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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.
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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!
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 had to laugh at “minimal kernel”.
yeah, arch is far from minimal
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
Arch, Arch based, GUI installer, installs even faster than EndeavorOS
it’s not
Tried it, and it didnt work properly. Manjaro works like a charm tho
Manjaro has broken AUR support multiple times on purpose. No thanks.
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
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.
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 :-/
If you switch from Visual Studio to Rider it’ll make the migration fully to Linux much easier.
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)
yeah I think I’ll just stick with Fedora.
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.
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.
Idk, ive installed non-free software without touching stuff, weirdly enough non-free drivers break my system (Nvidia 32kb “gpu” )
btw btw
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.
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.
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.
what? where? look at the username, that’s clearly anonymous, the hacker group.
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’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
They has been used to refer to an unspecified individual since before you were born.
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You can toss Fedora in there too.
Me? NixOS. No grass for me, thanks.
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I swear I’ve had fewer issues with nix than anything, including mint.
But I haven’t gotten into home manager and flakes yet
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Grass? Sorry. Grass isn’t reproducible.
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
Why the fuck does it say by spez next to the community name? Fuck spez
That’s because OP is spez
calm down. it’s not the real spez
Or, AM I?
Hello spez, please give me reddit stock. Thanks sir.
I thought the shortage of toilet paper was over?
Forget the stock, give me lots of money!
It is
You guys realize scapegoating spaz is exactly what’s best for Reddit right? He is the Fall Guy and was hired back on after the company was taken over, for exactly this purpose. It certainly not because of his intellect or technical prowess…
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?
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.
I thought that the joke would be that OP is actually trying to pop popcorn because of the word “kernel.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unironically yes. Let’s gatekeep anything that people can fuck around with that can’t be fixed by a simple factory reset button.
