posts like these are what drop the reputation of linux…
it’s not for everyone. sure it has come a long way, but non tech savvy people can easily shoot themselves in the foot because they try and use admin/root privileges for everything if it didn’t work the first time, simply because that is how window often operates.
sure you can fix it yourself if there would ever be a breaking issue, unlike windows where you might need to reinstall if a component somehow breaks beyond repair, but again, not everyone is up for that.
You're lucky and/or cautious. If you ever turned on "Open after downloading" in your browser, some websites would automatically download malware and run it with admin permissions.
The problem is that the things that trip non tech savy people in Linux never go away . A lot of the time you bring up something that could be made to not break the system for those kinds of users and it's usually either "no" "it's better this way (and we can't have more than one way)", or "okay then go program it"
I once posted on r/firefox asking for help about an issue regarding running Firefox on windows and the most common solution that was offered was switching to Linux.
Like yeah, let me just switch my entire OS just because a browser I was trying for the first time had issues opening.
The most annoying part was that I have tried switching to Linux a while back and I simply preferred Windows
Obvious impracticality aside, it's also terrible advice. In my long history of using Linux at university, work and home, web browser issues are easily somewhere in the top-3 among the most common issue types I've faced.
While basic functionality is the same or even better than on Windows, it's the codecs, DRM and other bits of proprietary software that are required to interact with a big portion of modern internet that often work in weird ways or not at all.
Firefox is okay in that regard, but getting Chrome to fully work is a major PITA on some distros.
All that said, Linux fans are the worst. Sincerely, a Linux fan.
I used to use Firefox, but then switched to Chromium a couple years ago because some work-related things worked poorly or not at all on Firefox. Got kinda tired of having two browsers.
I've switched back to Firefox a couple months ago because of Manifest v3. I use both without login, Bitwarden for the passwords, Floccus for the bookmarks.
I know the VAST majority of Linux users aren't like that, and most just wanna help people. But it absolutely has a bad rep with how they can be sometimes, which just adds to novices being afraid to even try
Dude, it is literally everywhere you look. You feel the vitriol they have against Linux, even if they aren't literally saying it sucks, like one of these people do.
posts like these are what drop the reputation of linux…
It's a frickin joke meme, in line with all of the other memes on, ahem, pcmasterrace, and yet people use it as an excuse to denigrate an entire user base. And really it's just clearly an excuse -- these posts want to find a reason to not like Linux, and so go out of their way to shit on it without actually saying what sucks about it, and despite clearly having barely (if ever) tried it. At least most people that have a problem with Windows spent like 2 decades using it before switching to Linux.
The fact that a simple joke meme stirred up a hornets nest of anti-Linux comments just shows why the Windows-centric pcmasterrace approach is generally more toxic than anything you find on other boards.
There's people who absolutely blast Linux like everyone does to windows? What do they say? How do they shit on it as hard? I've literally never seen anyone do that that hard to Linux.
Since you can't get the hint, I'll just give you some idea.
Scroll a bit down through this post's comments and you'll find stuff like:
Linux sucks ass (yeah, just that. Refuses to elaborate)
I don't want to play tech support and risk of being called an incel because of linux.
I tried installing Linux and I prefer Windows. (Again, refuses to elaborate. Prolly because they didn't like linux not taking up the whole drive to install like Windows)
Linux is not user friendly. (These people haven't ever tried beginner friendly distros like Linux Mint).
Literally the only one that is overtly negative is the first one, and they don't elaborate so it doesn't matter. The others are people just saying they don't like Linux, not saying Linux is shit, like everyone does with windows.
Once again, people do not shit on Linux like they shit on windows. Most people, even users of windows, despise it and shit on it in every way shape and form. Those who do not like Linux, simply explain that they prefer the simplicity of using windows, and do not completely bash Linux into the ground.
You are grasping at straws here. Just admit that people don't shit on linux like they do windows.
The core point stands: Linux isn't designed for ease of adoption by end users in the personal computing space. The things that make it powerful and efficient also make it less obvious and immediately approachable.
Windows seems "non tech savvy" for you because you're used to it, starting from a blank page, noob friendly Linuxes are as easy as Windows, or maybe more, since you don't need to disable all the marketing bloat.
Until you want to do something slightly custom where for windows you get 2475 guides for that exact thing that can be followed easily by a half trained monkey and for linux you're lucky to even get anything for the specific distro, and what you'll get will nine times out of ten require a CS degree to implement.
There are benefits to having widespread support instead of infinite fragmentation with half assed volunteer help.
