Thorned_Rose

pete, 3 months ago

I have a roughly 13 year old install that I’ve moved through the transition to /usr/ and from sysv to systemd. Its my oldest install. I run almost everything except suse as a systems admin.

As a way to run Linux, I find arch one of the nicest. Rolling release, unmodified packages direct from the dev, unopinionated systems management, arch build system for any packages you want to compile, arch Linux archive that can be used for snapshotting or locking your rolling release, and AUR.

It’s a completely different way to manage and build an OS that no one else is really doing. I find team ‘I use arch btw’ to be extremely annoying but at the end of the day, the arch tooling for building a Linux ypunlike to use means that people are naturally going to want to tell you they built something they find enjoyable to use. That’s not really something a lot of people say about most OSs.

I have a range of issues and annoyances with most major OS, ranging from i cant use this to i wish this worked. Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu/deb flavors, redhat/fedora flavors, openwrt, alpine and other busybox flavors, iOS, Android, Graphine. All have things that mostly work but I’m always working around something.

And finding accurate documentation for issues on distros that have different configuration release to release is a pain, deb, Ubuntu and redhat flavors are especially egregious. I don’t really care how to do this on RH6 or Ubuntu 11, lol, I want docs for the current version.

angrytoadnoises, 4 months ago

At the time, I think I had uncommon hardware. I was trying to get Linux going on the cheapest little notebook you can imagine. I also got the same retort from support forums at the time, so my problem obviously wasn’t widespread. It was just the most definitive effort into Linux I had made, and I was just getting rebuffed by what I saw as silly little problems.

That was close to a decade ago now, though. After so much faffing around on the Steam Deck I think I’m ready to give Linux another stab.

Crazazy, 8 months ago

Whatever metric they use to track installs has to prevent abuse like this

I would be eagerly awaiting a follow-up response from unity from this, because as it stands right now, consensus among gamedev circles is that unity won’t prevent abuse at all, which is just awful for multiple groups of people.

• someone paying for your game and then re-downloading it every hour would cost you $144 a month
• someone paying for your game and then re-downloading it every 5 minutes would cost you $1728 a month
• web games exist, and if the Unity Runtime Download metric is used there, well, that is going to be an expensive bill for anyone putting any sense of monetization in their web game

Lettuceeatlettuce, 9 months ago

This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.

The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.

This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn’t want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.

Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don’t care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.

Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00’s when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.

Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.

Consumers in general don’t care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don’t even care about the few “choices” that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less

Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don’t agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.

I don’t have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won’t ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.

I am happy with a few percent market share. I don’t need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.

We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming “mainstream,” it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.

SexualPolytope, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I’ve been exclusively using Linux for almost a decade now. I started in high school when the computer we had at home was painfully slow with Windows. At start, it did seem a bit hard to wrap my head around. I was a kid, and there was no one who used Linux to teach me. I guess the installation etc. are much simpler nowadays. And the online spaces are much less toxic.

Even after all that, the main reason, I believe, is that it’s different. If someone is using a stable distro like Debian, and just wants to do what 90% of people do (i.e. browsing, looking at documents media etc.), Linux isn’t really a hassle. The installation process might be daunting to some people. But after that, they don’t need to open a terminal ever if they don’t want to. My sister is basically tech illiterate, and she’s been running Mint for a few years now. Never heard any complaints. Only issue she had was when she deleted her .config folder. But I had set up a script that backed up dotfiles to her external drive, so it was easily fixable.

People get frustrated because whenever something happens on Linux, and they go online, they see all these walls of text that they need to read, and commands they need to run. But they forget that on Windows and Macs, that isn’t even an option. Most of the time, you need to reset your system. Or, in the case of Macs, get it replaced. The frustration that people experience is caused by conditioning. They accept the inconveniences of Windows and Macs because they grew up with it. But since Linux is new to them, the shortcomings stick out much more.

TL;DR: For the average user, the OS doesn’t matter (they should probably still use Linux for increased privacy). For the power user, unless some specific applications they need are missing, Linux is always the best choice. The frustration is mostly due to conditioning.