I don’t like it. He is just perpetuating the endless stereotypes that plague linux and harm linux adoption.
If you are using a somewhat stable distro and don’t have weird hardware, you don’t need to “write your own driver” etc. A lot more people “punch themselves in the face” by using a buggy, ad infested, data harvesting operating system even though they just need a web browser.
It’s legitimately staggering to me how much easier to maintain Linux is for the average use case than Windows. No messing with drivers; has preinstalled what’s essentially a GUI app store to manage literally all of my applications; updates that don’t require a restart; no bullshit with licensure; a trivial install process with zero dark patterns; no malware; and I could just keep going. Linux has faults with the UX, but having switched to it from Windows about a year ago, it’s extremely evident why this stereotype is perpetuated in spite of Linux being the sort of OS I would recommend to my grandma over Windows: nose blindness.
When Linux genuinely improves the ease of use over Windows, Windows users don’t even recognize it as a problem. Like imagine if the roles were reversed where on Windows I could just click a button, type in my password, and update every single one of my applications at once, but on Linux, I had to individually open any given app and check for updates manually. Windows users would rightfully be bemoaning that as too complicated for a lot of users and bitching about how tedious it is to maintain (in the case of Windows, updating is a bizarre patchwork whose difficulty depends on the application’s developers). But since it’s a problem they’ve become nose blind to, when Linux actually fixes this obviously ridiculous issue Windows has, it’s seen as “not a big deal anyway”.
updates that don’t require a restart
I’m a huge Linux fan but that wasn’t my experience. My experience was apps getting borked by attempting to load the updated versions of libs and communicating with a half-updated system where they don’t understand each other. For example with KDE I often had the experience that after updating packages, even the shutdown and similar buttons don’t work in the start menu. They were doing nothing, and when I looked at system logs, I have seen some failure with starting that confirmation overlay with the countdown. But similar experience with Firefox too.
Somehow it does not happen on my laptop, even though I use the same distro and still KDE. But on the desktop it was predictably happening, and the worst part was that I was still new with how a desktop works (technically) on Linux so I could not even troubleshoot it, while the system was actively falling apart. By the way, I still don’t know what the fuck was happening, or how would I diag it.
Upvoted because your experience is valid, but I will say that mercifully so far, I haven’t had this issue personally. Instead, rather, my Windows 10 installation is basically broken because MS pushed an update that requires it to enlarge the recovery partition, but because there’s another OS past the recovery partition, it can’t. So whenever I use it now, I need to wait for it to try updating itself, recognize that it failed, and then undo the updates and boot again (the entire process takes 10+ minutes). I only use this partition for emergencies where something critical absolutely won’t work on Linux, but it’s still hilarious to me that this happened shortly after I abandoned ship.
Man, the lack of a sense of humor in this thread is palpable. Can cut the harrumph with a knife.
When the same belittling joke is retold thousands of times, it tends to lose its edge for all but a few people.
Some people just don’t have a sense of humor 🤷♂
I spent the day yesterday trying to get kubuntu to update to the new LTS on a friend’s laptop. All because plasma5 was being slow at login. Well, after a few hours, it was finally updated and we spent another 2 trying to find out why plasma6 was now slow.
The whole time I was thinking “why the hell did the update require the command-line” and “this feels like punching myself in the face”. I wanted a quiet, productive saturday and spent it on linux instead.
Ubuntu is not ready for non-technical folk in these cases. Without me as support, my friend would’ve been lost on the “most user-friendly distro”.
Linux is amazing tech and the ecosystem built around it is better than windows and mac for many things, but still fails at random, supposedly simple tasks. Yes, windows and mac too, but it’s much more visible on linux.
Matt Parker also wrote a linux driver himself! Much respect.
The whole time I was thinking “why the hell did the update require the command-line”
B/c you’re using ubuntu. I switched to debian and I don’t have to deal with this snap/apt nonsense. In fact I’ve gained flatpaks in the software UI.
It used to have a graphical updater. I don’t know why they did away with it…