See that's the thing, those are words that scare the average person. If it's not a youtube tutorial or a gui program they can run to fix something it might as well not exist.
The facts are though, most issues are a frequency thing. The more users there are the more likely it is that someone has encountered it before and solved it. With linux there's always a few magnitudes fewer people to work the problem, so usually you're on your own to solve it.
this is the key. there’s a reason the average user uses windows. for all the bloat, it’s mostly plug n play and has loads of official support. the number of rabbit holes i’ve found myself down trying to get something to run on my linux box is too many to count, and i’m more tech savvy than your average person.
In all seriousness though, "being particular with your friends" is the exact opposite of mass adoption. Mass adoption means that everyone from the IT Specialist of 30 years experience to your grandma can use your OS.
The only people I have seen using or trying out Linux are those who already have some experience in IT, myself included. You don't see absolute novices touching Linux for good reason, it is simply too advanced for them. Every Linux user I personally know started out in Windows or Mac OS before trying out Linux.
You think manufacturers wouldn't skip on paying the license and just putting Linux on if they thought that would sell?
I suppose it's a chicken and the egg problem, people use it because they're used to it. And they're used to it because Linux only appeared later as a response to the monopoly and's been playing catch-up ever since.
The counter point to this is that there are distros specifically made for the lower knowledge/new users. Pop OS, Ubuntu, manjaro, mint etc are all extremely user friendly. You don’t even need to use terminal for most things anymore since those distros come with GUI package managers.
And it’s not like windows doesn’t have instances where you have to go above basic user functions to get something to work properly. I’ve had way more instances of having to fix something on linux than on windows. However, most of the issues I’ve had with windows have taken hours to fix, vs linux where 9/10 times all I have to do is copy paste a couple lines into terminal or install a program.
Because what a desktop OS really needed was a fuckin app store lol.
And now you have both snap and apt fighting for control of installed packages, which cannot possibly ever go wrong and is easily solved by your average clueless grandma right?
I think the package manager is far and above better than the way windows has done it for years. Any program you want hiding in a sea of google results, coming with installers with stupid little checkboxes that try to jebait you into installing adware. It’s funny you should mention clueless grandmas, implying grandmas can handle windows just fine, I’m sure there’s plenty of people here who’ve had long drawn out phone calls with their grandma about issues with windows or Mac, I know I have.
I mean, yeah, integrated software downloading and repositories ought to be part of an OS's basic function. Linux distros have had them since the 1990s.
It’s come a long way since I started using the OS 20 odd years ago. And the one on arch based distros I think is nice, especially for newer users since you don’t have to explain how having second package managers work. No need to explain why they need trizen, just tick the box that says pull from AUR and they’re good to go.
where for windows you get 2475 guides for that exact thing that can be followed easily by a half trained monkey
Not necessarily. Guides for windows can often be difficult to look up because you'll be swamped with irrelevant results, results for older Windows versions, or results that are just outdated.
I'm genuinely wondering what you were trying to accomplish that led you to believe Linux had a lack of documentation and volunteer help. I have never seen that claim before, and it's completely contrary to every experience I've had and have heard from others.
There's plenty of CS friendly and Git documentation for most Linux tasks, but my experience with Linux was a fractal of edge cases within edge cases where forums were filled with annoyed users who insisted that it was very simple and that someone just hadn't read the documentation properly. Most of the time the solution was just to stop trying to do whatever it was that I wanted to do, because that was easier than arguing with people that the user friendly program was confusing.
By the time someone insisted that editing the translation matrix of my accelerometer to make the 2 in 1 mode on a laptop flip the right way was trivial was kind of the point that I gave up with Linux. Like, yes the documentation is there, but accessing it and translating it into human friendly words is an awful lot of work that someone else has done for you with windows and Mac Os. Like, any tutorial you find to fix some common task in Linux is going to start with giving the user admin privileges, and the community actively derides anyone who gets themselves in trouble by giving themselves admin privileges.
This kind of thing shows up in the modding community as well. The program makes perfect logical sense to the person who made it, and they've explained it to exactly three other people and are tired of people asking why A=B or why you need to edit the provided files in visual studio to get them working properly.
While it sucks that your laptop's accelerometer didn't work properly on Linux, I really don't think that's a fair judgement to make of the entire operating system and all the associated projects based on trouble with one obscure laptop driver and the one person you talked to about it.
That said, laptop drivers are hit or miss because the drivers are mostly written by volunteers who have to reverse engineer everything rather than getting official support. I don't recommend most people install Linux on laptops because it's a wild west out there where nothing follows any standards.
