a windows one. But servers is where it ends.
My last use of Linux for personal machine was Ubuntu on an Alienware laptop. It didn’t have drivers for most of it. Got 90% of it working (took a good 6 hours) then one day I went to stick my headphones in and the jack wasn’t working (a Linux issue) I went back to windows and never looked back.
People scream about Linux being so much better but the hard truth is it just isn’t unless you are also willing to reinvent several wheels that are already handled for you in other operating systems. But if you like that level of fine control over every element and are ok with your UI lacking the finishes of commercial ones and custom drivers not being as effective with hardware management as the proprietary ones then Linux is the distro of choice. There seems to be a very thin line between people bragging about Linux to make it appear they are smarter than they are and actual Linux users, like it’s some sort of tech badge to shout that you love Linux that gives you some sort of superiority but after 25+ years in the industry I can honestly say all the actual Linux users I’ve met are also all very much on the spectrum and don’t have people skills. It would be fair to say what they are looking for in an OS isn’t the same as everybody else.
We have linux on our clusters. It is the de facto standard for scientific computing, and it is the best choice for kubernetes. So we have both linux as host OS and only linux containers on our servers.
Everyone uses Linux nowadays. Even Microsoft makes more money on Linux than windows on azure. No one wouldn’t even think about using windows for the job I do, not even Microsoft.
That’s why they created wsl2, to provide unix for enterprise IT. The real struggle is that wsl2 is suboptimal. A real Linux desktop, or even a mac would be much better. Problem is that enterprise IT doesn’t want to manage them, because accenture said so… I guess. Bigger the enterprise, less willing to support unix laptops they are.
If your diagnoses of professional unix users in the spectrum was right, you’d have to put most of scientific computing, hpc, ML and AI commuties in the spectrum.
It is a bit stretched, I’d say.
I don’t claim to be smarter than anyone, I started the thread pointing out that “windows just works” (as OP claimed) is not always true. For my work, it doesn’t work and it is painful
True, before i started to work with Windows i already disliked Microsoft, but what they are able to break constantly is astonishing.
There is no way security would give you a full terminal with all kinds of stuff to break or leak.
I do have access to multiple terminals. Terminals are just another interface alternative to GUIs. There is no way I could work without. I simply have access to the plethora of crappy terminals you can find for windows, and wls2. And clearly I have access to the remote linux VMs and can attach to containers running on the remote clusters, and deploy there hardened images I build, that are secured full OSes just lacking the kernel
Of they are but your access will be restricted (no access to files or executables). That can easily make working with a terminal that much more exhausting although implemented for good reason.
I do have admin access to my machine via a system of temporary password. Admin privileges are really not the problem. Is the overall windows experience that is pretty exhausting for power users. And if one needs unix, MS sells to companies this solution of wsl2, as if it was real native linux experience, but it’s not. It’s just frustrating
While I can definitely understand and respect that, ever since I had an experience where I had to dual-boot Windows for work reasons and the printer that just worked without issue in Linux required a three-digit MB download of a bloated driver-suite with borderline spyware included in Windows, I don’t trust Windows to “just work” any more.
Not saying it’s on-par with each other, there’s probably still more fidgeting with Linux (haven’t used Windows in ages, genuinely have no perspective any more), but that experience taught me that Linux isn’t the short straw any more in every situation, like it definitely used to be a few years ago.
(Also, was amused when during a LAN party when we wanted to play classic Warcraft III a while back, mine ran in wine without issue, but for a friend we had to deep-dive into the registry because of some obscure problem that prevented it from starting at all in native Windows).
There are generic printer drivers that work fine on windows too. You generally don’t need to get the manufacturers bloated driver/utility/update/subscription package. Also that’s not really the OS’ fault, it’s the shitty printer vendors.
First point, i readily agree. I could not be bothered to search for any longer back then, but there most likely was a better alternative than going with the official driver suite.
Second point though - if the OS doesn’t come with drivers that allow for a plug and play experience out of the box (like my Linux install, think it was Manjaro back then, did), I think that can be held against it. Shitty vendors harm the Linux experience all the time, and it is very often - legitimately as it can severely impact the user exerience - held against it.
Every one that bitches about Linux and plug-and-play always says it’s Linux’ fault for not working.
Now you say it’s the vendors fault for not supporting Windows.
Make it make sense, other than ‘I will defend my preferred option without logic’.
