This is FINALLY Getting Easier... Linux Challenge Part 3

[tkitch]

14 hours ago, Ultraforce said:

I think it's understandable since when was the last time you had to install a font? I can definitely see how it would take a while to figure things out.

Windows:   Right click on font -->  Install

 

Granted, Alex's issue was mostly not realizing the font had a dumb name.

[Bramimond]

Just to address part of the conclusion: I don't actually want to evangelize Linux and have everyone use Linux. 

Once things become too mainstream, they tend to accomodate the lowest common denominator. And that's never a good experience.

 

EndlessSeptember™ comes to mind.

 

Having using Linux be a kind of rite of passage is actually just fine with me. 

[Lightwreather]

18 minutes ago, Bramimond said:

Having using Linux be a kind of rite of passage is actually just fine with me. 

Without using Linux

 

/s

[GodAtum]

Linux us so crap, I mean it takes 15 mins to zip a 3GB file? I can do that in Windows in less then a minute!

[Lightwreather]

22 minutes ago, GodAtum said:

Linux us so crap, I mean it takes 15 mins to zip a 3GB file? I can do that in Windows in less then a minute!

Are you serious or trying to troll?

[Bramimond]

To elaborate, for Microsoft new Windows users are something to extract value from. But for Linux users, new Linux users with an attitude of not wanting to put in some effort and learn are support cases waiting to happen. 

 

So I'd very much prefer it if Linux users had all cultivated a state of mind of self-reliance, willing to first troubleshoot their own problems.

 

48 minutes ago, GodAtum said:

Linux us so crap, I mean it takes 15 mins to zip a 3GB file? I can do that in Windows in less then a minute!

>fallocate -l 3G three_gigs.img

>time zip three_gigs.zip three_gigs.img 
  adding: three_gigs.img (deflated 100%)

real    0m17,751s
user    0m16,956s
sys    0m0,788s

Created a garbage 3G file in half a second.

Timed how long it takes to zip it. About 20s. Resulting zip file is 3Mb. 

 

Might take longer depending on your files, but not that much longer. 

I'm not sure what Linus did and since the font is so awful, I cannot say for sure, but this looks like a 29gig archive:

 

 

[Giganthrax]

I'm happy to see they've come to the same conclusion about desktop Linux I did: it's actually perfectly fine and ready for everyday use ie. the tasks they do in the video. The only qualms I have about it is long-term stability: I simply haven't used a Linux distro long enough to be able to tell if it's as stable as Windows 10. The longest I've went with a single Linux install is with Mint Mate for about 4-6 months now or so, and it's great. Hopefully, the ZorinOS I have installed now will stay nice and stable for a long time to come.

 

Hopefully, with Steamdeck, the gaming difficulties will be mostly resolved as well. 

[GodAtum]

26 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Are you serious or trying to troll?

I can only see what they showed in the video. Linux looked like it took ages to zip up.

[Musty]

Loving this series so far. 

 

I daily drive Linux but only for work, so it was nice to see appreciation for how easy some of the day to day stuff is in most distros now.  

 

The only reason I still have a dual boot setup with a windows partition at home is so I can play games, because the last time I tried it on Linux things were still pretty rough. Particularly for the games I wanted to play. It is really nice nice to see things are starting to improve, particularly with Valve/Steam pushing things forwards, but it does look like it would be a while before I'd be willing to get rid of that windows partition.

 

To be honest, I find having the separation between my "Work" and my "Gaming" OS quite useful anyway. I know when I log in to my Linux partition it is to get work done and avoid installing anything particularly distracting from that.   

[Ultraforce]

3 hours ago, Bramimond said:

Just to address part of the conclusion: I don't actually want to evangelize Linux and have everyone use Linux. 

Once things become too mainstream, they tend to accomodate the lowest common denominator. And that's never a good experience.

 

EndlessSeptember™ comes to mind.

 

Having using Linux be a kind of rite of passage is actually just fine with me. 

