This is NOT going Well… Linux Gaming Challenge Pt.2

[Sho2048]

34 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Linus' discussion of scripts at 724s is very revealing, in two ways:

1. He treats scripts as somehow more risky and dangerous than executables, which Windows users like Linus download and run from random websites all the time, and are much harder to inspect than scripts
2. The idea that a user (of any system) should have some basic idea of what they're doing is so alien to Linus that when Luke mentions that you're supposed to actually inspect the scripts that you run, Linus breaks out laughing and cannot stop. He also mentions how ‘long’ the script is, (talking about how much scrolling he had to do)

That ‘long’ script is also less than 200 lines, including whitespace. The following is a complete list of all of the commands it contains, aside from shell builtins like cd and exit:
 

apt-get
clear
cp
chown
dpkg
grep
pacman
pacmd
pulseaudio
sed
sh
sudo
tee

That's the complete list of commands Linus would need to understand to audit that script. Most of those are so common and quotidian that anyone who will ever touch a Unix-like command line more than once in their entire life should know make a point to know them. (And anyone who uses a Unix-like command line for a year or two will learn them by accident.)

The only two that are specific to the application are pacmd and pulseaudio. Those are also, along with apt-get, dpkg, and pacman, the only commands in the script that are specific to Linux; the rest are present in some form on macOS and *BSD. Every one of those commands has a manual that can be consulted quickly and efficiently to make sure that a given usage of the command is not malicious.

In no way does it take a ‘security professional’ to inspect that script to determine whether or not it is malicious. Barring some disability or active hostility toward learning, any newbie could develop the skills required to sanity check that script in a week or two.

It's clear that for Linus, asking users to exercise any judgment or diligence at all when it comes to scripts is unthinkable. That point of view embodies many of the attitudes Linus ascribes at times to the Linux community: it's extreme, condescending, and elitist. In a word, it's pitiful.

(There's a big difference between saying ‘I don't want to do that right now’ or ‘I don't have time to learn this’ or ‘that's too hard for me’ and the attitude Linus reveals in that clip.)

I really agree with this post and just signed up to give my 2 cents on the matter. What I am seeing is some big confusion on what they’re really doing here. Linus is not acting as a “inexperienced user” but more like someone who doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t want to think about what he’s doing, and comes off as condescending Dunning-Kruger. No “new user” would go download a rolling release dietro based on Arch without doing some research first… So how come he missed the fact that apt is not a thing on Manjaro? 
 

Never mind that he complains that the browser is doing its job, downloading a link to a page as a web page! And even then, that can happen to someone once, no big deal; but no, he proceeds to tell us that how Windows does it must be the one true way and everything else is bad. Like he thinks “new users” actually know what file extensions are? 

 

What has come out of this has been a lot of armchair ux designers with some embarrassing takes - such as treating Linux as a product of a monolithic company - and circlejerking about how the Linux community is bad, while FOSS developers do their best to help out even the most ungrateful. Heck, some people *do* take the PC Master Race meme seriously, yet happily call users on forums gatekeepers for asking to actually read and not brain dead your way into a random distro install.

 

Please don’t turn everything into childproof software for the masses. I don’t use it anymore as desktop environment but when I got into Linux I googled about it and learned from Wikipedia about DEs, package managers, differences between families of distros and such. I cannot believe that Linus downloaded a distro based on some random word of mouth on enthusiast forums and yet didn’t even google how it is different from even Ubuntu. How do you get into a new thing without even doing the least research and right away try to be a smartass in the terminal? Manjaro even comes with a software store thing…

 

Linux is not perfect but the biggest take that should come out is how little love goes into software for it compared to Windows, and same goes for hardware. The community can’t force Nvidia or Slack or even Discord to give a bigger shit about it, and there’s nothing in the Linux kernel to prevent a good experience. Why are they faulting Linux for it? 

[Olgyd]

1 hour ago, finest feck fips said:

this is why assuming that filename extensions mean something (or that what you see at the end of a URL is a filename) is dumb. Don't do that, even if your dumb OS primes you to.