I remember building a PC with motherboard not supported by Windows, with drivers on a CD. Obviously I didn’t have a CD drive, since why would I. Ubuntu supported it out of the box. Had way more success with printers on Linux than Windows. And god bless AMD.
When have I bitched about Linux? I’ve had a great experience with Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu. I use Linux, Windows and MacOS on a regular basis.
Some people just like to complain. Can’t fix that.
It just works.
Same as GNU/Linux
Except if somebody uses distro like arch just because memes, and then complain on the internet that they have to download some stuff to connect to wifi or projector in this case
Even Arch can be made to “just work”.
Install a generic kernel, install a famous desktop environment (GNOME or KDE), don’t go out of your way customizing everything. I never had much problem with this setup, maybe except that my installation is 1GB larger than the “minimalist” ones. But hey, I would trade 0.05% of my disk space for sheer convenience!
Except when I start a 10h build before going home only to find out in the morning that windows update restarted my computer in the middle of the night. Or when I can’t edit a folder because a file “is being used”, then I close absolutely every running program and it’s still somehow “being used”. Or when I can’t turn off the PC because something is running in the background, even though I closed everything one by one. Or when my PC starts screaming because a VSCode subprocess is using all my resources, I kill it in task manager, and it somehow respawns as a process of its own. I can’t end it, and closing VSCode doesn’t do anything. My laptop became so hot I couldn’t hold it.
I mean Linux causes problems too, ofc. I once spent like 2h trying to set up a keyboard to input Chinese characters on Fedora. But in my experience, Linux caused me less frustration by far. Or when a problem arises, I can fix it quickly.
This is not to bash on you for using windows, just thought I’d throw in that “just works” isn’t universal.
As someone who had to switch to windows at work, why the fuck do I have to set the path variable so often for every program. choco does it sometimes but most often something doesn’t work ootb and I have to set this path variable
This is one of the main reasons that I want to bash my head against the wall when setting up new stuff on Windows
Tech worker vs tech enthusiast
A looooot of tech workers start as tech enthusiasts but have the enthusiasm part of them ground away by the sands of time and toil.
Then they were never in it for the tech… only for the easy payout.
This is the goofiest take I’ve heard in a while.
He is right though. Why do you think Windows was so common in companies (on the server side) in Europe at least. Beside the MS lobbying of course, it lowered the initial entry bar, then you ended up with infrastructure completely fuck’d up. Yes, at my last client, we still had 2003 servers running because software deployed on it was done on the “click/click, copy this file” way. I pass on the “clustered” windows servers which never worked succeed a freaking failover.
As an IT professional i got rid of anything Microsoft related at home years ago just to not get bothered, can’t imagine anything i’m missing and shit just works.
Same. I swear, people running Windows don’t really know what “just works” means.
I have Windows on my work and home machines for years. Never needed a reinstallation or recovery.
You have to explain to me what you do then, please. :) I swear, i don’t do anything fancy and this is not the only windows I am exposed to.
I’m a system analyst, so I use a couple of IDE, Docker, Jypiter Notebook, Postman, MS Office
So there’s no way e-v-e-r “it just works”, especially docker, you have the feeling because you kind of used to it and might never seen a fast, responsive and reliable system (on the long run). I had the same kind of setup on several jobs and nope, nope-nope, noooope.
But hey, kudos if you succeed to do your job in such condition without hurting yourself, good sign of resilience. :)
I don’t know what are you talking about. There was no problems or struggles with Docker or Windows for me. I installed it and run it. It just works.
I didn’t have to do a reinstall since XP and been doing everyday stuff like gaming, emails, browsing but also programming/scripting.
On the contrary none of my Linux machines survived, usually either because of hardware incompatibility or dist upgrades that broke shit
I call it BS, my friend. Though, of course you could do those activities, that’s not the argument. the argument is telling that you can’t do that with ease, first try, in the best way (performance, stability). Dude, just switching audio input/sources is a mess on Windows, configuring an IP is a fucking joke.
I don’t take in account gamer’s opinion cause they tend to devalue their difficulties as soon as their 28gb cracked games has started or they logged-in 30min later (opening, downloading, upgrading) on their OriginSteamXboxLive platform.
the argument is telling that you can’t do that with ease, first try, in the best way (performance, stability).
Like running games on Linux or getting your gpu supported properly? Or wifi?