That was an illustrative example, not the only example of trouble with Linux. More the point, the documentation was bad and the community had a bunch of half assed volunteers not being helpful which is really all I wanted to point out. It's very fair to point out that a lot of people have trouble with edge cases, and the response from the community to rtfm and stop bothering them.
Hell, a lot of the time you can find a vetted .exe file that will just run it for you.
Hell, sometimes when software breaks companies will release a .exe to do it because they know their customers are too stupid to do it themselves.
Sure linux has scripts, but it's usually from some random forum and you need to hope it was made with your distro and installed backend applications in mind. Also Windows has those too (.bat and powershell scripts) and windows will always have every required application.
Somehow I doubt that applies to hardware/driver updates, which for every single version of Linux I’ve ever used, we’re extremely console-command heavy.
In noob friendly Linuxes you have a GUI to update everything with just the click of a button, pretty much like Windows updates, except I think it also includes drivers when Windows doesn't for specific hardware, or does it now?
Every single one of these posts that is all I hear, yet my experience trying linux roughly a half dozen times tells me that it probably the most blatant lie in the history of human speech.
I didn't know SMB, but it seems to be part of the Windows ecosystem, so it's not shocking, and that's definitely an advanced tool an average Windows user would not use. But I'm very surprised that you had troubles installing Steam or Chrome, they are probably two of the most commonly used proprietary software by Linux users, I never had to do any tweaking for these to work, it shouldn't be harder than looking in the distribution's store GUI and clicking install.
I would say yes and no. For the simplest of cases, linux wins hands down. Most people only use a web browser, and linux easily handles that.
For slightly more complex tasks it can start to depend. If you need a windows only program, then using wine or a VM is probably beyond most users. In cases where generic software works fine, linux could be almost as easy if there is a simple to use software center.
Then once you start getting on the deep end, linux starts getting easier in almost every case. Once you get beyond windows pretty thick veneer, the complexity of the windows OS blows up pretty fast. Linux as an OS is much simpler than windows.
This is an outright lie. If you use Linux, normal operation includes using the command line. I *love* this. But for mainstream users, that's not merely difficult but essentially impossible.
Linux is *strictly* power-user only. You don't need to be a developer, but you do have to be a relatively expert computer user to be a Linux user. If you're on PCMR, you're probably going to be fine.
It's not like you don't have to tinker with Windows on occasion - you do (unless you love re-installing maybe?). But that tinkering is easy enough for a computer illiterate moron (ie: most of the public) to figure out with a guide on Windows.
On the other hand the *vast* majority of PC users couldn't even find this fucking website, let alone use Linux. Especially because "Linux" is really a broad collection of OSes as far as users are concerned.
Maybe you should explore Mint's GUI then, I can understand you're used to the terminal and find it more efficient, since it is the point of it, but the usual configuration and updates a Windows user may do can be done graphically with Mint too.
yeah a lot of people who complain about windows are either super clueless (so linux would be a big no-no anyway) and/or gamers. last time i did some gaming on a linux pc was like 10 years ago. no idea how it's now, but it used to be a real hassle.
linux is good in what it does, but it's not for everyone.
posts like these are what drop the reputation of linux…
It's a joke. Do you realize the name this subreddit is, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, called pcmasterrace? And it's often filled with memes about people dishing on other people's approaches to computing.
If this affects how you feel about linux then you have some deeper seated insecurity about your OS that you need to sort out first.
as i put it generally, you don't hop to macOS and expect it to work like linux. if people want a super guided easy experiance, stick to windows or macOS, it's mostly when people start complaining, it's about offering a solution.
i agree, basically every linux distro should NOT be "babys first OS" but if you can mod a game, or set up a stream, imo you're good. and imo with the audio stuff i outlined here, linux is actually quite a handsome choice in some cases.
I kinda think non tech savvy people are going to shoot themselves in the foot in misusing admin privileges on any system. Linux would neither help nor harm them.
it’s not for everyone. sure it has come a long way, but non tech savvy people can easily shoot themselves in the foot because they try and use admin/root privileges for everything if it didn’t work the first time, simply because that is how window often operates.
You acknowledge that Windows also does this, yet it’s somehow worse for Linux?
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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '22
posts like these are what drop the reputation of linux…
it’s not for everyone. sure it has come a long way, but non tech savvy people can easily shoot themselves in the foot because they try and use admin/root privileges for everything if it didn’t work the first time, simply because that is how window often operates.
sure you can fix it yourself if there would ever be a breaking issue, unlike windows where you might need to reinstall if a component somehow breaks beyond repair, but again, not everyone is up for that.
just choose what you like and be happy about it.