Here's a counter arguement Linux isn't a monolithic entity so for distros that sell them selves as beginner friendly or noob distros they should try and do a certain level of UX research that they can be used by LCD. Luke has been more clear about how he definitely supports there being more specialized distros that aren't designed to be a good experience for new users. The issue is making it clear when a distro is for noobs but still requires decently advanced knowledge. Outside of never having to use it my first exposure to Linux being Fedora to do some stuff in an Operating Systems class definitely pushed me away.

Raspberry Pi OS I think is great and is very much designed so children are able to use it for learning how to code without too much difficulty and I think that's a great thing and a better choice for how someone should first be introduced to GNU/Linux.

I personally don't see how Linux could become too mainstream since having things be significantly more user friendly is stuff mostly that Distros would do by themselves and it's unlikely that people would need to modify the kernel to get it to work.

[finest feck fips]

6 hours ago, tkitch said:

Windows:   Right click on font -->  Install

 

Granted, Alex's issue was mostly not realizing the font had a dumb name.

Like everything, graphical tools vary by environment, but the manual install procedure for installing font files on Linux desktop is just double-clicking them, like Linus did. Just double-clicking them opens them in a GUI app that offers to install them either on a per-user basis or systemwide.

The software you might use to do this varies per-desktop environment, and it sounds like Linux Mint's Cinnamon is especially weak here; the two most popular desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) both support the kind of workflow Linus used for this task.

And, to borrow a phrase from Luke in the video, installing a font by searching for it on the web and downloading a file, then manually dealing with it is very ‘Windows brain’. Just like application software, fonts included in every distro's package management system, and the little app store (or whatever UI you want to use) is a very convenient and always-safe way to get free fonts.

[finest feck fips]

  

4 hours ago, Bramimond said:

Having using Linux be a kind of rite of passage is actually just fine with me. 

Just like one of the nice things about Linux desktops in general is that you don't have to use them if you don't like them, because none is or aims to be a monopoly within the platform.

If you don't like a newbie-oriented distro, you don't have to use one. Ubuntu is never going to kill Gentoo. Linux Mint is never going to kill GuixSD. Even if Fedora Silverblue catches fire and takes over desktop Linux in terms of marketshare, that'll never force you to use an immutable root filesystem on Arch Linux. You'll be fine.

 

That said, I'm not personally interested in newbie-friendly distros or in improving newbie-friendly distros, either. That's not because I think newbie-friendly distros are worthless or a bad idea, but just because building and maintaining them is a ton of (to me, very boring) work that I'm not interested in doing.

 

23 minutes ago, Ultraforce said:

I personally don't see how Linux could become too mainstream since having things be significantly more user friendly is stuff mostly that Distros would do by themselves

IOW, this,

[finest feck fips]

On 12/5/2021 at 1:34 PM, HSF3232 said:

ARK (after having a quick look at the code) appears to be simplistic in nature and doesn't reference "pzip" or "p7zip

Your look was too quick.

Ark uses a plugin architecture for the backend, and it has plugins for both p7zip (which handles zip archives as well as 7z archives) and FreeBSD's libarchive which (like 7zip) is top-notch and supports virtually all archive formats.

 

On 12/5/2021 at 1:17 PM, Bramimond said:

Created a garbage 3G file in half a second.

Timed how long it takes to zip it. About 20s. Resulting zip file is 3Mb. 

 

Might take longer depending on your files, but not that much longer.

Wasn't the file Linus was archiving in the ZIP a 3.9GiB compressed video? That's not gonna compress pretty much at all. Comparison to 3GB of zeroes or whatever makes no sense. lol

And for real why is anyone using ZIP in 2021?? ZIP has been obsolete since 7zip introduced LZMA compression to the world in 1999! Pretty much every format compresses faster and better than ZIP.

Everyone should be using .tar.zstd (or .7z if if you want an index and encryption and idk what else, I guess) by now.

Edit: meant to add this as an edit of the previous post. Cannot delete this post and edit it into the previous because the forum software doesn't support it lol

 

Forum staff edit: fixed

[Bramimond]

39 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

  That said, I'm not personally interested in newbie-friendly distros or in improving newbie-friendly distros, either. That's not because I think newbie-friendly distros are worthless or a bad idea, but just because building and maintaining them is a ton of (to me, very boring) work that I'm not interested in doing.