Or just having a running system after dist upgrades?
Dude, just switching audio input/sources is a mess on Windows, configuring an IP is a fucking joke
Wtf are you talking about? Have you ever used windows?
I can do both of that in less than 20 seconds.
Go to your audio manager, switch source.
Go to your network interface, configure IP.
I don’t take in account gamer’s opinion cause they tend to devalue their difficulties as soon as their 28gb cracked games has started or they logged-in 30min later (opening, downloading, upgrading) on their OriginSteamXboxLive platform.
I am an IT professional working with both and I couldn’t care less if you value my opinion. I highly doubt you are doing anything with your system that I haven’t done.
Fellow IT pro (don’t feel like it though) who also uses Windows here. It’s not the perfect OS, but I’m kinda getting tired lately of the amount of Windows bad over exaggeration going on (seriously I’m seeing people complain about windows not having features that it actually does have or running into errors that are entirely user related in cause). If I want to sit down and have a 90% chance of not having to mess with anything then Windows is my choice.
In the chance it does mess up it’s usually something I can find and fix easily even for obscure issues just cause the amount of exposure to errors and documentation for Windows is insane… That and usually a reboot will fix it 9/10 times.
While I do dual boot and use linux from time to time for enthusiast stuff, and while Linux is now fairly comparable to Windows in “it just works” stuff. A lot of programs still don’t have full or even well kept Linux versions. And after getting off of work where I deal with fixing a ton of complicated Linux errors, a lot of times with little documentation or similar error documentation. I just want something that will be reliable, fairly predictable, and also “just work”.
Honestly. I’m basically the same I just use a fedora because it works. I tried arch and its cool but I’m too lazy to keep up with stuff at home since I already have to do so much at works. Linux is as stable as you want and you actually can do whatever you want unlike linux
Am same job. I just hop around from platform to platform when I get bored at home. All the shit I care about is on an unraid box. My PC at home is just a toy I play around with to suit my mood.
I have the exact opposite experience. Windows at work just doesn’t work. I start every day by clicking away a few error messages (like the KDC certificate or a PIN that doesn’t work without any more details) when logging in, then checking for updates and installing them while I get a drink so windows won’t force a restart on me during the day. Then I fix all the shared drives we use because they just don’t mount properly without help from a batch script. If I didn’t reboot the PC for updates already, I restart outlook and teams because otherwise they will eventually lose connection and stop working without any error messages.
That continues through the rest of the day.
When I get home, I can confidently run a pacman -Syu (unless there are nvidia updates) and everything just works. I can launch games and (after a minute or two because proton and excluding EA of course) they just work. Usually better than on windows too.
Oh, I actually meant Windows at home. Windows at work is definitely problematic.
But at home, for my own stuff, Windows just works, with zero setup or maintenance hassle. I used to do the whole Linux thing, had set up dual boot (again for games that only work on Windows ) it was not only not fun, what was I getting out of it? I found myself not even booting to Linux because it literally was not providing me with anything I needed.
Linux Mint for people who have better things to do with their time.
EndeavorOS, arch based, gui installer up and running just as fast as a linux mint, but simply better
simply better
for you yes, I reallly don’t like the linux community’s mentality of hurr durr mine betterrr. To each their own.
Simply better
- In your opinion
- For your use case
OBJECTIVELY
Arch, Arch based, GUI installer, installs even faster than EndeavorOS
it’s not
It’s not what
Arch based? GUI installer? installs even faster than EndeavorOS?
Tried it, and it didnt work properly. Manjaro works like a charm tho
manjaro works, until it doesn’t
That’s what “works like a charm” should mean, IMO. It works great until it fails spectacularly.
Take a typical tiger charm, designed to ward off tigers. Works great, until you encounter a tiger at close range.
That’s true for everything though lol, but I get what you mean
Wich would still be better
I mean, I have no idea how didn’t manage to make EndeavorOS work, but managed to make Manjaro work, so maybe it’s a PEBKAC thing.
Manjaro has broken AUR support multiple times on purpose. No thanks.
Yeah, but then you have to tell people you use something that sounds like an exotic dancer’s stage name. I’ll stick with Endeavour.
Arch is the truest test of how much you’re willing to sacrifice for control.
You get control of everything on your system, but you’re basically on your own when it all goes to shit… which from how many of these posts I keep seeing seems to be a daily occurance haha
Hardly.
