Had this conversation with my boss yesterday. They cant use Azure mdm with Linux.

it’s made out of like a thousand different independently maintained hobby projects

Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it’s hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won’t tell people they’ll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won’t understand.

The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren’t up to date yet, and won’t be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I’m not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren’t FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let’s backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we’ll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we’ll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn’t vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

Simply put, if you want to install Linux you’re gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn’t paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).

“It’s different! It is not what I learned to use!”

Every few years, i come back to Linux to see how far i can get before hitting a major obstacle. Installed Linux mint summer last year to get away from windows.

First impression: Steam and proton are great, i can play my favorite game Mechabellum without any issue. Helldivers 2 otoh won’t work due to what seems to be an anti cheat tool.

Software development is also kinda good. Install vs code, let’s go.

But then the trouble begins: my brother laser printer that works out of the box with windows and macOS refuses to print. No error message or anything, just nothing happens. Next thing is that i want to use lm studio to host local llms, but they don’t have a full release for Linux, only a beta that is not available from the mint AppStore. There is an appimage available however, so i have to learn how to handle these. Too bad the Linux version does not support in app update, you always have to install the newest appimage manually.

I would like to develop an llm application using C#. I download the dotnet framework from the AppStore, but VSCODE is not able to find it. After investing several hours trying to find out why this is, i surrender.

And then, for some reason, my NVIDIA card breaks. I try to reset to an older version of the driver, but to no avail - i don’t know whats going on, but steam only shows if i deactivate hardware acceleration and games also will only run on the integrated graphics card.

I surrendered and went back to windows. See you guys in 2 years.

Edit: some spelling

Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:

The program you’re using was not developed for you.

It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it’s their time.
But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user’s perspective because they make sense from a developer’s perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that’s just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

the vast majority of my work software is windows/mac (although the expensive software I wish I could afford just added linux support in 2022). that’s the big one for me. on a smaller note i haven’t checked on my games since, i mean if i’m going to have to run a windows box i might as well take advantage of the plusses, but i understand there is significantly worse compatibility on linux.

Many (most?l tools I use and games I play aren’t natively compatible, and while there are sometimes free alternatives to them, they’re usually buggy, unmaintained, or lacking basic features

Doesn’t have the apps people need/want

One thing that happened recently that really showcases the difference between Linux and Windows is the glibc update that broke several popular video games. These games were specifically built to run on Linux. Ironically, games built to run only on Windows could still be ran on Linux just fine. That’s because those games are run through a compatibility layer that translates the Windows instructions into their corresponding Linux instructions. The games built for Linux use Linux instructions directly, so they don’t need a compatibility layer.

The update to glibc changed how some Linux instructions worked and so any program using the old instructions needed to update to the new ones. Lots of Linux programs are actively maintained or at least open source, so making the change isn’t a big deal. Video games tend not to be open source or actively maintained after they’re released, so some of these broken games will be broken forever. When that was reported to the maintainers of glibc, they responded that they don’t care if they break unmaintained, closed source software. It is the user’s fault for choosing to use such software.

To me, that is the biggest difference between Windows and Linux. If someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now. If someone creates a program for Linux, it could break next week, and the people who broke it won’t care. It’s a bit embarrassing that programs created for Windows work on Linux more reliably than programs created specifically for Linux.

I’ve been using it exclusively as my desktop for over 20 years. Does it have flaws and shortcomings? Sure. So have Windows and Mac. What system does not have issues?

Does it fit your use case? Who knows? Just try it and be the judge. If it doesn’t work, just keep using whatever you’re using, no harm done.

All you need is a USB stick, some curiosity and some time. It’s not like it’s a lifetime commitment or something. Unless, of course, you enjoy it… then you are doomed.

@[email protected] here’s a brief list, in no particular order and based pretty much entirely on my own opinions and experience.

1. you have to learn a little bit about what happens behind the scenes sometimes. for example, if you don’t know what distro packages are or what flatpak is (or the reasons behind each of them, honestly) then installing apps kinda sucks at first.

2. you can end up installing a package thinking it is the official one, when in fact it is some variety of third-party. generally this doesn’t really hurt anything but it can (look up fedora flatpak).

3. sometimes cool features get stuck in limbo because none of the people who want them know how to code

4. sometimes cool features get stuck in limbo because of politics (in-project politics, not what you probably thought at first)

5. it can be hard to figure out if something is good or if the people reccomending it are just trying to help a new user find something easy and, since they don’t actually use it and haven’t for a while, don’t know that it kind of sucks now (I’m thinking of ubuntu here but it happens with a lot of stuff, distro or otherwise)

6. all the damn tribalism

7. drivers are hell on most distros

8. app availabilty on non-.deb systems

9. some apps refuse to look native (gtk apps on kde, qt apps on gnome, anything made by a mac user for some reason, every browser fighting tooth and nail to default to windows titlebar icons)

10. all the damn tribalism

Software compatibility for things such as Adobe products and other things that are built specifically for windows.

It always feels like it’s someone’s hobby and not a mature product.

Fixing nearly anything is digging through a text file that might follow a standard but never the same standard as the last text file.

I’ve been using Linux Mint for the last 1–2 months (or so) and one of the things I miss the most is how on Windows, games just run (typically). Now, on Linux, one of the very first things I do upon wanting to play a new game is check the ProtonDb page. I am not always able to play the game I want. There’s often not even any ProtonDb page for a lot of older games, notably in my case Jazz Jackrabbit. (For example, even though the Jazz Jackrabbit Collection on GOG has a Linux installer, for some reason it won’t run.)

Make no mistake, I ain’t never going back to Windows for my personal use if I have anything to say about it. The sense of personal security I feel from not having my every move be captured, scrutinized, and sold by Microsoft is way too important to me. If I can have that feeling of relative comfort by forgoing a few games, it seems like a worthwhile price to me.

Nevertheless, the “plug-and-play” nature of games designed for Windows is something I miss.