 

As a Linux user: No. Just no. File extensions are a convention, just as file headers are, and both have their own benefits and drawbacks. It's only "dumb" because not everyone follows it.

 

24 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Linus' discussion of scripts at 724s is very revealing, in two ways

 

I remember a discussion I had with someone once: are you expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a car? No. You go to a mechanic. Yet at the same time, you are expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a computer. It's easy to lose track when it's your hobby, but just like how you probably expect your car to "just work" and take you to your destination, the average person expects their computer to "just work" so they could do whatever they need to do and get back to their actual hobby.

[Sho2048]

1 hour ago, finest feck fips said:

I didn't!

That's dope. Is there a client header for saying ‘I'm hitting you with a save dialog right now’? Or a content disposition that the browser will understand as a whole page but not try to save by default?

Does this

mean it can't be applied to whole pages, like what's served at such a link?

Nope, this has zero to do with it. Browser was downloading the link as a file and the link happens to be a web page, that header would not help

[Guest Linux-Is-Best]

2 hours ago, Ultraforce said:

Oh yeah I was going the the LMG Clips for the WAN Show and the whole github thing seems to not be a bit but actually just straight up not knowing how to use Github or Git

 

 

Is he serious? He cannot be serious!

 

Are you serious? Do you have any imagination of how insecure and dangerous running an EXE file on Windows is compared to running an SH file on Linux? First, on Linux, I can review the code in an SH file in any text editor, while on Windows, most of that code in your EXE is encrypted. The anti-virus industry is a trillion; that's trillion with a T, dollar industry because people randomly download and run executables (EXE) files without knowing what they are.

 

I will agree that no, perhaps not everyone reads everything line by line, but at least with Linux, I have that option. Yet your EXE often does not give me a choice.

[finest feck fips]

8 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

Nope, this has zero to do with it. Browser was downloading the link as a file and the link happens to be a web page, that header would not help

That was my impression, but I don't really do frontend so my knowledge of HTTP headers and when browsers do what with them is pretty limited

[Sho2048]

12 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

 

As a Linux user: No. Just no. File extensions are a convention, just as file headers are, and both have their own benefits and drawbacks. It's only "dumb" because not everyone follows it.

 

 

I remember a discussion I had with someone once: are you expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a car? No. You go to a mechanic. Yet at the same time, you are expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a computer. It's easy to lose track when it's your hobby, but just like how you probably expect your car to "just work" and take you to your destination, the average person expects their computer to "just work" so they could do whatever they need to do and get back to their actual hobby.

You still need to learn to drive a car, you aren’t born with it, and so kids aren’t born with knowing how Windows work either

 

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

[Olgyd]

29 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

Never mind that he complains that the browser is doing its job, downloading a link to a page as a web page!

The issue is that it didn't look like a hyperlink. It looked like a direct link to the shell file.

Quote

And even then, that can happen to someone once, no big deal; but no, he proceeds to tell us that how Windows does it must be the one true way and everything else is bad.

Uh...Linux does it the same way, too. Again, the issue is that it's a toss up whether the button is a direct link to the file or is hidden behind javscript.

Quote

What has come out of this has been a lot of armchair ux designers with some embarrassing takes - such as treating Linux as a product of a monolithic company - and circlejerking about how the Linux community is bad, while FOSS developers do their best to help out even the most ungrateful.

Bit surprised "if it's free you can't complain" isn't a fallacy. Oh well.

Quote

How do you get into a new thing without even doing the least research and right away try to be a smartass in the terminal?

Trial and error?

 

Quote

Linux is not perfect but the biggest take that should come out is how little love goes into software for it compared to Windows, and same goes for hardware. The community can’t force Nvidia or Slack or even Discord to give a bigger shit about it, and there’s nothing in the Linux kernel to prevent a good experience. Why are they faulting Linux for it? 

They're not. They're bemoaning. Like how one can bemoan it raining: you know it doesn't rain because the world hates you, and you have no power to change that, but the end result is still an inconvenience and it just feels nice to get it off your chest.