Gentoo is closer, it’s like Arch except you’re supposed to COMPILE every package…
Then there’s Linux From Scratch. You don’t download the Distro, you download the manual on how to MAKE the Distro.
Yep. Why not take Mint/Pop/etc and actually be productive instead of solving the ever so trivial issues on cmd? Matter of taste
Exactly. There’s no such thing as a polymath in this day and age, so you’re gonna have to trust somebody at some point, so why not put a little bit of the control freak away and accept a more put together OS from the community?
I’ve had more issues on mint than I ever had on arch, and I’m in no way a computer expert. Arch is just more simple.
Can you give some examples?
Not the guy you replied to but i put Mint on my uncles pc, tried to install some software and it just gave me some errors, tried fixing it for about 40 mins and gave up and just put windows on it. I had an Kubuntu install that just randomly killed itself after a few months as well. It worked fine for a while, then i restarted one day and wouldn’t boot giving some drive error, and i ended up moving to arch after that. Arch has been working very well for me and it has had issues but i could always solve them quite easily.
At the end of the day all linux distros are essentially running the same software, the only difference is the version of software you’re running, some update faster some slower.
But did you try putting Arch on your uncles PC? Seems like you’d have run into more of the same.
I’ve been an Arch user on my main machines for years, which is exactly why I’m hesitant to buy that it’s “simpler” and less prone to issues than a distro like Mint.
Im sure that arch would probably cause more issues than mint in the long run, i was just saying Mint or any other beginner distros are not exactly 100% issue free as some would claim them to be
That’s just Linux in general at that point though – and really wasn’t what I was responding to.
Every Debian/apt based distribution needed a reinstall after some time.
very probably my fault, but with Arch I always could save my install somehow, while with apt it was a lost cause - for me at least.But I spent much more time with Debian based system in the past and still all my customer production machines are on a Debian variant, for my laptop and workstation, I’m happy with Arch - or if I’m lazy with Manjaro
Go for Endeavour over Manjaro for lazy-Arch. Manjaro is the least stable of the bunch.
The choice for Manjaro was quite some time ago, so maybe it’s time for a re-evaluation.
Could you tell me, what you think the advantages of Endeavour are?
Endeavour is essentially just a GUI installer that spits out a proper Arch install with a few nice-to-haves pre-installed (like yay for example), and some good defaults (like increased parallel downloads for pacman).
Manjaro, on the other hand, holds back packages from the main Arch repos for testing. Which is reasonable in theory, but it means you can have compatibility errors if you install things from the AUR (which is the main draw of Arch IMO).
The Manjaro team has also forgotten to renew their SSL certificates multiple times (and told people to roll back their system clocks to fix the problems it caused), as well as DDOSing the AUR a few times too.
After using Ubuntu for a while I wanted to try out Arch once. Grabbed a step by step instruction and followed it.
Around step… 7 or something I ran into a wall, because the commands simply didn’t work. After messing around for an hour or two I finally gave up at that point. Of course that was years ago, so it might be easier now to install.
But overall I’d rather use Windows, Ubuntu or whatever, give me an OS where things just work, as I have actual work to do (instead of trying to fight with my OS). Hell, back in the day (~14 years ago) when using Ubuntu for school I once spent hours to get HDMI Audio to work, it was a nightmare.
Right now I just use Windows 11 on my desktop (as I game a lot and use Visual Studio) and Ubuntu on a server. I’d love to fully switch to Linux as my daily driver, but there’s simply too many features that wouldn’t work :-/
I’m often very happy with Manjaro in such a case.
Easy install, nicely pre-configured, quite some variants to choose from (i like i3), and I still have practically Arch running - with some more stable Repos (which could bring some problems with AUR, but I never really had any major ones)I tried out ubuntu about as long ago as you did, and for some reason I couldn’t get the internet to work. But because this was before smartphones, I had to boot back into windows, look up a possible solution, write it down, boot back into ubuntu, try it, didn’t work, rinse and repeat. After 2 hours I just gave up and went back to windows. It’s probably way easier now, but I’m still hesitant to give it another try.
Huh? That’s weird. Internet always worked for me, both over Ethernet and over WiFi. The only issue I had once (where it took me an extra hour or two) was with a school network that had extra protections, like a login. That one was tougher, especially when I then wanted to route a tunnel through it so I could play games in class.