That's what I was trying to say. 

People can do what they want, obviously, but I am not personally interested in more people using Linux and do not plan on taking any steps to improve the experience for new users. There being some friction for new users is fine with me. If anyone wants to spend their time removing that friction, that's fine with me, too. 

 

Personally, I switched to Linux after Win98. When I started out, I had the pleasure of figuring out why audio was completely broken and fixing it. On the bright side, my system didn't crash every hour, like it did with Win98. 

 

Part of the conclusion of this video made it sound like people on the Linux side had work to do if they wanted more users and I was just pointing out that I do not actually want more users. What I want is for more people to take their tech life back into their own hands and for them to understand why Google and Microsoft spying on them is a bad thing. I don't really want them to use Linux like Windows and install other spyware like Steam or Discord. It defeats the point.

 

But of course, everyone can do whatever they want with their computer. 

[Uttamattamakin]

12 hours ago, Gork said:

I'm just sitting here er eeer eee. Because way back in the day I daildrove linux on a Thinkpad, that had something called a PCMCIA slot, that's old. Sufficed to say: I didn't know anything. Work gave me the laptop and I was told to try it with "anything other than windows", basically they wanted to litnus test just how compatible, warts and all, that specific laptop line was. I went through redhat, then slackware and then mandrake. and manually set up a keyboard. All sans the 999  advantages Luke and Linus have. getting even that card to work was hit and mis and just a lot of headaches and just jank. See where it says mandrake? that was my laptops desktop for a long time. 

https://opensource.com/article/16/12/yearbook-linux-test-driving-distros

 

Yeah I know what you mean.  I started with Caldera Open Linux first on a Tandy Sensation II back in the late 1990's.   There were PROBLEMS back then if you had hardware that was windows specific.  So modems and printers were a pain.  Anything standardized and open worked.   Getting it to work with a laptop back in those days was hit and miss for sure.  So many laptops were not very standard at all.  By the time laptops became common and affordable for me HP Compaq machines of the day ... everything internally seemed to connect via USB which was an open standard so Linux worked with it just fine. 

 

12 hours ago, Gork said:

My point is: I have no idea what these two are doing to make a lot of the stuff their doing so hard so far.  Cinimon can do double click font install (did as of 2018 IIRC). We're somewhat passed the point of Ubuntu's rep as kabooming.

What did they do their poor penguins?

KDE when it went to the plasma system and latter became a huge hodge podge of a mess, which is why gnome Unity is so popular (unity as in Coninical's project not the 3D engine ). 

This leads to the real issue I have pointed out and which Linus in particular does not want to accept.  He is using a computer that is virtually unobtainable.  Even in normal times it would be the highest end and therefore rarest hardware in a rare combination.     He's on a Threadripper with a 3090 lots of high caliber parts which he uses via Thunderbolt.  The combination of all of these things is going to mean that he will run into problems that most people don't have.     But of course creators are a bit defensive about this fact for some reason.  

[Qub3d]

A pretty hardcore Linux dev (and founder of SourceHut) weighed in on the LTT series today with two posts: 1 is from the point of view of what a new Linux user should do to help them succeed, the other is what the existing Linux community can do to help Linux succeed on the whole:

 

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/05/How-new-Linux-users-succeed.html

He did something that I appreciate, which is admit where Linux stands compared to Windows in a fair and honest manner.

Quote

 

Even so, I must emphasize the following point:

The best operating system for gaming is Windows.

Trying to make Linux do all of the things you’re used to from Windows or macOS is not going to be a successful approach. It is possible to run games on Linux, and it is possible to run some Windows software on Linux, but it is not designed to do these things, and you will likely encounter some papercuts on the way.

 

 

Unfortunately, Drew immediately turned and fell into the pit that many complainers have -- he stood up and tried to argue that the challenges should have been more "linux-centric" and made use of the command line. Its like everyone is ignoring or forgetting Linus' repeated statements (including at the end of this video):

These challenges are important in the context of getting an average user to switch.

 

That does lead quite nicely into his second post, however...