[Olgyd]

5 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

You still need to learn to drive a car, you aren’t born with it, and so kids aren’t born with knowing how Windows work either

 

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

Yeah, drive a car. Not "calibrate the carburetor to ascertain a correct fuel/air mixture ratio".

[Sho2048]

2 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

The issue is that it didn't look like a hyperlink. It looked like a direct link to the shell file.

Uh...Linux does it the same way, too. Again, the issue is that it's a toss up whether the button is a direct link to the file or is hidden behind javscript.

Bit surprised "if it's free you can't complain" isn't a fallacy. Oh well.

Trial and error?

 

They're not. They're bemoaning. Like how one can bemoan it raining: you know it doessn't rain because the world hates you, and you have no power to change that, but the end result is still an inconvenience and it just feels nice to get it off your chest.

They are not direct links though. So complaining that "save as a file" does not work makes no sense whatsoever. And github is not a file hosting website, so you should not expect them to be link to files anyway (where is your beloved trial and error btw?)

 

You seem to be awfully condescending too, are you a Linux user?

1 minute ago, Olgyd said:

Yeah, drive a car. Not "calibrate the carburetor to make sure it gets the correct fuel/air mixture ratio".

No one is required to do that on Linux if everything is supported. It just so happens that some stuff is not compatible or supported. You don't expect consoles to be compatible with random hardware right? So don't expect Linux either to be compatible to just about everything without work. Stuff does not magically work just because it's USB or PCI-E. 

[finest feck fips]

12 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

File extensions are a convention, just as file headers are,

yes. Although typically file headers are part of the spec for the file format and sometimes contain important data for decoding the rest of the file, so it's generally a more critical convention and it's less likely to be ignored in practice

 

15 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

It's only "dumb" because not everyone follows it.

mostly agreed. But relying on file extensions alone to determine handlers and interpreters is also genuinely stupid design. You think that if Microsoft were writing an OS from scratch today, there's any chance they'd make that choice again? I don't

 

19 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

I remember a discussion I had with someone once: are you expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a car? No. You go to a mechanic. Yet at the same time, you are expected to know how to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a computer.

This is true. And Unix-like operating systems are generally designed for the equivalent of a ‘mechanic-driver’; they're modeled after big, fancy multiuser systems whose administrators were universally supposed to be professionals.

But Linus didn't ‘go to a mechanic’, or suggest that users should do something equivalent to ‘going to a mechanic’, either. I wouldn't criticize him for that suggestion.

Linus' expectations are also totally unreasonable if we apply a car metaphor: his expectation was to take a third-party part which was not designed for his vehicle and install it himself, using instructions and diagrams a local car nerd wrote on the back of a napkin. You don't get to do that and then also complain that the process is questionable or involves skills that put you out of your depth.

[Olgyd]

1 minute ago, Sho2048 said:

They are not direct links though. So complaining that "save as a file" does not work makes no sense whatsoever. And github is not a file hosting website, so you should not expect them to be link to files anyway (where is your beloved trial and error btw?)

 

You seem to be awfully condescending too, are you a Linux user?

No one is required to do that on Linux if everything is supported. It just so happens that some stuff is not compatible or supported. You don't expect consoles to be compatible with random hardware right? So don't expect Linux either to be compatible to just about everything without work. Stuff does not magically work just because it's USB or PCI-E. 

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's...an HTML file. Maybe Github could consider not making their UI look so much like an FTP server.

 

You know the old saying. If you meet a condensecnding person, you met a condenscending person. If everyone you meet seems to be condenscending...

 

At least we agree on one thing. Linux isn't compatible with everything, and that's fine. But as I've said: it doesn't matter what the reasons are. And unlike bemoaning the weather, Windows serves concrete proof that it can be better.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, Jaesop said:

This isn't exactly helpful either.

I don't care.

 

apparently you're not allowed to criticize linux ever, and everything is the fault of the user. i'm going to keep criticizing PEOPLE for acting like they do in this thread until the elitism around linux is gone.

