this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Linux: "my users spend half their time troubleshooting"
That's categorically untrue. As long as you stick with well supported, mainstream distributions, most things just work. Given the vast diversity of window managers, init systems, boot loaders, desktop environments, package managers, graphical interface systems, audio systems, and so on... it's surprising how well things do just generally work in most cases.
Gee, I must have imagined writing a novel on a laptop running Linux, with nothing giving any trouble at all.
I guess my imagination is even better than I thought!
Sadly,, that means that the second novel I'm halfway through must be imaginary too. A shame to have imagined that much imagining.
Seriously, that's just this laptop, it doesn't count the ones on desktop before that, also on Linux.
Least gatekeeping Linux user
💀
Edit: 💀💀
Similarly, about 90% of the complaints I see linux users make about Windows are actually limitations in their understanding or are just outdated and no longer apply.
That's how it's supposed to be! The only question is whether the brokenness has a documented method to neutralize it, and you could help with that by publicly posting about any issues you have.
At least most problems under Linux have solutions and if you are really desperate you have the option to fix it yourself in the source or pay someone to do it. Under windows, if microsoft doesn't care about your problem, you either find a workaround or live with it.
Because of the ginormous community, every problem has a solution in Windows.
If it isn't a Microsoft sanctioned solution, then multiple third party solutions exists that fix it.
Windows has a hell of a lot more support than any Linux distribution does.
That's not how this works. If it's not a Microsoft-sancioned solution, it literally cannot be fixed no matter how much effort you put in. You need an API to work with Windows. If Microsoft does not provide you with an API, you can't do it. And even if you find a way to hack together something, you have zero guarantee an update won't just come along and fuck it. Linux distros are open source, you can change quite literally any thing about them. That is what that person was talking about.
the thing is, microsoft does provide stable, well-documented and backwards-compatible apis for just about anything imaginable, and even if that's not enough, you can try interacting with the kernel directly
I can't say I share this experience as I spend a lot more than half my time using Linux watching documentaries on youtube in a web browser. If you are obsessed with personalization I could see this happening, but I happen to prefer using default (as in "possible to consistently re-apply") settings on most things.
Regardless, troubleshooting makes you better at resolving trouble that you didn't bring about on your own, and life is defined by unexpected troubles. It is better to be antifragile than happy!
I guess you're lucky (or much more tech-savvy than me). I tried to switch to linux once many years ago (pre-COVID, which is like ancient times now). It was horrible. Oh, I now need to learn about file systems and NTFS and ext3/4(?) - i guess i’ll try Linux on a separate, old hard drive. Ok, something didn’t work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn’t supported and what I need to download. Great, people on forums are helpful but they’re asking me a bunch of gibberish. Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don’t need to play with the command line, but then the GUI doesn’t work occasionally and now I have to figure out if it’s the GUI that broke or something else. And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.
Unlike in Windows where you never need to download drivers. As executable binaries you have no chance of checking. Sometimes from very questionable sources. And actually you can be happy if it's only a driver. Installing random 3rd party tools just to get basic functionality is a thing.
Which also happens for Windows. But rarely. And if they really try... then there are still 10 different answers to a single problem and you have to test which one works for your specific version (no, chosing the most recent one sounds logical but is rarely the answer).
Which in what way is worse then editing random obscure values in the registry? Because it's a window you type in. And in the worst case even the Windows help starts with poweshell nowadays, which is exactly the same.
That's a solveable problem. Unlike in Windows where they put file permissions on top a file system not having them in a weird unintutive way. And don't ever try to change the wrong permission as an administrator as that's simply not allowed. After all you don't own your Windows PC, MS just gratiously allows you to use it.
So, you see... it's all a matter of perspective.
No there’s only ever one answer and it’s “have you tried ‘sfc /scannow’?” But it never works, even if it finds an alleged problem.
Trying to use proprietary drivers and NTFS on Linux is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People work hard to make it work and maybe it does with a little effort but the proprietary model and Linux distros just don't mesh well together. If you make it a point to purchase hardware that has open source drivers and use open source software (and as a consumer, you probably should anyway), everything does just work. Obviously this may not suit your use case and Linux may just not be for you.
NTFS is okay if you're mounting a drive that you share with a Windows machine but don't actually install Linux to an NTFS partition please. Most of the "beginner friendly" distros I don't think even let you.
There's no way that would work, would it? I can't imagine installing linux to an NTFS volume and it actually functioning.
If I was in your situation, I would try installing openSUSE or Fedora Linux on a computer where you don't care if the entire disk gets wiped occasionally, using a flash drive you also don't care about getting wiped occasionally. They probably have sufficiently comprehensive installers and installation instructions for you to succeed in using one of them, and if you don't care about the content of the disks you use you'll be more willing to experiment with the installation process (even though it's unlikely your computer will work worse due to trying to install a Linux distribution). If you use a computer that has become slower and less usable than you'd like you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the results!
Also, you can back up your product keys and prepare a Microsoft Windows installation disk if being able to go back to Windows 10 makes you more comfortable with experimenting.
Overall, Linux enhanced my ability to to get productive work done, and also the opportunity to experiment and learn more about how to use computers to solve problems. I think learning how to use a GNU operating system is a good long term investment, though if you still need to keep around at least one computer that runs Microsoft Windows to protect your income I won't disparage you.
The key to customization is not going out of bounds. If you customize, do it the way it was intended to be customized, not by finding weird, hacky shit that works like some kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. If you find yourself writing convoluted bash scripts, and dredging up plugins on GitHub with the last commit from 2012, you're on a crash course with destiny.
Hey, how'd you see what I've done to my Android phone?
Cause this exactly describes what I do to it. Then I get weird conflicts. Lol. I do it to myself.
I was primarily noting that I usually don't engage in unnecessary and unproductive customization, as there will always be some way you could meet your desires a little better, but unless you're creating and documenting an automated system like https://larbs.xyz/ or even just "copy this file to
~/.profile" your customizations will eventually be lost when your system fails, leaving you with new reason to spend more time customizing.As the video I linked said: if computers are as powerful as the universe and the universe was created in billions of years, you may only be done customizing billions of years from now (and at that point you will have had even more billions of years to come up with new ways you want to improve your customization).
If I'm spending time on something that won't result in an update to a git repository, or a Lemmy comment, or even speaking to someone in person or me acquiring more property, I consider it more frivolous than not.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
obsessed with personalization
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I have to use windows at work. I have to spend a lot more time trouble shooting there than on my bleeding edge rolling release linux at home.
That is because you perform more work on your work computer instead of browsing lemmy all day.
I've had hard time troubleshooting on Windows because everything is obfuscated behind so many layers. And there's just things you can't feasibly do. But it does seem to work well most of the time.