Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.
Of course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you shouldn’t want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.
Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.
Sometimes making an iThing (iPhone) work with another iThing (Fiancée ´s Apple TV) isn’t as easy as it should. Streaming the nba app from my phone to the Apple TV was a nightmare a few years ago. Now I just use my PlayStation as the nba is hostile to Linux even in a browser.
So, taking into account the fact that Linux is free and works on almost any hardware, I can only congratulate the people making Linux possible.
Or the purposeful incompatibility between Android/iOS and others.
Like how Google pulled miracast from Android to push Chromecast as the standard. Now I can’t stream to an Amazon FireStick even though it’s also fucking Android at its core.
A lot of these private companies purposefully put in “pain points” to get you to spend more money in their ecosystems.
The “pain points” in Linux are “you have to learn something.”
This too is an excellent take. “Artificial pain points” for capitalism, or “learn some shit” for Linux. Love it.
Barbed wire gardens. Painful to get in, painful to get out.
I resonate with that point, since I do a digital art/tech class, which uses Macs. I find app crashes and the inaccessibility of certain menus quite infuriating, i even somewhat rage internally for a while until i either quit what i was doing or search it up.
When my 8 year old Fedora laptop freezes, crashes, or sound drivers crash like what happened yesterday, I stay very calm and think of a solution, such as updating and restarting.
even if I haven’t built the OS myself or really customised it at all, i find it more calming that i have options to completely change the software compared to locked down OSes.
Have you messed at all with macs “under the hood” so to speak?
Part of the reason my Linux nerd friend swears by them is because command line, they’re super similar to Linux since it’s actually certified UNIX.
So, it’s definitely not 1-to-1 but I’d say macOS is closer to Linux than Windows, including being able to fix shit via CLI.
As a newbie in this space, I had interactions with a few distros over the years and lately switched (hopefully) permanently.
My first experience was with Mint 10 years ago. Installing it would cause some GPU driver defect (AMD card) and would turn the whole login screen into an epileptic checkerboard pattern with no way of doing anything. It took me a few reinstalls and a ungodly amount of googling to find a solution which involved opening the terminal at boot process. You can only imagine how frustating that can be for a newcomer.
Later in time I had Ubuntu on my laptop which had a bug that wouldn’t spin up the CPU fan and it would simply overheat and shutdown. I had to take it to a technician to find out what was causing the random shutdowns.
A year ago I decided to try Debian on my desktop PC as many have praized it for it’s rock-wolid stability. It didn’t want to work on my PC. No internet connection and some weird bugs. Took me two-three days to get ti to work and I still don’t know what exactly fixed it as I have applied every possible solition I came across.
Much later, aka now, I decided to go with Bazzite on my desktop as many have claimed excelent support. I wanted to install the mimalloc because I play Factorio a lot and a few reddit posts claimed 20% UPS improvement over the stock scheduler. After downloading the source code and following the 4 very easy steps, cmake would throw some random eerors at me claiming some critical files were missing, although they were right there in the usr directory. Turns us Bazzite some some issue and Fedora 40 compiled the code in seconds without any issues.
Conclusion: Linux users, which are very tech savvy or work in that space, know what to do when things don’t work out, while the rest of us keeps googling and crying over error messages for things that seem trivial. You never seem to know if it’s you, the system or your hardware.
It’s something we’ll take for granted. With enough time and experience, you could fire off a one liner to fix a problem in less than a minute. For most people thst could take an hour, and they’d probably give up within 10 minutes
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”.
No, I don’t think so. There should be an expected difference between Windows (for example) and Linux as far as “it just works” goes, simply by virtue of the fact that one is actively developed by a company with eleventy-bajillion dollars and the other is developed by lots of hobbyists and a handful of profitable companies.
If Windows doesn’t work, it’s not unreasonable to expect that it should. If Linux doesn’t work, it is unreasonable to expect that it always will.
To be fair, a big portion of the work that goes into Linux (at least the kernel) is done by paid developers working for big corporations.
That’s true, it’s not just hobbyists. I meant that the paid effort is relatively small potatoes compared to giant companies like MS.
Pls stop giving billion dollar corporations so much credit.
The difference comes from windows dominant (home pc) market position meaning that almost all software and hardware is specifically made to work with it, with even things that officially support linux being afterthoughts.
Additionally much software (and hardware even more) primarely targets windows as a platform. The way printers mostly "just work"™ on Linux still amazes me, because printer vendors have all the incentives to make their stuff work for the most used platform, which sadly isn’t Linux right now.
And let’s not forget that printer vendors historically bungle even that much. That they work at all on Linux is a testament to the various Linux devs.
Also a testament to how much of a benefit it is when the vendors just get out of the way and don’t feel the need to add their own Special SauceTM to the drivers.
Exactly. I give more credits to linux, and it deserves this. I like your garden metaphor, yes my linux pc is like my garden and linux behaves to be, unlike windows.
if it didnt work, why would it be running the majority of the internet… among other things?
linux is prolly better than we give it credit for
The kind of issues you run into “running the Internet” are not the same as the average desktop user. Most of those systems don’t even have a monitor attached, let alone a whole desktop environment or GUI.
We have to give credit for being able to do both
You know that there’s different use cases right?
