To give the author credit, ignoring the other flaws with windows, most things “just worked” and generally either didn’t have an issue or if it did, fixed it’s own issues. I didn’t really have to resolve any issues or anything. Heck it even fixed itself if it failed to update, rolling back the changes and alerting the user next boot (which I usually just ignored and let fix itself which it generally did after a few days/tries! lol)
My current rig had Windows as the primary OS from 2016 to about 2024, during that time I don’t recall any times I had to actually look up any issues unless I personally created the problem. I think the most extensive issue I had was my 5700xt crashing under high load but that wasn’t something I could fix anyway as it was a driver issue, or when i made the entire system unbootable cause I messed up making a recovery partition
When I swapped back to Linux (Linux Mint at first, then Linux Mint DE, then Debian 12, now Debian 13), I had multiple hurdles from my headset not functioning, to my video card not being supported, no login screen(this surprised me as I had thought Debian was supposed to be stable), etc, these issues didn’t fix themselves, I had to fix them. Granted some were easier to fix (like the no login screen was a super simple edit to a config file), but it wasn’t something I had to deal with on windows.
Linux isn’t going to hold your hand like Windows does with issues. So yea you need to resolve your own issues, Linux isn’t going to do it for you, the most it will do is post a command in the log saying “issue X expected, run this command to fix”
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case. If you have no interest in tinkering with ur OS windows or Mac is just a better option, if you want to tailor your experience how you’d like Linux is the way. I run W11 on my gaming PC because I don’t have time to mess with it and experiment anymore. I have played with so many Linux distros but never had one work flawless out of the gate, and always reserved it for my secondary fuck around rigs because if I wanted to fuck around I could but I do want something that i can press the power button and evrything works fine without use of my brain after working a 13 hour day where i might get lucky to play for 40 mins lol. My fuck around time these days is totally sapped by project vehicles and house issues the last think I wanna do is play around in terminal when I have 10k other more important things to do :c
I’m not sure I entirely agree anymore. I’ve installed Mint OS on both my mother’s and my grandmother’s computers and neither of them have complained a single time about it to me. Setting up a printer was even easier, I tried helping an acquaintance with W11 set up a printer and it was hell, with Mint it just figured out everything relevant on its own, I just had to confirm that it was correct.
I sometimes forget others dont have these massive time sucks and can afford to troubleshoot for hours. I cant! Even though its kind of fun, I have shit to do.
Fully agree. When I mention switching to Linux on the rare occasion it comes up I make sure to mention that you can do basically anything on the platform, but with that customization comes drawbacks. If you are afraid to research an issue then I would not recommend full stop. I also mention not to be afraid of needing to use the terminal if needed. Don’t expect a 1:1 it’ll do most things you can do on Windows, but there will be some things you just can’t
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case
I really love this analogy, and plan to steal it for future use.
The entire internet? Whatever problem you had on windows you can just Google it and there’s either a YouTube video, reddit thread, or some obscure forum post that fixes your exact issue by copy and pasting some Powershell commands or a random bat file or GitHub project.
Linux? It’s gotten better, but the community side can get quite toxic or outright ignorant of how to troubleshoot any kind of issues tbh.
That’s probably the direct opposite of my experience and an experience of everyone I know.
With Windows problems you do get a lot of very, very long youtube videos that says a lot of things, but unless your problem is trivial, the shit wouldn’t work, and random bat files aren’t working for unexpected problems, or are just viruses. More often then not though, you get a question on Microsoft forum, with one answer asking you to run that windows repair bullshit that never actually solves anything. And then you just accept that it’s not something you can do and move on with your life, thinking that ignoring the problem is actually solving it. Alternatively there is for some reason very expensive program that does what you wanted badly, while using 20% of your machine’s resources, but you’re so exhausted at this point, that you pretend it’s normal.
With Linux you will get snarky answers telling you that you’re an idiot for not reading the error message on your screan (which is, yeah, you are), or that you’re an idiot for not reading the first page of man (which is, yeah, see above), or the most detailed explanation of inner workings of this specific thing that is giving you troubles, and you pretend to understand all of it while just copying and pasting all the random commands from the answer like an idiot that you are. But if you actually want to learn, you just do that, and then your problem is solved and you’re a bit more knowledgeable in the end.
Every time people talk about how Linux community is unhelpful, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. How can I always find help and support no matter how weird and obscure or banal and trivial my problem is, am I special or do people don’t know how to google? I mean, snarky and condescending? Yeah, that happens. But unhelpful? Never in my experience.
Same with Linux. Is there a problem Search it. Someone had that problem before. Shit even basic AI can help you out if you can’t quickly solve the issue.
For me I got better results if I used the actual distro + version in the search, Linux is to general a term, but say Fedora 43 + problem would really narrow down the amount of results and also prevent really old answers to pop up.
Every tech company in existence, in exchange for all of your privacy and now subscription fee.
For the low low price of all of your money and privacy you can avoid having to figure out how to backup your own files and have a team of developers ensuring that any kind of difficulty that you have will be fixed before you even realize it was a problem.
Once it is ensured that you will never develop those skills you are completely dependent on their services and they can keep jacking up the price.
Hate Netflix’s price increase, or password sharing restrictions? Too bad you spent 8 years not learning how to setup streaming media that you control. Hate listening to ads in order to listen to music? Well, it looks like Spotify doing everything for you has paid off for them.
Everyone has traded their privacy for convenience, if you want your privacy back then you have to give back the convenience and learn to do things for yourselves.
Who was solving your problems before then?