[Olgyd]

3 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Linus' expectations are also totally unreasonable if we apply a car metaphor: his expectation was to take a third-party part which was not designed for his vehicle and install it himself, using instructions and diagrams a local car nerd wrote on the back of a napkin. You don't get to do that and then also complain that the process is questionable or involves skills that put you out of your depth.

Eh...I guess we have different ideas on what constitutes "not designed for". I can definitely understand the mindset that Linux was never written with things like the GoXLR in mind and shouldn't be faulted, but on the other hand, a GoXLR isn't completely ridiculous to try and connect to your PC - after all, it's designed for it.

[Sho2048]

17 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's...an HTML file. Maybe Github could consider not making their UI look so much like an FTP server.

 

You know the old saying. If you meet a condensecnding person, you met a condenscending person. If everyone you meet seems to be condenscending...

 

At least we agree on one thing. Linux isn't compatible with everything, and that's fine. But as I've said: it doesn't matter what the reasons are. And unlike bemoaning the weather, Windows serves concrete proof that it can be better.

Well then enlighten me on how you would display a directory of files without making them look like an FTP client? Because code repositories are directories... And you're on Github, it's literally in the name. You're being served a code browser, not a file browser

 

And no, Windows does not prove anything. Windows and its ecosystem aren't the same as Linux. It's not even "Linux", it's GNU, Linux, thousands of contributors and the most disparate libraries with different interests and objectives... And unlike Windows, it does not have consumer hardware companies working for it.

 

I struggle to see what people can do to help Linux be better at hardware support without money and some ultra black magic to rewrite Windows monopoly on OS being shipped with computers... 

  

7 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

Eh...I guess we have different ideas on what constitutes "not designed for". I can definitely understand the mindset that Linux was never written with things like the GoXLR in mind and shouldn't be faulted, but on the other hand, a GoXLR isn't completely ridiculous to try and connect to your PC - after all, it's designed for it.

 

Linux does not know what a GoXLR thing is. What should it do with it? Windows doesn't know it either before the drivers

  

9 minutes ago, Arika S said:

I don't care.

 

apparently you're not allowed to criticize linux ever, and everything is the fault of the user. i'm going to keep criticizing PEOPLE for acting like they do in this thread until the elitism around linux is gone.

This outlook that Linux users are elitists is not gonna help anyone

 

And it's really hard to fault users for just being so few of them... That is the root problem of everything

[Arika]

1 minute ago, Sho2048 said:

This outlook that Linux users are elitists is not gonna help anyone

I've yet to see anything substantial to the contrary.

[Sho2048]

Just now, Arika S said:

I've yet to see anything substantial to the contrary.

Thanks for the helpful insight

[Olgyd]

14 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

Well then enlighten me on how you would display a directory of files without making them look like an FTP client?

All that needs to be done is to not have the text itself be links. Use a button that says "Go to" or "View".

Quote

And no, Windows does not prove anything. Windows and its ecosystem aren't the same as Linux. It's not even "Linux", it's GNU, Linux, thousands of contributors and the most disparate libraries with different interests and objectives... And unlike Windows, it does not have consumer hardware companies working for it.

Third time: It's The End Result. Not The Reasons.

[Sho2048]

6 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

All that needs to be done is to not have the text itself be links. Use a GoTo button instead.

Third time: It's The End Result. Not The Reasons.

There is no path for Linux to become mainstream for consumers, so there is no path for Linux to have mainstream support.

 

Bye. ^^

[Ultraforce]

51 minutes ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

Is he serious? He cannot be serious!

 

Are you serious? Do you have any imagination of how insecure and dangerous running an EXE file on Windows is compared to running an SH file on Linux? First, on Linux, I can review the code in an SH file in any text editor, while on Windows, most of that code in your EXE is encrypted. The anti-virus industry is a trillion; that's trillion with a T, dollar industry because people randomly download and run executables (EXE) files without knowing what they are.

