Linux NOT an OS for non-advanced users that have neither an IT department NOR an official tech support team (not random help threads) backing it.

[pixelated_sunglasses]

Just now, person123456789 said:

oh well i asked in the ltt discord and it worked

actually

oh well all those forum threads I comb through didn't
actually

[person123456789]

Just now, pixelated_sunglasses said:

oh well all those forum threads I comb through didn't
actually

i might have just gotten lucky

[IkeaGnome]

2 minutes ago, person123456789 said:

probably the reason i didn't get major issues as i use pop os

I'm just waiting on more anti cheat software to be Linux compatible. I'd love to go back to Linux, but I play too many online games and it caused issues. I'm hoping Steam Deck will help with that.

[pixelated_sunglasses]

1 minute ago, IkeaGnome said:

I'm just waiting on more anti cheat software to be Linux compatible. I'd love to go back to Linux, but I play too many online games and it caused issues. I'm hoping Steam Deck will help with that.

Somewhere along my 20-year ordeal, I had retreated to "okay, forget main driver, I'll just use Linux in VM" but even those attempts didn't last very long. Somewhere along the line I had to abandon and delete the VMs due to one issue or another. I just want an isolated place where I can watch streaming movies off of web browsers but even such a small task couldn't be performed if update dies or some dependency breaks after update.

[IkeaGnome]

6 minutes ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Somewhere along my 20-year ordeal, I had retreated to "okay, forget main driver, I'll just use Linux in VM" but even those attempts didn't last very long. Somewhere along the line I had to abandon and delete the VMs due to one issue or another. I just want an isolated place where I can watch streaming movies off of web browsers but even such a small task couldn't be performed if update dies or some dependency breaks after update.

I ran PopOS. The only issue I had that wasn't easily solved without switching back to Windows was my old lady getting annoyed I couldn't play a lot of games online with her. My experience=/= your experience =/= @person123456789's experience.

Linux isn't for everyone. Person decided it's for them. I know what it would take to be for me, and you seem to know it won't ever be for you. That's fine. 

[pixelated_sunglasses]

1 minute ago, IkeaGnome said:

I ran PopOS. The only issue I had that wasn't easily solved without switching back to Windows was my old lady getting annoyed I couldn't play a lot of games online with her. My experience=/= your experience =/= @person123456789's experience.

Linux isn't for everyone. Person decided it's for them. I know what it would take to be for me, and you seem to know it won't ever be for you. That's fine. 

Everyone makes assumptions and that includes you, because to this day I'm still trying to set up Linux VMs that I don't have to delete after using.

[IkeaGnome]

Just now, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Everyone makes assumptions and that includes you, because to this day I'm still trying to set up Linux VMs that I don't have to delete after using.

43 minutes ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

My personal experiences with Linux haven't been positive. For the last 20 years I have tried various Linux distros at least 15 if not 20 separate times, each and every time forced to give up and go back to Windows. There's always some issue which I'm unwilling to jump through hoops for, and when I did bother to jump, I had to navigate a labyrinth of headache-inducing forum help threads that only help some of the times.

You've tried for 20 years, 15 or 20 times and there's always some issue that causes you to go back to Windows though. What are you trying to do with VMs that your that adamant on Linux must working?

[Dutch_Master]

15 minutes ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Does that include not getting the desktop at all

For what? The experiment I alluded to? Certainly: all issues should be recorded. And after a bit more thought, add weight to each issue. That can be arbitrary numbers, just make sure you treat each issue equal on either OS. Heck, you can even make a video about it! Each issue you encounter gets a score 1-10 where 1 is basically a minor nuisance and 10 a full blown BSOD event. Most points loses 

[pixelated_sunglasses]

8 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

You've tried for 20 years, 15 or 20 times and there's always some issue that causes you to go back to Windows though. What are you trying to do with VMs that your that adamant on Linux must working?