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/05/What-desktop-Linux-needs.html

 

Quote

Linux is the operating system developed by programmers, for programmers, to suit our needs, and we have succeeded tremendously in this respect.

 

However, we have failed to build an operating system for people who are not like us.

 

If this is not our goal, then that’s fine. But, we can build things for non-experts if we choose to. If we set “accessible to the average user” as a goal, then we must take certain steps to achieve it. We need to make major improvements in the following areas: robustness, intuitiveness, and community.

I will say that Drew Devault tends to be a bit... fiery in his convictions, so I actually found this to be a good attempt at an olive branch from him: he is taking Linus' arguments in good faith.

He throws down the gauntlet at the end:

Quote

I reckon that we could use a commercial, general-purpose end-user Linux distro. As I mentioned earlier, the model of developers hacking in their spare time to make systems for themselves does not create incentives which favor the average end-user. You can sell free software — someone ought to do so! Build a commercial Linux distro, charge $20 to download it or mail an install CD to the user, and invest that money in developing a better system and offer dedicated support resources. Sure, it’s nice that Linux is free-as-in-beer, but there’s no reason it has to be.

 

In theory, that was supposed to be Ubuntu, but that failed because Ubuntu tried to become the "everything" distribution, and ultimately fell to the demands of power users. It may take someone willing to stand up and say, "I understand you want that functionality, but no. I'm going to include less configuration/extensibility/functionality on purpose, so that the "normal" user (not the POWER user) has the first-class experience. Arch is that way, go have fun.

 

 

[finest feck fips]

Okay, now I have the energy to do this:

 

General thoughts on L&LLCp3:

Lots to love about this video (even though I am, in fact, a Dolphin file manager fanboy )

• excellent tone! feels like the video alternated between a thoughtful mood and a more playful one
• I liked the highly structured format of this video, which helped ensure
  • good pacing (the video actually felt shorter to me than some previous videos, even though it was quite a bit longer— that's great!)
  • lots of opportunities for small comparisons
  • more equal screen time between Linus and Luke
  • the video felt like a dialogue with two voices
  • the video felt like a (friendly, casual) competition
• it's nice (and accurate) in how it shows that even just 2-3 weeks of acclimation can make a big difference in how it feels to use a system
• the time limit seems like it was a great idea! I think it was a fair constraint and it made the competition more fun. Based on their results, maybe a 10-minute timer would have been okay too
• loved how intense Linus got about his wins and losses on each task. Very cute, very fun to watch
• the fact that they were on two different desktop environments with two different heritages did a good job of showing how desktop experiences on Linux can be both similar and different from one another

Some thoughts about their experiences and the issues they encountered:

• the Ark and Dolphin integration bug with drag-and-drop is a first-class bug; it would have been fair for Linus to be much more harsh on it. Ark and Dolphin are both major, mainstream KDE applications. Drag-and-drop between applications from the same DE should be flawless, and that bug is unacceptable, even though it seems like a minor nit.
• I really like the default Dolphin/KDE behavior of collecting status information and success reports for long-running jobs in the system tray. But clearly this kind of setup sucks with the standard panel layout when you have a very large, high res monitor. While the jobs are still running, there should be an indicator in Dolphin, just like there's an in-app indicator in Gnome's Nautilus. Maybe when the app finishes copying or whatever, then it can direct you toward the notifications log with an animation, as well.
• Imo the shortcut creation task was not well-defined. Symlinks aren't really shortcuts; shortcuts are just text files that encode some metadata, but symlinks are implemented at the filesystem level and are transparent to applications. And Windows actually does have symlinks— even though they're still less used than shortcuts, NTFS got symlink (junction) support when Windows Vista came out. Moreover ‘shortcut’ on Windows can also be used to refer to application shortcuts, which have a direct equivalent on Linux in the form of XDG .desktop files.
  • if you're on KDE Plasma like Linus is, you can symlink files by dragging and dropping them. Dolphin will ask you whether you want to move, copy, or link the file when you drop it.
  • Using shift or control while dragging and dropping to cause the drag and drop to copy or link rather than moving files is actually pretty standard. It works that way on a bunch of Linux desktops, as well as macOS. Idk about Windows but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar works there as well.
• The de facto required but nominally unsupported status of the AUR is dumb as hell, and it'll never change. It's a problem that, officially, Arch developers just dismiss as non-existent. Most Arch hiccups are intentionally considered ‘your problem’ as a user, by the community. There are reasons for this (related to Arch's keep-it-simple-stupid design philosophy), but frankly I think they're stupid reasons.
• ‘Windows brain’ continues to cause problems for both Luke and Linus, namely the habit of going to third-party (vendor, publisher, or developer) websites to look for downloads and installation instructions as a first instinct rather than a line of last resort. The experience is pretty much always better integrated and more convenient when you go through your distribution's channels instead, and only look to outside sources of downloads or instructions when something is unavailable or you've tried the distro default and realize that you need something custom.
  • Personally, I never install anything by going to the developer/vendor/publisher website. If it's not in my distro's repos I either don't use it or I package it myself. Once you get really used to how nice it is to manage everything on your computer with only one tool, looking all over the web for downloads and instructions feels really fucking gross, and per-app auto-updaters seem rude and misbehaved.
• I agree with Linus that Spectacle is really nice. It's nicer than what's available by default on macOS and Windows. KDE has also had something like this much, much longer than the Windows Snipping Tool has existed; before Spectacle, KDE had KSnapshot since the late 90s. (Spectacle is basically a rewrite/clone of KSnapshot)