 

I will agree that no, perhaps not everyone reads everything line by line, but at least with Linux, I have that option. Yet your EXE often does not give me a choice.

I personally might be aware that exe on windows is actually more dangerous then running a random script on Linux but I honestly don't necessarily expect most people to know that to be the case. A lot of old flash or game maker games were .exe so it became more normalized. The fact that with scripts it isn't exactly possible to trick you into getting a lot more access to the computer then you want is a bit more of a complicated idea. If Linus had taken an uni course on computer security I'd think he couldn't be serious but I imagine my mom and dad might think that scripts are less secure then exes

 

[finest feck fips]

1 hour ago, Olgyd said:

Bit surprised "if it's free you can't complain" isn't a fallacy. Oh well.

No, this isn't about price, or some weird version of ‘you get what you paid for’. It is the rejection of a sense of entitlement, though.

So many of the objects we interact with every day are products designed to be sold and consumed, and they exist solely to serve us as we are, and from before they were even conceived, there was a commitment from everyone involved in making them that we could never wrong about what to expect from them.

Desktop Linux just isn't a product in that sense, though. It is (delightfully) something that has emerged into the world through a process much more organic, much more multifaceted, and much less alienated from the people making it than that. It is something whose relationship to its users has always been characterized by reciprocal influence. It is something whose characteristic transparency and ease of inspection have embedded learning into the tradition of its use.

So it shouldn't be surprising or especially interesting that when you treat it like an appliance designed by a well-funded team with a singular vision for a customer who is simultaneously always right and incapable of learning or responsibility, your experience will be strange or unpleasant.

Approaching desktop Linux as though it's just a product designed for you as just a consumer makes about as much sense as giving a consumer review of ‘the violin’ after someone wordlessly lends you one for a month.

 

1 hour ago, Olgyd said:

They're not. They're bemoaning. Like how one can bemoan it raining: you know it doesn't rain because the world hates you, and you have no power to change that, but the end result is still an inconvenience and it just feels nice to get it off your chest.

This is fair! And while I think in a few moments, Linus comes across as plain bratty, I think his overall assessment is totally fair, and he's not wrong to wish things were otherwise or to ‘warn’ his audience about the pitfalls he encountered during the challenge.
 

1 hour ago, Olgyd said:

Maybe Github could consider not making their UI look so much like an FTP server.

Maybe! I wonder what they can really do here. I think the choice to have the URLs mirror the file paths is so that programmatic generation (or generation from human memory) of a GitHub URL for a given file in a repo is easy. I don't think they'd want to give that up. And, like on the web interface for an FTP server, they want to present the hierarchy of the files in the repo more or less directly. But there might be some part of the web UI where they can give better hints.

 

1 hour ago, Olgyd said:

Eh...I guess we have different ideas on what constitutes "not designed for". I can definitely understand the mindset that Linux was never written with things like the GoXLR in mind and shouldn't be faulted, but on the other hand, a GoXLR isn't completely ridiculous to try and connect to your PC - after all, it's designed for it.

No, you have it backwards. GoXLR was designed to require software that only runs on Windows. It doesn't work with macOS either. It's not a peripheral ‘for personal computers’. It's a peripheral for Windows computers.

There are audio interfaces and mixers that work just fine on Linux (sadly too few, but there are some). You can run a complete digital audio workstation on Linux; there's no software support lacking on the Linux side for the kinds of things that GoXLR devices do.

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 hours ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

APT is a piece of trash

Piece of trash might be a bit hyperbolic. As with all systems, it has not aged well, and in the age of appimages, pacman etc, it's idiosyncrasies have become antiquated. Just growing pains of apt. 

[finest feck fips]

59 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

This outlook that Linux users are elitists is not gonna help anyone

If anything, it's the view that ordinary people are too stupid and lazy for anyone to expect them to learn or adapt when trying something new, which is elitist.

If anything, it's the view that ordinary people simply cannot be burdened with the expectation of trying to understand what they do before (or as) they do it, which is elitist.