But usually internet works flawlessly on any Linux distribution.
If you switch from Visual Studio to Rider it’ll make the migration fully to Linux much easier.
Lol, Rider is paid only. And it’s a subscription too!
My work pays for Visual Studio in the office and at home when I want to mess around in my free time Visual Studio Community (which has around 95% of the features of the paid versions) is free.
If I ever work for a company that uses Rider I might switch. But paying over a hundred bucks a year just for the little bit of personal use is insane.
Rider is free for Open Source projects: https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/#support which should cover your personal projects.
Might also be worth asking around if your office have any JetBrains licenses. It’s pretty common to have one covering the .NET suite for dotTrace etc
I have nothing against well made paid software but I am not going to use a subscription model to pay for it. I am not looking for software that is looking to rent seek from me every month.
So you’d be OK paying a one time fee in order to own that version forever?
Because that’s literally how JetBrains works:
12 months of uninterrupted subscription payments qualify you for receiving a perpetual fallback license.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-
(I promise I’m not a sales rep)
Huh didn’t know that and I’ve never even seeing anything remotely similar, sounds pretty fair.
Gentoo goes even further, you can disable features for individual software so they aren’t even compiled in.
And you’re not really on your own, arch’s wiki and forum are really good and helpful.
yeah I think I’ll just stick with Fedora.
For me arch was just a fun project that helped me understand how operating systems work and how they interact directly with hardware
It’s true. On Arch, you have to compile a different package for every pixel on your screen. It could take days to finish compiling and when it’s finished compiling all the pixels, you have to start all over again.
I switched to Ubuntu Cinnamon and now I can walk on my own feet again.
Nah, that’s Gentoo.
It’s true, I have 3 monitors so it took a whole week to install
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I had to laugh at “minimal kernel”.
yeah, arch is far from minimal
Driver for VGA/HDMI?
How much minimal that kernel is?
only enuff to boot 💪
This is fake, as plugging it into a projector would imply he’d installed some kind of graphics driver.
It’s funny, but memes like this affect the opinion of people who haven’t tried it.
They mistake some extreme minimal arch rice for the general Arch experience or the general Linux experience as well. If so many Lemmy users, who are statistically tech nerds, don’t see through the meme, then the average person will definitely stay away from Linux.
Why do you automatically assume the person who wrote this wants people to use arch? It’s written as a joke, which means it might be nonsense or it might be a real dedicated arch user who had a bad day, or it might be someone who thinks linux is terrible.
This isn’t even a pro-linux community so OP probably doesn’t care about “affecting the opinion of people who haven’t used it”.
We’re really in here worrying about how badly Linux users are oppressed lol
But it’s misinformation and it might lead to some gullible idiot to take it seriously and this it should be censored in the name of making the Internet more safe for everyone!
This sounds like something that could’ve happened 28 years ago or if someone did a little too much fiddling for no good reason
The average person probably should stay away from Linux. In fact most of them should stay away from PCs in general.
They should stick to an iPad or something. That way I, the family tech nerd, will never be bothered by them a week after they downloaded “hacked Spotify” or some shit, that is now emailing scams to everybody in the continental United States. Most people just need a browser.
Ah yes. Let’s gatekeep Linux and keep the general public out of it. Definitely helpful to drive up adoption of desktop Linux.
As someone who recently started using it…doing anything at all is a pain in the ass in Linux vs Windows.
Installing many things requires following a guide instead of downloading an exe. And when one step of the guide yields something unexpected, well good luck.
The thing hurting Linux adoption is Linux.
No, it’s fragmentation. If you know what can be applied to other distros and what’s distro-specific, things become very easy.
You completely missed the point, which is standard.
Unironically yes. Let’s gatekeep anything that people can fuck around with that can’t be fixed by a simple factory reset button.
Learning more about technology and having more control can be really empowering. I don’t think dumbing things down even more is going to make people more tech literate and it’s definitely going to make them more dependent on shitty corporations.
Many years ago I advocated for using Linux on the servers we sold to customers. They didn’t need to do much. Run a DB server mostly. This was accepted happily by my managers as we could save costs on Windows licences.
Over the next five years, as those machines started to go wrong, it became my job to fix all of them, alongside all my other duties. So now we use Windows again, because our low wage helpdesk monkeys can actually talk people through most faults.