[finest feck fips]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

KDE when it went to the plasma system and latter became a huge hodge podge of a mess, which is why gnome Unity is so popular

Unity's not GNOME, and very few people are running Unity 7 anymore. Unity 8 got renamed to Lomiri. Neither are meaningfully still Canonical's projects; Canonical abandoned Unity like 4 years ago.

The default layout of the panels in GNOME 3 and GNOME 40 is superficially similar to Unity, but it doesn't support what was Unity's distinguishing feature (the macOS-like global menu bar).

 

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

KDE when it went to the plasma system [...] became a huge hodge podge [sic]

I've been using KDE applications and desktops continuously since 2004, as my primary desktop environment. The KDE3 to KDE4 transition, which introduced the ‘Plasma’ name, was very rough because of the type of rewrite it was, and many users and distributions switched too early, when KDE4 was not yet feature-complete. That turned a lot of people off of KDE back in the day. But what you wrote here is nonsense. KDE's design language was much less unified and much more cluttered before Plasma than after.

Edit: Sorry @Uttamattamakin! Those comments are for @Gork. This forum software's behavior with selecting and replying to nested quotations is completely broken. It's kinda embarrassing to me to see the selection of forum software and its WYSIWYG editor defended here when it basically doesn't work.

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, Qub3d said:

A pretty hardcore Linux dev (and founder of SourceHut) weighed in on the LTT series today with two posts: 1 is from the point of view of what a new Linux user should do to help them succeed, the other is what the existing Linux community can do to help Linux succeed on the whole:

 

As a long time linux user maybe a poweruser I totally feel that expecting the average joe user to access the command line is the most asinine thing that the developers do.  What Linux needs is not a paid distro what it needs is a common desktop environment.  Linux needs one good enough desktop   a GED.  This GED would combine the advantages of Gnome and KDE and focus on being light and not using a lot of resources but could be expanded on with optional plugins to customize it.  This would allow for a unified graphical user experience which can be compared to Windows or Mac. 

Part of the reason that so many Linux How To's revert to the command line is because BASH is common to all of Linux.  It is the one set of instructions that will always work in exactly the same way for a given family of linux distributions (Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu/ Arch) 

 

This all leads to

38 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Okay, now I have the energy to do this:

 

• ‘Windows brain’ continues to cause problems for both Luke and Linus, namely the habit of going to third-party (vendor, publisher, or developer) websites to look for downloads and installation instructions as a first instinct rather than a line of last resort. The experience is pretty much always better integrated and more convenient when you go through your distribution's channels instead, and only look to outside sources of downloads or instructions when something is unavailable or you've tried the distro default and realize that you need something custom.
  • Personally, I never install anything by going to the developer/vendor/publisher website. If it's not in my distro's repos I either don't use it or I package it myself. Once you get really used to how nice it is to manage everything on your computer with only one tool, looking all over the web for downloads and instructions feels really fucking gross, and per-app auto-updaters seem rude and misbehaved.

