Until someone wants to switch from Windows/MacOS to Linux and is presented with two dozen popular distros, half a dozen desktop choices for each with no explanation of what the acronyms mean or why someone should care, immediately gets prompted about things like bootloaders and various partition schemes, until they finally get to a desktop and their mouse is stuck at 0.01% pointer speed regardless of what the mouse options are set to because the maintainer of sdctlxinputmd got mad at the maintainer of some dependency and decided the user can install and configure what lets sdctlxinputmd work with the OS settings panel. Oh except installing those requires configuring new sources and overriding disallowing proprietary drivers because some other maintainer is a purist who added friction because Nvidia doesn’t provide their firmware source code under the PLGPPGL 4.1 Licence.
Given fairly well made mainstream distros like Ubuntu basically just work nowadays, I think it is a bit rich to shit on Linux with snarky remarks. Nobody is denying that there is certain lack of cohesiveness, niggling issues that annoy us but most of the time they are not dealbreakers. There used to be a thousand papercuts but not anymore - sure its not zero. Afterall it is made by volunteers for free because they have an itch to scratch or they like programming or want to give back something to the world etc.
You didn't pay a dime for it, except with your time on things that annoy you, which is indeed not free. But if your time is that precious and you are that exacting, maybe Linux isn't a good fit for you. Maybe you should try paying for the perfectly crafted commercial alternatives. Except in the real world, those alternatives are far from perfect and have tons of issues like spyware, bloat, ads being shoved down the users throat and so on - on top of the papercuts/annoyances that sometimes take years to fix.
I’ve been using Linux daily since people were saying the same about Mandrake to people complaining about Gentoo requiring part-time job levels of effort to make it capable of basic functionality. Don’t mistake the recognition of very real hurdles to widespread adoption (brought on by fragmentation) with some sort of lack of experience on my part. I love Linux, except for when the simplest little things become nightmarish time-sucks and you find out it has nothing to do with technical complexity but because of some ideological argument a couple of guys had on a mailing list in 1999.
> Don’t mistake the recognition of very real hurdles to widespread adoption (brought on by fragmentation) with some sort of lack of experience on my part.
Everybody recognizes the hurdles. But they are there because of the nature of the ecosystem. Unpaid skilled maintainers are hard to get and it takes specific kind of people to maintain a driver or a subsystem, for sometimes decades. Those personalities sometimes come with strong opinions and prejudices and such. Does that delay fixing of end user issues? Yes. If there was an easy solution, it would be implemented by now.
Funny you bring up Mandrake because I paid a good chunk of my salary to buy a box that came with the CD and a small printed book. I have been using Linux through thick and thin everyday since then.
> I love Linux
Me too! Let's not be too harsh on our loved one :)
This is funny but it's telling that people often resort to exaggerations to paint Linux as hard to use. Any major distro is a lot easier to set up than it was 15 years ago.
Sure, most people's eyes gloss over the moment I try to explain the distinction between Linux and GNU, but if you're really that uncurious about how the system works then what's the point of switching to Linux anyway. Windows / Mac already get you most of the way there, especial now that WSL is a thing.
> what's the point of switching to Linux anyway. Windows / Mac already get you most of the way there
What is the point of using Windows or Mac when Linux will get you most of the way there?
Linux has a lot of advantages for users who are not interested in the technology. Longer hardware upgrade cycle, ease of maintenance and upgrades, more resource efficient, more secure (partly because it is less targetted as a desktop - but what matters is if you use Linux you are less likely to have issues), better privacy....
I agree, which is why we have a trope of grandma running Elementary OS. Windows is not actually easy to use or intuitive at all - it's just popular. Which, if you squint hard enough, looks a lot of intuitiveness. But it's not actually.
I've been daily-driving Linux for decades. I know how valuable it is. But I'm also "that guy" who likes examining every little piece of my system. I thought we were talking about the normies who just "hear good things" about Linux (especially soft-core developers) but aren't really interested in everything going on under the hood, and are willing to shell out a grand or two every couple years for new hardware and tech support.
I am talking about normies. not even developers. I mean my family, for example. My late dad used Linux for many years, my daughters do, my ex-wife used to (possibly still does). None are developers, although my daughters are somewhat technically inclined and can program (the older one is an engineer).
The point I am trying to make is that there are advantages for people who are NOT interested in every detail of the system.
> … paint Linux as hard to use. Any major distro is a lot easier to set up than it was 15 years ago.
See, I don’t necessarily think Linux is hard to use. Most desktop environments are so similar in style to Windows and Mac that they are pretty intuitive.
To me, setup is often the hardest part. It can be easy with some hardware. But if you aren’t lucky, getting a system running can be tricky.
This is one area where having someone who can make decisions is really helpful. Apple can make sure their software works with their exact hardware specs. Microsoft has various compatibility guidelines and enough market share to make sure they are always supported. Linux is fragmented and hardware support lags because of this.
Then you have smaller hardware vendors who support one obscure distro, but if that’s not what you want to run good luck. I spent last week trying to get Debian running on a Pine 64 laptop and still don’t have working sound.
1) Due to the stability of the Linux kernel ABI, switching distros is far easier than between Interactive, SCO, SunOS, IIRC, Ultrix etc...
There have only really been two major bootloaders in x86 Linux, Lilo and Grub, and the disk partitioning was driven by DOS/Windows and is still simpler than the dozens of differences between the commercial UNIXs or even adding on ons like VXVM.
I have switched Linux distros at a data center level several times in my career due to various reasons and it has only ever been constrained by downtime budgets, and typically is faster and easier than a major window upgrade, even before modern tools existed.
Different groups are always going to make different decisions, and those decisions will change over time within even single groups.
Nvidia drivers are a complete mess, even without licence concerns.
IMHO, with modern tools, you should let the application drive distro choices if needed, reserving your preferred distro for more generic needs that don't suffer from app vendor coupling.
That wasn't really a problem even a bit over a decade earlier when I started looking into switching things up. You look what is popular, you install ubuntu, it goes to usb stick which you insert in computer -> click next until you're on desktop. Nothing special.
I think the really annoying parts were more related to nothing being quite perfect; things tearing, having iffy support for mixed resolution and refresh rates, sometimes browser not using hw acceleration and fans spinning up. Everything you could live with, but dealing papercuts.
$ show
show: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libimageproc.so.2: undefined symbol: jpeg_mem_src@LIBJPEG_8.0, version LIBJPEG_8.0 not defined in file libjpeg.so.8 with link time reference
