Like when you send a .7z instead of a .zip or .rar to a friend or a teacher because that’s what your computer has installed and they’re like “Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip” even though the same program that opens .rar also opens .7z I feel like people are way more annoyed when they receive a .7z
No?
I just used 7Zip to compress to a .zip file when sending to anyone who I supect is tech illiterate.
Now I’m on linux, I don’t even know what application is doing the compressing, I just right click stuff in dolphin to compress/uncompress things using whatever format is suitable.
and people still think linux is hard
It can be. But pick a stable distro, and as long as you get past installation, you’ll be set.
I put Vanilla OS on my sister’s laptop, showed her the “app-store” (flatpak) and she’s been happily minecrafting and firefoxing ever since.
Yeah my mom’s 80 and her laptop runs Ubuntu. For the day to day stuff it’s dead simple, I haven’t had to do “tech support” for her in years
To be fair, someone with a more basic grasp of computers probably has fewer use cases that Linux will give you trouble with. I installed PuppyLinux on some ancient machine for someone I was renting from in like '08 and it was fine for her, but that’s because all she ever did was look at YouTube and check her email. It didn’t have any of the features of modern Ubuntu and the UI was clunky; if memory serves it didn’t even have DHCP.
It worked fine for basic browsing, but if you tried to do anything more complex, you’d better be ready to learn a thing or two.
Today it’s still pretty similar. Ubuntu and GNU at large have come a long way in the past couple of decades, but you still start running into issues when you get to more niche use cases.
I’d probably be running Ubuntu as my daily if Solaar worked properly with my MX Ergo, but it doesn’t, so I can’t. I guess I could go learn how to make contributions to patch that myself, and I may at some point, but at the moment I have stuff to get done and dealing with an unexpected hiccup in my workflow too often brings everything to a grinding halt.
What does it mean to not have DHCP? Does that mean you need to either pray the router is ok with you squatting on an IP, or you need to explicitly tell the router an IP will be reserved?
Normally it means that people have to set their network IP when they connect their device since they are not automatically assigned one. If the IP is taken, the router will tell you. If you don’t set an IP, the connection will simply fail. You are basically forcing every device in your network to have a static IP.
The upside is that you don’t have changing IPs in your network. I use my phone to control Kodi on my RPi and if I didn’t force a static IP on it, I would have to search for the Kodi host probably every time I restart the RPi.
Most routers and host clients do support IP reservation while still having DHCP enabled tho, so disabling DHCP is not really necessary these days. It wasn’t so smooth 20 years ago tho.
You had to manually configure your IP on the PC’s end. In practice it just meant you had to hit a button to connect to your network when you boot up. Considering that like a decade earlier we were all on dialup it didn’t feel that weird at the time.
I was also getting my internet via cantenna back then, so DHCP was the least of my worries!
Yeah that’s a good point, the simple stuff will surprisingly enough tend to be simple
I did this, picked a stable distro (Ubuntu) and had endless problems. Each time I was told that I just picked the wrong distro (and they recommended a different one each time), or that I shouldn’t want to do what I wanted to do, or that it’s my fault for not having compatible hardware, or that if I want something I should just code it myself. Switched back to Windows eventually. Linux is great for server but I wouldn’t touch it again on desktop.
Enjoying life in 2003?
Damn, when was this? I can’t remember the last time I installed Linux on a machine and had this experience.
I understand the frustration. Except the point about hardware. I mean, yeah, of course you need to pick hardware that’s compatible with the OS you want to run. Can we blame HP for not being compatible with macOS, or an iPhone for not running Android? Hardware needs drivers, so if your hardware isn’t compatible, that’s just… reality. 99% of the time I hear this complaint it’s either a wifi card or an Nvidia GPU lol
Earlier this year. I was using a thinkpad x1 carbon laptop, supposedly a good laptop for that but still had problems. I was using an nvidia gpu, granted and one of my issue was related to WiFi
Majority of my problems have by solved by not having Nvidia graphics. Personally Linux has been great at extending the life of old computers for me. Linux mint runs a million times faster than windows 10 on my old machines. But it also helps I am fairly tech literate so problems that come up don’t register as a bif of a deal to me compared to others.
Yeah, I was using nvidia graphics so a lot of my issues were definitely caused by that.
When was this? When I finally went full time a year ago, compatibility and ease of use had improved greatly since the previous time I tried to leave Windows. And it sounds like the people giving you advice were gate-keeping assholes.
Any distro can install and run any software, choosing one is really just a matter of getting something that is already as close to the config you want as possible.
Not to discount your experience, but you’re only one data-point. The vast majority, in my experience, encounter few, if any, issues. And the ones they do can be solved by someone who knows even just the basics of linux. I’ve made the jump on several systems, for myself and other users.