To give the author credit, ignoring the other flaws with windows, most things “just worked” and generally either didn’t have an issue or if it did, fixed it’s own issues. I didn’t really have to resolve any issues or anything. Heck it even fixed itself if it failed to update, rolling back the changes and alerting the user next boot (which I usually just ignored and let fix itself which it generally did after a few days/tries! lol)
My current rig had Windows as the primary OS from 2016 to about 2024, during that time I don’t recall any times I had to actually look up any issues unless I personally created the problem. I think the most extensive issue I had was my 5700xt crashing under high load but that wasn’t something I could fix anyway as it was a driver issue, or when i made the entire system unbootable cause I messed up making a recovery partition
When I swapped back to Linux (Linux Mint at first, then Linux Mint DE, then Debian 12, now Debian 13), I had multiple hurdles from my headset not functioning, to my video card not being supported, no login screen(this surprised me as I had thought Debian was supposed to be stable), etc, these issues didn’t fix themselves, I had to fix them. Granted some were easier to fix (like the no login screen was a super simple edit to a config file), but it wasn’t something I had to deal with on windows.
Linux isn’t going to hold your hand like Windows does with issues. So yea you need to resolve your own issues, Linux isn’t going to do it for you, the most it will do is post a command in the log saying “issue X expected, run this command to fix”
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case. If you have no interest in tinkering with ur OS windows or Mac is just a better option, if you want to tailor your experience how you’d like Linux is the way. I run W11 on my gaming PC because I don’t have time to mess with it and experiment anymore. I have played with so many Linux distros but never had one work flawless out of the gate, and always reserved it for my secondary fuck around rigs because if I wanted to fuck around I could but I do want something that i can press the power button and evrything works fine without use of my brain after working a 13 hour day where i might get lucky to play for 40 mins lol. My fuck around time these days is totally sapped by project vehicles and house issues the last think I wanna do is play around in terminal when I have 10k other more important things to do :c
I’m not sure I entirely agree anymore. I’ve installed Mint OS on both my mother’s and my grandmother’s computers and neither of them have complained a single time about it to me. Setting up a printer was even easier, I tried helping an acquaintance with W11 set up a printer and it was hell, with Mint it just figured out everything relevant on its own, I just had to confirm that it was correct.
Fellow project car and house enthusiast here!!
I sometimes forget others dont have these massive time sucks and can afford to troubleshoot for hours. I cant! Even though its kind of fun, I have shit to do.
Fully agree. When I mention switching to Linux on the rare occasion it comes up I make sure to mention that you can do basically anything on the platform, but with that customization comes drawbacks. If you are afraid to research an issue then I would not recommend full stop. I also mention not to be afraid of needing to use the terminal if needed. Don’t expect a 1:1 it’ll do most things you can do on Windows, but there will be some things you just can’t
I really love this analogy, and plan to steal it for future use.
The entire internet? Whatever problem you had on windows you can just Google it and there’s either a YouTube video, reddit thread, or some obscure forum post that fixes your exact issue by copy and pasting some Powershell commands or a random bat file or GitHub project.
Linux? It’s gotten better, but the community side can get quite toxic or outright ignorant of how to troubleshoot any kind of issues tbh.
That’s probably the direct opposite of my experience and an experience of everyone I know.
With Windows problems you do get a lot of very, very long youtube videos that says a lot of things, but unless your problem is trivial, the shit wouldn’t work, and random bat files aren’t working for unexpected problems, or are just viruses. More often then not though, you get a question on Microsoft forum, with one answer asking you to run that windows repair bullshit that never actually solves anything. And then you just accept that it’s not something you can do and move on with your life, thinking that ignoring the problem is actually solving it. Alternatively there is for some reason very expensive program that does what you wanted badly, while using 20% of your machine’s resources, but you’re so exhausted at this point, that you pretend it’s normal.
With Linux you will get snarky answers telling you that you’re an idiot for not reading the error message on your screan (which is, yeah, you are), or that you’re an idiot for not reading the first page of man (which is, yeah, see above), or the most detailed explanation of inner workings of this specific thing that is giving you troubles, and you pretend to understand all of it while just copying and pasting all the random commands from the answer like an idiot that you are. But if you actually want to learn, you just do that, and then your problem is solved and you’re a bit more knowledgeable in the end.
Every time people talk about how Linux community is unhelpful, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. How can I always find help and support no matter how weird and obscure or banal and trivial my problem is, am I special or do people don’t know how to google? I mean, snarky and condescending? Yeah, that happens. But unhelpful? Never in my experience.
Same with Linux. Is there a problem Search it. Someone had that problem before. Shit even basic AI can help you out if you can’t quickly solve the issue.
Yeah, they had the same problem… 13 years ago, and their solution doesnt work on modern OS’s due to package changes and command depreciations.
Thats how about 99% of my internet searches for linux problems end up.
For me I got better results if I used the actual distro + version in the search, Linux is to general a term, but say Fedora 43 + problem would really narrow down the amount of results and also prevent really old answers to pop up.
Every tech company in existence, in exchange for all of your privacy and now subscription fee.
For the low low price of all of your money and privacy you can avoid having to figure out how to backup your own files and have a team of developers ensuring that any kind of difficulty that you have will be fixed before you even realize it was a problem.
Once it is ensured that you will never develop those skills you are completely dependent on their services and they can keep jacking up the price.
Hate Netflix’s price increase, or password sharing restrictions? Too bad you spent 8 years not learning how to setup streaming media that you control. Hate listening to ads in order to listen to music? Well, it looks like Spotify doing everything for you has paid off for them.
Everyone has traded their privacy for convenience, if you want your privacy back then you have to give back the convenience and learn to do things for yourselves.