It's the folks like Linus who are pessimistic about what ordinary people are capable of, who think that responsibility, knowledge, and mastery are only for ‘elites’.

The view that Linus repeatedly ascribes to the Linux community and decries as ‘out of touch’ is fundamentally one of faith in the basic intelligence and adaptability of prospective and new Linux users.

[Gork]

4 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

I think Linus has to know way more about linux than he's acting for views, he's set up servers before and had to have put in work to make these linux videos.

But people defend this with "But he has to show how linux would be for an average non-tech user". Except an average non-tech user will likely stick to windows, even with the mess of Windows 11 and its awful UI changes.

 

YES YES YES YEEEES ORGASMICALLY YEEEEEEESSS!!.

He's had videos where he went right to the command prompt. for a while he was on clickbait kick with using manjaro, and or ubuntu for reserecting oooooooooold computers and said something about using switch's, pipes, touch[the command kind!]. I think he had some kind of embeded system he tried to turn into "le the gran's computer" with Manjaro. from several years ago. lol so,yes he, or his handlers have been their before at somepoint. The fact that xwin, could even do old school 640x480  from what I gather was obscure  mobo and CPU in the first place is a technical achievement.

I guess I've been lucky, the gamers I know, were stupidly curius how to run linux at somepoint on a older computer for, as you said, to make a baad aass like super great NAS. as far from technical they were? they got it up and running and had it double as  personal server for their own cloud I have no, clue, how they did that over the course of just one day.  

Not nocking Linus to much. Just that if I can I get a del, that didn't have standard parts to run Ubuntu 18, for work in just a few hours (the hard drive almost just about died) and I had to have a working computer for even basic customer support.  

Story their is that I gotten to bed late trying to fix it. got up a bit early, on damn neer had a fucking heart attack when windows just, abjectly refused to boot. I genuinely don't know what kind of wonderful blackmagic ubuntu was able to pull. It installed, and ran just fine. I think because of how the file system and the linux kerel work, it can blithely ignore bad parts of a hard drive. 

Eh. well that sweet youtube money lol, hard to turn that down!

[Gimmick21]

21 minutes ago, Sho2048 said:

There is no path for Linux to become mainstream for consumers, so there is no path for Linux to have mainstream support.

 

Bye. ^^

The common path is: Reduce it as far as possible and create a simple GUI for that. The results are Android, SteamOS, some smartdevices run Linux,...

If "mainstream = gaming" - the only path is: Do it like everyone does it, when someone wants to push into an established market ->  invest millions of $. (Epic Launcher, steam deck,...)

13 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Maybe! I wonder what they can really do here. I think the choice to have the URLs mirror the file paths is so that programmatic generation (or generation from human memory) of a GitHub URL for a given file in a repo is easy. I don't think they'd want to give that up. And, like on the web interface for an FTP server, they want to present the hierarchy of the files in the repo more or less directly. But there might be some part of the web UI where they can give better hints.

The GUI of github should fully serve the purpose of working with git(hub). Everything in addition to that, can already be added by the owner, but he has to do so. But that's not a problem of the mentioned repo anymore, since the owner added a terminal-only installation guide and you do not have to download anything manually anymore.

[Gork]

13 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

If anything, it's the view that ordinary people are too stupid and lazy for anyone to expect them to learn or adapt when trying something new, which is elitist.

If anything, it's the view that ordinary people simply cannot be burdened with the expectation of trying to understand what they do before (or as) they do it, which is elitist.

It's the folks like Linus who are pessimistic about what ordinary people are capable of, who think that responsibility, knowledge, and mastery are only for ‘elites’.

The view that Linus repeatedly ascribes to the Linux community and decries as ‘out of touch’ is fundamentally one of faith in the basic intelligence and adaptability of prospective and new Linux users.

Yeah. my hunch his bleak, intense outlook is from being a youtube star, and before that a sales guy. But he's gone from hopeful, and constantly amazed and pleased with humanity, to a: Well I'll write nice well writen letter to encourage the world to burn. type...it'll be on very nice letterhead! like what happend to you man?