Sometimes people don’t want to be empowered. They just want their shit to work.
Ironically factory resettable Linux distros are coming and will be more mainstream. Fedora plans to convert all Workstation users to Silverblue/Kinoite within 5 years. Being immutable distros, a factory reset option will soon arrive at them. Other distros are now also experimenting with this.
It would be convenient in short term. But, once the vast majority of people starts to live in the walled gardens, it would be very difficult to buy a “normal” computing device.
Based, most people today would be just fine with a Chromebook. Not to say I support Google’s BS, but 90% of people don’t need to do more on their computer then use a web browser to access emails, view their bank account, stream some shows and maybe write a word document here and there.
It’s true that Linux gives you control and freedom over your computer. But for the vast majority of people, that level of control is something they don’t know how to wield and is unneeded given their day to day tasks.
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You can toss Fedora in there too.
Me? NixOS. No grass for me, thanks.
Grass? Sorry. Grass isn’t reproducible.
Grass? Sorry. Grass isn’t reproducible.
My brother in
christGNU+Linux, have you ever been outside?
I swear I’ve had fewer issues with nix than anything, including mint.
But I haven’t gotten into home manager and flakes yet
It’s incredibly long stretches of smooth sailing interspersed by brief intervals of banging my head against the desk.
…which generally isn’t nix’s fault it’s just that fitting the absolute state that is python package management into something sensible is an exercise in futility.
Oh and occasionally I have to doctor around a bit during upgrades because my EFI partition is only 100MB, someone should have warned me. Deleting old generations and windows boot loader language packs and fonts generally does the trick.
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I have had zero breakage on vanilla Fedora ever since switching to it years ago, it’s probably the most stable yet cutting edge distro I have ever used. I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about and would love to see some examples of this supposed frequent breakage.
it’s probably the most stable yet cutting edge distro I have ever used
same experience, I daily drive Fedora and it’s my first linux distro. Have had a great experience especially after most of the software is on flatpak. Let’s see how that telemetry proposal goes.
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If it’s so famous, it should be trivial to gather a bunch of the more egregious examples of general update/upgrade breakage. Again, would you mind linking to them? I can neither personally remember them, nor is Google any help.
All I can find are minor, individual, dependency issues that are common with absolutely every Linux distro. I’m actually a little surprised how few of those Google digs up.
It would be rather worrisome if the foundation for an industry behemoth like REHL would commonly suffer from the problems you, and only you, are claiming without any kind of evidence. So, please, end my “delusion” and show me the error of my ways by showing us these common issues.
Are these issues in the room with us right now?
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Wow, “Google doesn’t index Reddit, Linux Forums and Mailing Lists” is a new one. Good job, I genuinely can’t tell if you’re a master troll or an giant idiot.
Regardless, as someone who has been active in the Linux community since around ~97, I’m at least certain that you are full of shit.
Forgot to enable non-free packages on Debian 🤬
They should come by default in Debian 12
(i use Debian btw)
(on my server btw)
(this incident will be reported btw)
Non-free firmware is now enabled by default in the installer. To install non-free software, you still need to enable the non-free repo.
Installed potato, 23 years ago, have Dist-upgraded since.
can we opt out of non-free firmware?
Yes, you can give an argument to the installer not to install. Or just remove the non-free firmware packages after installation.
Keep in mind thatbif you have hardware that require those firmwares. That hardware will not work without. Often wifi chips.
Buying hardware that have no non-free firmware is an increasingly complex labyrinth nowadays.
Idk, ive installed non-free software without touching stuff, weirdly enough non-free drivers break my system (Nvidia 32kb “gpu” )
Then you must have non-free enabled. Looking in /etc/apt/sources.list would quickly tell you
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive#s-non-freeIf you followed the wiki when installing nvidia drivers. It would have told you to enable non-free
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_12_.22Bookworm.22
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What kind of weak anon compiles his kernel without supporting the clearly required and already integrated hardware?
It’s fine and dandy if you remove coax or something, but video output? Really?
Lol they just needed the driver as a kennel module.
Yeah, then it totally would’ve worked and had no other issues
There really isn’t much you need to do to get your HDMI port working on Linux. In fact, the kernel module is probably loaded by default.
Exactly. I’ve had HDMI working on even the most hardened kernel on Arch. Either they needed to modprobe or they had installed the driver to the wrong folder and an insmod would have solved that too.