A lot of windows know-how is useless, and linux newbies who are used to windows may look for solutions in the wrong places, and hence don’t find any. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or are more complex than on windows. I did this myself, bashing my head on problems with simple solutions, simply because I didn’t know those solutions. Windows would seem pretty “complex” too if you didn’t know the control panel exists, or what it’s for.
For windows, the know-how for solving problems is simply more accessible. If you don’t know someone who can help with linux, and don’t want to learn, then yeah, by all means, stick to windows.
But linux can absolutely be a good experience on desktop. And who knows, any given person can give it a try, and chances are, their system wont run into any issues at all!
This was earlier this year. Last time I tried it before that was in 2013 and I had heard that Linux had advanced a lot since then so was hopeful for giving it a try. I think you’re right to a degree that I don’t have as many issues with Windows because I know how to fix most issues there. However, one of the first issues I ran into on Linux was trying to increase the scroll speed on my mouse and searching showed me the only solution was a 3rd party program that listens for scroll events and just doubles them up which was far from ideal.
That’s because the kinda people who push Linux irl still tend to be the arch/Gentoo/random niche distro kinda people.
That’s why I don’t even recommend it to people anymore. Over the years I’ve lost track of all the distros and I wouldn’t even know what to tell someone to install.
Honestly, I’m not a Linux person. I’ve been thinking about it, however I’m being held back by the fact that I think some of the software I use probably wouldn’t work in Linux, even with wine or proton. I know, I know, I can dual-boot Linux with windows, however really I don’t really want to fuck around with having to reboot everytime I want to use Substance Painter (rip Substance for Linux, if it weren’t for that I’d be dipping my toes in again) or some niche game modding tool that doesn’t play well with
emulationcompatibility layers. Also I have an Nvidia card because there’s a ton of support for Cuda (but not a lot of support for amd compatible GPU compute apis), and I’ve heard those don’t usually play well with Linux.If I had to choose a distro to recommend for a non-techy person though, it’d probably be something like Mint or Ubuntu, and I’d make sure wine and/or proton is installed. Additionally, I’m not sure if wine or proton have the ability to setup a config database (it’s been a long time since I tried to use Linux), but I’d also setup something like that with all the most commonly used configs so that whenever a new program is launched in wine/proton, it searches the DB and then uses whatever config is set to be “the best”. That way grandpa can install and play his hoyle card game or whatever without having to call me over every time he wants to use something new (though I’ll be honest, he’d probably do that anyway because it’d be a reason to spend time with me, sorry grandpa :c).
(Edited because I realized I used the wrong term, pls don’t burn me at the stake Linux nerds)
My reasons are almost the exact same as yours. CUDA, software compatibility, and not wanting to mess with dual boot in case I mess up. I ended up trying linux mint on an external drive and it works pretty well, but I don’t think I see myself using this full time beyond software development.
I swapped to Ubuntu after windows 7 (refused to use 8/10). I find it much easier to work with than windows, but Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve used.
I’m not really an advanced user; I do some minor self hosting, and sometimes enjoy looking into new functionalities, but I’m not a huge computer person at all. Ubuntu worked perfectly well once I got the display driver issue sorted.
Holy shit is drive/file management sleek as fuck, especially if you move drives frequently. The disc management gui was just what it needed to be. The bulk rename utility being a standard, and easy as hell to use, was so so so fucking helpful, especially fixing all 26 seasons of original doctor who (each season is broken down into several miniseries, and were named like S01E01P01, S01E01P02, so not a workable naming scheme for Plex).
I learned a bunch of terminal commands because I like command line, it’s just more transparent and easier in the long run. Learned to add my software’s repositories for updates, which was super nice. But it’s a super nice and easy OS, and learning stuff in general was pretty optional.
The mobo died and I replaced the whole thing with a cheap win 11 computer. I can’t stand it and will be rebuilding my beast. Once my self-host servers are properly migrated to Linux, I’ll format the windows one to throw a different distro on to play with as my daily use computer.
I got a machine to set up as a media server and it had Windows preloaded. I’m a Windows user primarily and after an hour I got the shits and installed Mint. Command line installing is so much simpler.
The hard part is happening to only own hardware that has software supporting it that isn’t out of date. That and a lot of gaming.
It would be more correct to say some gaming. I don’t even check if games work anymore before buying, I just assume that they do, and so far they have.
Yeah at this point it’s mostly those games with heavy DRM and/or anti-cheat that don’t work properly on Linux. Proton has done wonders for compatibility otherwise.
Ehh, I would take those Proton ratings with a grain of salt. I’ve definitely run into issues trying to run stuff that’s supposed to be silver or gold. But again it all comes down to what your specific use case is. Hardware, software, peripherals, and goals and preferences.
I don’t even look at the ratings. I just buy games and play them. What would I do with a grain of salt?
Lick it.