Yeah Linux is great for servers hosting websites. That doesn’t automatically make it the perfect desktop user interface. I sure as fuck wouldn’t want to use a servers interface (ssh on a box a mile away) as my main desktop experience.
It depends on who you ask. If you ask this to a M$ refugee, they will praise it. If you ask a *BSD user, they will bitch about it.
Like anything else, can be, depending on your needs.
Just this morning I tried to make Outlook on my work laptop to open on startup. I have to find and add a shortcut of Outlook, buried somewhere in the machine, to the startup folder, buried somewhere else in the machine. The startup apps settings menu was just an eclectic list of programs and is of no use at all.
With Mint on my home machine I just go to startup programs settings menu and I can add whatever I want just by pointing it to the right program. It just works.
WIN+R , “shell:startup” in future by the way.
The other list you saw is programs that have added thier own AutoRuns registry keys.
I’m actually kinda surprised that functionality isn’t in the new task manager yet. You can toggle on and off basically all startup items from there, but not add stuff.
XP-7 had this right with a folder in the start menu for startup items, just drag a file or shortcut there and it runs on startup.
XP-7 had this right with a folder in the start menu for startup items, just drag a file or shortcut there and it runs on startup.
It’s the same in 10. This is actually one thing I find obnoxious in Linux, even as a user for 25+ years… menu “shortcuts” aka .desktop files are harder to make and poorly documented.
Does windows 10 have it? I didn’t see it in the start menu of my VM.
It’s hidden by default but it should be there in
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUpfor “all users” and%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startupseparately for each user.
After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
We live in a world where the idea of community has been destroyed by rampant capitalism and the death of third spaces.
While there is indeed a lot to be said for something that “just works,” that “just works” demand is borne from a capitalist/consumer process that is literally in the process of going off the rails.
Why do we get so mad at Windows? Because it isn’t ours. Microsoft grows it like a weed on our property. Its roots begin sticking out new places all the time (“hey what’s that new bullshit on my taskbar?”) and has zero respect for your needs as opposed to its needs. Windows only cares for Microsoft’s needs, and it makes that readily evident in how you’re forced to use it.
Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.
In other words, Linux is better than we think it is.
I like to think of Windows as the Zelda sidekick of OSes.
Non-stop interrupting what you’re doing to tell you something you don’t need to know or care about, and constant “HEY LISTEN” nags for all sorts of shit that you either already figured out, knew about, or don’t give a shit about.
Don’t you dare talk about Navi like that!
Sort of like the difference between the cathedral and a bazaar?
No, because a kibbutz (planned intentional community) would be the “cathedral” in that analogy, and the city (incrementally developed community) would be the bazaar.
Love the image of wheeds just popping up all over your garden where you don’t want them.
It’s a great metaphor for the “HEY, TRY THIS NEW THING!” shit microsoft pulls.Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.
I was 100% with you until you decided to go and diss cities.
Cities are great and neighborhoods within them can have plenty of sense of community; it’s soulless car-dependant suburbs that are like Windows!
I think they dissed “corporate cities,” which I interpreted as related to company towns, like the so-called Foxconn City or iPhone City in China. Not cities in general.
Some suburbs are nice, too.
it’s soulless car-dependant suburbs that are like Windows!
Some suburbs are nice, too.
It’s precisely the streetcar suburbs that are nice, and they are nice precisely because they are not car-dependent.
Tbh it’s more like Raccoon City than an actual city.
Linux is the answer, it’s not about choice, the choice was eradicated years ago.
The community alone and fact in 2024 it still not just exists but thrives shows how much we need things like Linux which buck the trend
We’ve been having this discussion in the group I game/ play TTRPGs with. Like 7 of us total all windows, me and another switched to Linux, a third is a computational scientist who is forced to work with redhat frequently, and a fourth member was thinking of switching. After me and member 2 switched, member 4 saw that we had problems (entirely discord for me, all games have honestly worked so far) and changed his mind about switching because he doesn’t want to deal with stuff not working OOTB.
I can’t fault people who want that, hell I do, Linux is well worth it to me but I will begrudgingly admit there are draw backs to Linux.
I had this exact same thought but than I booted Windows. I get less frustrated because if use Linux I feel like I’m working with it and it is acceptable if there are mistakes. If I use Windows I feel like I’m working against it, and a big part of that is that a lot of issue aren’t there because they are bugs (of which there are probably as many as on Linux) but rather just bad/anti user design
Linux to me is just an optional substitute of an OS, but it has yet to make it my primary day-to-day use. Linux isn’t going to make the problems I get aggravated with like the verification-hell we deal with, go away. It’s going to happen on both Windows or Linux regardless.
I have more patience when I give any laptop I get Linux, than I ever will should I decide to make Linux a primary OS of choice on my primary desktop machine. Because Linux does give me the whole ‘works out of the box’ feel with laptops than Windows would when it comes to driver hunting and I’m talking with old laptops, not newer ones where all of that is currently provided.
Well, I don’t use a DE so your scenario of the new display not switching over right away is basically my life every time
autorandrdecides not to run on startup.Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?
No, it’s better.
Seriously, when something that I paid for it doesn’t work is annoying when something that I choose to use doesn’t work is somewhat my fault, I think that’s the difference.