I tried linux-hardened for a while but too many games wouldn’t work if I tried launching with Proton. Had to switch to the Linux kernel and implement my own protections.
When I used to game on a Linux desktop, before getting a Steam Deck, I used to have a dedicated SSD with Arch set up just for gaming so I didn’t have to mess with my hardened setup. Steam Deck has been a game changer.
What do you mean they?
He clearly says he’s a singular person
They is, and has been for a very long time, perfectly valid for singular use.
Most people I’ve encounted do it all the time without noticing between sentences.
It’s extremely confusing. Its a he, no doubt
Where you you see a gender qualifier in the post? If you don’t know you don’t assume because you turn into a donkey or something like that.
A gender what?
How is there a doubt that it’s a he.
I doubt. What tells you it’s a he… that’s what I’m asking you to do. Show me, prove me it’s a he.
He uses thinkpad, what more proof do you want
Wow. You’re dumb and sexist. Have a good live buddy.
Good *life
And thanks, i will
what? where? look at the username, that’s clearly anonymous, the hacker group.
You mean the hacker known as four chen
In english, they stands for both plural and gender-neural (when you don’t know whether the person you’re referring to is male or female).
There no doubt that it’s a male speaking
You do you
Thanks, i will
They has been used to refer to an unspecified individual since before you were born.
What you mean unspecified?
It says right there
That’s not really the point.
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
A comedy of errors, act IV, scene 3
Mine doesn’t even have usb drivers.
I use arch btw.
Who needs USB when you can have PS2, it’s even rounded, it was already at the peak of design
From using arch with the default kernel and XFCE: the only thing that breaks is the external monitor gets the XFCE default desktop background rather than the one you set. Other than that hot plugging just works.
Granted minimal window managers tend to require explicit edits to a config file to get monitors working
You could replace Windows with Ubuntu/Mint/Debian/openSUSE/Fedora for even better effect.
Signed, a former Arch user
You read my mind. I’m currently trying to restrain myself from reinstalling Manjaro, and this post reminded me why I switched Ubuntu two years ago. Two drama free years as far as I’m concerned. And I can use printers without switching kernels! Imagine that!
Never had any problems like that with Archlinux. Literally one command, and all your video drivers are installed. And using a minimal kernel is not really a archlinux thing, since it isnt supported.
Sure, the drivers install real quick, but the whole model is rolling release. In three months, you can’t be sure that any one piece of software is actually compatible with the rest of your packages. Any long time Arch user will tell you about the weird manual tweaks they’ve had to make at one time or another just to make sure their wifi still works or soemthing like that. After like 26 months of updates, my version of wpa_supplicant just gave up the ghost and started crashing. Didn’t have this issue on Ubuntu, so the fix was clear. This wasn’t the first time some bizarre driver issue cropped up either. I’ve booted into black screens, my audio stopping working one day, I’ve had to patch my video drivers a time or two, and this is on a System 76 Galago Pro, so its not like I was using some exotic setup. I’ve just had to reboot from grub one too many times I think.
And thanks to the magic of downgrading a package, the issue is resolved within minutes. If any update breaks something, which never happened in 3 years of desktop usage and 2 years of server usage so far, you can just downgrade the package, to the previous version, ignore the upgrade and take some time to understand what breaks. But I understand, why this might be too much maintenance for some people, and they rather pay with their freedom, and let other people take care of their system. But for me, that is not what using Linux is about.
A lot of manjaro issues are specific to manjaro and have nothing to do with arch. I also had a lot of issues with that and after switching to proper arch, the only problem is nvidia (or stuff that I screw up on my own). Zero issues besides that.
tbh, cause my other comment in this thread were more windows-rant, I had one moment where I felt “alone” in enterprise (i was 23). It was in 2007, laptops in enterprise, at least in this insurance company was not common, and I was the only person with my glorious x60, at least within the openspace :). I was called in a meeting to help to display something, except that this is was my personal laptop, with hardware issue and gentooised, i don’t remember exactly the issue but X was not willing to start at resume, even after reboot. I felt alone in front of the senior dev and manager guys :P Of course, it was the classical Murphy shit moment.
Note that this projector was usually connected to one of these HP pizzabox running wintel but it was not working. So I guess I shouldn’t be totally ashamed at the end.