This is very true. Part of it is Windows brain and part of it IMHO is Linux is a Windows Power user but a Linux NO0O00ooBb.    So his first approach with Pop OS "Yes do as I say" ... nuke my desktop environment is an example of that.  In windows an install could never mean having to remove conflicting dependencies like the desktop environment.  

With Linux it is better to treat installing software on it like installing an app in OSX or Android.  Just going to the package manager and relying on it has been the way to go for decades.  Even in the late 90's Redhat package manager RPM was the way to go for most people.   Installing via a command line is for someone who wants to develop the code.  

[Uttamattamakin]

10 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

Unity's not GNOME, and very few people are running Unity 7 anymore. Unity 8 got renamed to Lomiri. Neither are meaningfully still Canonical's projects; Canonical abandoned Unity like 4 years ago.

The default layout of the panels in GNOME 3 and GNOME 40 is superficially similar to Unity, but it doesn't support what was Unity's distinguishing feature (the macOS-like global menu bar).

 

I've been using KDE applications and desktops continuously since 2004, as my primary desktop environment. The KDE3 to KDE4 transition, which introduced the ‘Plasma’ name, was very rough because of the type of rewrite it was, and many users and distributions switched too early, when KDE4 was not yet feature-complete. That turned a lot of people off of KDE back in the day. But what you wrote here is nonsense. KDE's design language was much less unified and much more cluttered before Plasma than after.

Edit: Sorry @Uttamattamakin! Those comments are for @Gork. This forum software's behavior with selecting and replying to nested quotations is completely broken. It's kinda embarrassing to me to see the selection of forum software and its WYSIWYG editor defended here when it basically doesn't work.

It's fine.  I totally agree with both of you guys about the Linux GUI situation being a big problem.    Linux needs to have a single unified (or at least dominant) DE to which most if not all software can be written.    The switch from X to Wayland gives us a golden chance to do this.    As long as there are a dozen different sequences of clicks to get things done Linux will be "hard" to use.  

I too have been a KDE user, mostly, forever.  I've tried the others they're OK but KDE since using Caldera Open Linux back in the day.   It just seems to be the more serious professional option.  I mean if one wants one can make it look and act a lot like Gnome.  

[quantum-]

2 hours ago, Qub3d said:

Unfortunately, Drew immediately turned and fell into the pit that many complainers have -- he stood up and tried to argue that the challenges should have been more "linux-centric" and made use of the command line. Its like everyone is ignoring or forgetting Linus' repeated statements (including at the end of this video):

These challenges are important in the context of getting an average user to switch.

I think Drew made a decent point that I definitely agree with though, quoting from the first article,

Quote

If you just want to do all of the same things on Linux that you’re already doing on Windows, why switch in the first place?

I can't recall a satisfactory answer to this from Linus, Luke, or anyone who wants more people to switch to Linux. If you are a Windows user, it is far easier to remove the included bloat and malware in Windows than it is to try and run things on Linux. Why should the average Windows user switch if fixes for the problems with their current OS exist and applying those fixes has a much lower barrier to entry than changing their OS?

 

Drew makes a number of criticisms of desktop Linux and the community in the second article. I agree that all of the points mentioned there (and several others that weren't) are issues that can (and must) be fixed by the community, but I don't think the paucity of desktop Linux users is one of them.

[mmaridev]

As someone commented on YouTube, I hope there will be space for a mention to LibreOffice in your final episode.

[Sarra]

46 minutes ago, quantum- said:

I can't recall a satisfactory answer to this from Linus, Luke, or anyone who wants more people to switch to Linux. If you are a Windows user, it is far easier to remove the included bloat and malware in Windows than it is to try and run things on Linux.