I've already stated this earlier. Set up VM so I have an isolated environment to use web browsers on. I could run Windows VMs but I think those would be too resource intensive. My last two attempts involved Ubuntu (died for some reason) and Manjaro (update kept saying things are corrupt, tried all sorts of stuff mentioned on various forums and having none of them worked)

Edited August 7, 2022 by pixelated_sunglasses
Spelling for Ubuntu

[pixelated_sunglasses]

3 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

For what? The experiment I alluded to? Certainly: all issues should be recorded. And after a bit more thought, add weight to each issue. That can be arbitrary numbers, just make sure you treat each issue equal on either OS. Heck, you can even make a video about it! Each issue you encounter gets a score 1-10 where 1 is basically a minor nuisance and 10 a full blown BSOD event. Most points loses 

Linus made four videos. What made you think I'd make better ones

[Dutch_Master]

Just now, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Linus made four videos. What made you think I'd make better ones

He didn't do a comparison between Linux and Win-OS on the issues he encountered. Linus just ranted about Linux, most of the time. TBF, he did acknowledge things that went well for him, but most of his time was complaining about what went wrong. The time he spent talking between what went right and what didn't wasn't proportional, so people quickly assumed it was worse then it actually was.

[pixelated_sunglasses]

Just now, Dutch_Master said:

He didn't do a comparison between Linux and Win-OS on the issues he encountered. Linus just ranted about Linux, most of the time. TBF, he did acknowledge things that went well for him, but most of his time was complaining about what went wrong. The time he spent talking between what went right and what didn't wasn't proportional, so people quickly assumed it was worse then it actually was.

...and I'd be doing those videos for what?
You don't have to believe Linus or me.

I don't even have to "make a list" and the reason is simple. Note how I had to quit Linux each 15 to 20 times I've tried switching because of "game over" issues that makes continued use of the same install non-viable.

No such "game over" occurred with Windows, but with Linux it happened between 15 to 20 times.

[pixelated_sunglasses]

19 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Honestly I stopped reading when you said Linked In, not gonna lie.

 

Linux as an OS is a nightmare, and USING it is even worse. Most distros are a compendium of inintelligible ancient gibberish files stacked on top of each other for 20+ years and constantly patched for specific purposes and use-cases and whenever you want to do something as simple as install a new music player BOOM a random dependency error pops up and leads you down into a bottomless pit of browsing the internet for hours trying to locate a repo that doesn't exists since 1996 when it was hosted at the MIT for half an hour and cloned by an student in a floppy disk.

Good luck if your computer uses an nvidia graphics card, you can go thru the entire install process and end up with a black screen or a Kernel Panic! At The Disco because the default drivers refuse to load due to a bad { in line 395 of a file you should've known you had to edit using sudo nano prior to copying the OS onto the hard drive.

And ohh forget about games, any games, you'll only be able to run Neverball and Tux Racer for 5 minutes before a weird OGL error freezes your computer due to modern CPUs having more than 1 core. Sure there's Proton but half the games won't run, some will run with awful glitches, others with no sound so you'll have to make up the dialog and shooting sounds in your mind... and so on.

 

I use Arch btw. Best OS ever.

Most of my work contacts are on Linkedin, so most of my commenting goes there as I visit the site daily. Whenever I make a gripe about Linux there (three times over the past two years) I usually get the you-know-what. Should I delete the term "Linkedin?"

Yes, I use Nvidia graphics cards and sometimes that was that. Nowadays I install on VMs and that presents another set of unique issues.

Maybe I should have mentioned in the original post but despite everything I still haven't completely thrown in the towel. From time to time I still throw in one distro or another into a VM.

[person123456789]

45 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Honestly I stopped reading when you said Linked In, not gonna lie.

 

Linux as an OS is a nightmare, and USING it is even worse. Most distros are a compendium of inintelligible ancient gibberish files stacked on top of each other for 20+ years and constantly patched for specific purposes and use-cases and whenever you want to do something as simple as install a new music player BOOM a random dependency error pops up and leads you down into a bottomless pit of browsing the internet for hours trying to locate a repo that doesn't exists since 1996 when it was hosted at the MIT for half an hour and cloned by an student in a floppy disk.

Good luck if your computer uses an nvidia graphics card, you can go thru the entire install process and end up with a black screen or a Kernel Panic! At The Disco because the default drivers refuse to load due to a bad { in line 395 of a file you should've known you had to edit using sudo nano prior to copying the OS onto the hard drive.

And ohh forget about games, any games, you'll only be able to run Neverball and Tux Racer for 5 minutes before a weird OGL error freezes your computer due to modern CPUs having more than 1 core. Sure there's Proton but half the games won't run, some will run with awful glitches, others with no sound so you'll have to make up the dialog and shooting sounds in your mind... and so on.