As a long time Windows user (uh, Win ME was my first at-home Windows OS), and occasional dabbler in Linux (yeah, I had Red Hat waaaaaaaaay back in the day, also dabbled with Ubuntu), I'm getting ready to permanently switch over to Linux. I tend to adopt Windows... uh... They aren't usually 'upgrades', uh... I adopt Windows Sidegrades usually after the "product" has matured. It looks to me like, despite your statement above, Microsoft is willing to do any and everything to prevent that. Fighting MS just to not be forced to use Edge is ridiculous. If I'm going to pay for a full license/copy of Windows 11 Pro, MS should fuck right off with their bullshit. I refuse to use Edge, even if it's Chromium based, even if it's a good product, even if what the fuck ever justification here.

 

Around two years ago, my ISP fat fingered some config in their settings on their servers, and almost every single HTTP request got force redirected to a stupid internal page with an 'upcoming features' or some other BS. I goggled, and figured out that they log almost everything their users do. So, I got a VPN. I'm not worried about some phishing attack, or someone hacking my internet connection, but I was pissed off that I'm paying for a service, and part of that service includes my ISP selling my browsing history to third party advertisers, so they can advertise to me. So, I paid more to prevent that.

 

And this is why I'm looking at switching to Linux. Because I'm tired of dealing with bloatware, shady AF business practices, and being a 'product' for a product I purchased. As said before by numerous YouTubers, if Windows 11 Home was free, then ads would make sense. But paying for a product, then having ads inserted into that product, is just stupid. That and I refuse to use a Microsoft account for sign in.

 

It's like buying a brand new BMW car, for $120,000, then having to pay $10/month for the heated seats to work. What happens when BMW adds a fee to enable the wiper blades? Or the airbags? What happens in a number of years, when a Honda Civic costs $150,000, and you have to pay $1,500/month on top of the vehicle cost, just for the seat adjusters to work, the engine to give you more than 30% power, and your wiper blades to have an 'automatic' setting that doesn't suck? Man, this is like power creep from P2W MMO's, but it's evolving into something so dystopian...

 

Back to the topic of this thread. I'm getting prepared to switch my laptop over to Kubuntu LTS, which might be a mistake. I probably should use Ubuntu instead, but I'm trying it out on hardware, not just a VM, to prepare for replacing Win 10 Pro on my old Haswell machine. If I like what it's doing, I'll be also installing it on my gaming/editing machine. I have no intention of being forced into using Windows Vista 3.0, Adware edition, and my Haswell box, despite having TPM, isn't supported anyway, and I'd rather not just eWaste it.

[Gork]

3 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

 

Yeah I know what you mean.  I started with Caldera Open Linux first on a Tandy Sensation II back in the late 1990's.   There were PROBLEMS back then if you had hardware that was windows specific.  So modems and printers were a pain.  Anything standardized and open worked.   Getting it to work with a laptop back in those days was hit and miss for sure.  So many laptops were not very standard at all.  By the time laptops became common and affordable for me HP Compaq machines of the day ... everything internally seemed to connect via USB which was an open standard so Linux worked with it just fine. 

 

This leads to the real issue I have pointed out and which Linus in particular does not want to accept.  He is using a computer that is virtually unobtainable.  Even in normal times it would be the highest end and therefore rarest hardware in a rare combination.     He's on a Threadripper with a 3090 lots of high caliber parts which he uses via Thunderbolt.  The combination of all of these things is going to mean that he will run into problems that most people don't have.     But of course creators are a bit defensive about this fact for some reason.  

thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, you speak me verry well ^_^.

[Gork]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

It's fine.  I totally agree with both of you guys about the Linux GUI situation being a big problem.    Linux needs to have a single unified (or at least dominant) DE to which most if not all software can be written.    The switch from X to Wayland gives us a golden chance to do this.    As long as there are a dozen different sequences of clicks to get things done Linux will be "hard" to use.  

I too have been a KDE user, mostly, forever.  I've tried the others they're OK but KDE since using Caldera Open Linux back in the day.   It just seems to be the more serious professional option.  I mean if one wants one can make it look and act a lot like Gnome.  

YES YES YES YEEEES.  OMG  Wayland would be sex.. no it'd be making love aaaaaall night