 

I use Arch btw. Best OS ever.

i use an nvidia gpu on linux

had 0 issues so far

[10leej]

My only real takeaway is that if the op has issues with broken dependencies, then their doing something wrong that they're already aware they shouldn't be doing.

 

However no real specific issue was provided, no example of software or anything. So as a result my only real solution was that OP obviously is doing something wrong.

[LloydLynx]

58 minutes ago, 10leej said:

My only real takeaway is that if the op has issues with broken dependencies, then their doing something wrong that they're already aware they shouldn't be doing.

 

However no real specific issue was provided, no example of software or anything. So as a result my only real solution was that OP obviously is doing something wrong.

OP may indeed be doing something wrong, but they probably don't know it. They probably followed some guide to install a program that walked them through some stupid actions that broke their package manager and they don't even know the root cause of the issue. The person at fault is either the person who wrote the guide, or Father Time. This issue sould slowly go away with flatpak on the rise. 

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

LinkedIn

lmao

9 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

No one I've "spoken" to acknowledge that Linux just isn't something for non-advanced user to simply switch to (or even simply "learn"), namely, the mass unwashed masses of plebeian Windows users like me.

I started using Linux off and on when I was 13. I think it's safe to say I was an "unwashed plebeian" back then, and Linux distros were a lot less polished than they are now. Nobody is saying you should just uproot everything and switch exclusively to Linux, a lot of people can't due to proprietary windows software they need or just want to run... which is why I don't particularly like the idea that LTT has sort of been pushing that you should see Linux as a free windows alternative for videogames. Videogames are possibly the worst use case for Linux.

9 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Minor disclaimer: I don't even exactly qualify as one of those "unwashed masses" that I just referred to. I use Linux daily on my engineering job, and I've been a PC user since 1985. However, as far as Linux is concerned I wouldn't be able to extricate myself from some if not all of trouble that experienced users would deem "simple" to fix.

I mean... that sounds like a "you" problem? It's fine if you don't care to learn about Linux but that doesn't mean it's impossible or that you should automatically know everything about it just by virtue of having an engineering job, especially since you started your career years before Linux even existed.

9 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

Those who are interested in learning and mastering Linux should understand those who don't, and chastising them (...or worse, and I've personally been through plenty of this "worse") isn't going to turn any of them into those who do. People like me belong in the majority of computer users ( https://distrocrunch.com/linux-market-share-2021/ ) whether they like it or not.

Who's "chastising" you for being unwilling to learn Linux? Are you being asked to learn to use it better for your job and you're salty because you don't want to?

9 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

I can't cope with zero ability to update after update breaks (cue endless help forums for me to go through such as all of these, for example
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=invalid+or+corrupted+package+manjaro&ia=web

I've had plenty of update issues on windows, the only difference is that on Linux I actually have a chance to fix them whereas Windows is a black box that sometimes just breaks and can't be fixed.

[Ralphred]

Whilst the "barriers to entry" have been slowly lowered through the last 15 years or so, the barriers to fix remain the same, which is usually RTFM. Personally I find Linux easier to fix because it's documented properly (excluding anything written by Poettering), but it's become patently clear that if you make it "automagically" configure itself then when it goes wrong there is more to sift through, and more actually working against you to effect a suitable fix.

And herein lays the rub, the more people you make it "accessible" to the more people who are going to hit a wall when something goes wrong, where that wall is lack of knowledge, lack of guidance (due to lower user-ship), lack of time, lack of interest or a combination of the aforementioned.

There isn't much advice I can offer to fix this paradigm, other than install the most popular (debian/buntu), install something you have to pay for (so you get support, like Zorin/Suse), install gentoo/arch so you have to read the docs from the off and know where to look if something breaks, or find a 15 year old machine and install Slack.

[RollyShed]

11 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

No one I've "spoken" to acknowledge that Linux just isn't something for non-advanced user to simply switch to (or even simply "learn"), namely, the mass unwashed masses of plebeian Windows users like me.

Please explain why someone "dropped" on to using Linux Mint after Microsoft deleted her computer in 2018, simply carries on using her computer with Linux Mint as if nothing had happened.
Business - documents, accounting spreadsheets, Email, web searches, music (learning the violin) so sheet music, tutorials etc. ZOOM, videos. sound recording....

 

Myself, using it for over a decade and no problems. I've also installed over 50 systems for other users. One just finished an hour ago.

 

Our organisation uses Linux, accounting (the Treasurer), emails, writing newspaper articles, stock taking, documents for running the organisation, etc. etc.

 

Yes, someone had a problem this morning, no sound on the YouTube he was watching. OK, it helps if speakers are plugged to to that computer, not the one he usually uses.

[maplepants]

Your complaints are really about desktop linux. And most of the people who daily drive Linux in a work environment do so on a server. Like me, they are using Linux all day every day, but through a terminal + ssh. Desktop Linux has a completely different set of trade-offs vs using it on a server. 

 

I think you need to reframe how / why Linux has such passionate fans. Stuff like ufw, cron, awk, & grep make such a strong and positive first impression that any computer without them basically feels broken. This is why desktop linux exists. The underpinnings of Linux are just so good that people bolt a desktop onto it and actually daily drive it. So if you come at it without first liking the things Linux is good at, it's easy to see it as all pain and no gain.

 

I would encourage you to check out WSL2. You can run it on Windows, it's cool as hell, and exposes to you to all of the best things Linux has to offer. If you catch the bug and start wanting to basically run a little Homelab you can pick up a Raspberry PI and then you're basically set. 

[10leej]

8 hours ago, LloydLynx said:

OP may indeed be doing something wrong, but they probably don't know it. They probably followed some guide to install a program that walked them through some stupid actions that broke their package manager and they don't even know the root cause of the issue. The person at fault is either the person who wrote the guide, or Father Time. This issue sould slowly go away with flatpak on the rise. 

The problem is that the OP didn't tell us what they were actually doing where they ran into dependency issues.

[wasab]

Did steam installation uninstalled your desktop as well?

[kumicota]

17 hours ago, pixelated_sunglasses said:

I can't cope with zero ability to update after update breaks (cue endless help forums for me to go through such as all of these, for example
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=invalid+or+corrupted+package+manjaro&ia=web

You and a lot of people dislikes this argument, but Arch(the distro that manjaro is based) is a rolling-release distro, this means that you get the earliest update from the main channel on all packages and not a stable version of it.

 

While rolling-release distros are great for keeping your system updated to the newer versions of the kernel or the application that you use, a lot of time, there's packages that worked on the devs, test, qa department works but it breaks on a lot of machines. While recently I stop having too much problems with arch, I know that before big updates(major versions upgrade) is a good thing to check their foruns to see if someone is having trouble.

 

If you want a stable distro, you have to go to debian based distros(ubuntu, popOs, mint, fedora, ...) and not arch based distros

[Slaiter]

LOL @ Caroline basic sarcasm is it not

 

OP I truly believe you ran into one mayor (rant) Linux error more people experienced. 

Thinking A to B instead of A to Z.
 

Using Linux for a long, long time I must say that it is a great OS.  Perhaps not for everyone, but for me it is.

Started with Mandrake (I am that old) and Slackware later on Gentoo and now Arch. 
I learned that the issues I came across (and that where some) where not due to Linux, but my own mistakes and wrong expectations.
 

I used a Nvidia card  for a long time in Linux without any problems. Just use the right drivers and do not use Nouveau since they suck big time (most of the time) and unless you have a at least the 495.xx drivers and the right (kms)setup just stick with X and do not attempt to use Wayland. 

I can do all I want in Linux and more, this includes office and internet work, photo and video editing, 3d work, multimedia, gaming etc. 

 

Also the video you are refurling to is great and Linus did noting wrong he just tried to swim in the see, without learning to swim first. Linux is another way of using your machine and perhaps even to think, but it is not the holy grail. 

Use whatever OS you like, with joy and happiness.  

 

[Arokan]

I get your point, Linux isn't for everybody, totally true. I often think, most things get worse when they become mainstream anyway.

However, I wouldn't agree to the notion, that you'd need an IT-department/support team to master the magic of Linux.
A friend, lawyer, and I, med-student, started using Linux just before win11 was released, because we hated what Microsoft was doing with it. Both no technical background, and calling us "advanced" would be exaggerating.

 

We said the tower goes Linux, the laptop stays on windows, in case of emergency, if we break the system and have to use it for work.
We f***ed up several times in the first few months, but kept learning when any problems arose and finally completely switched to Linux.
Both of us today: We're never going back!

So.. Linux needs interest, time and rigour, but you can do it if you want, have a little time here and there and... a backup laptop if anything goes south