Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can’t.
The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
I’m not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I’m saying that as someone who’s been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are “if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout”.
Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn’t quite there. This wasn’t a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.
i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.
if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.
i think its up to win7 era at least.
i havent used kde in a while but gnome is so good these days, and they made it much much better in the span of just a couple years
I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
Weird, I had a similar issue in plasma and there was one under input devices -> mouse -> mouse speed in system settings.
I’d be surprised if gnome has no equivalent
I found several form or reddit posts indicating there was so setting. I kind abandoned the whole thing once I found several pieces of software are no longer releasing deb files and are using some kind of flatpack that wasn’t working. I’m completely ignorant of current linux, but I can’t help but feel like it was easier to manage back in 2008 when I daily drove it.
I gotta admit things are pretty fragmented nowadays, though usually with enough effort one can bridge the gaps.
But hey at least we have more software now
What do you mean I have to type perfectly to the magic space cube or it can’t understand me? How the fuck is ‘sudo apt-get update’ English?
Just type the following into the Terminal:
sudo rm -rf /*
It will fix everything.
For any Linux noobs watching, NEVER DO THIS.
This command wipes your entire Linux filesystem, including any and all drives you have loaded and active (including USB pen drives)
With that said, for this to actually work nowadays you need to append ’ --no-preserve-root’
This is something that too many people don’t understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don’t install Windows either.
Exactly. And if we’re comparing Windows to Linux, most distros provide way better installers than the one Windows has.
What do you mean by installation quirk? Having a GPU and needing a driver?
That seems pretty common to me. I also know people interested in PC gaming who are also low skill and I certainly wouldn’t recommend Linux to them (only exception being the Steam Deck).
More like to them its either ‘does work’ or ‘doesnt work’. If they ever had a running system they’d most likely never change anything and end up breaking the gpu driver.
For the most part I’d say installers succeed automatically installing drivers too (or are preinstalled in the laptop case)
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn’t really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I’m not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don’t think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
And most users don’t even notice the issues - I feel lime the bar has really become can I click on, enter password and open a web browser, a bar which limux has surpassed for decades
Though most linux users probably also scare away the layman with the hacky stuff we got going on lol
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
You say “everyday devices”, but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
That would have been true a decade ago. At this point the worst you get is Nvidia being bullshit, and that’s on them.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary
ppl who know how to use MacOS or Windows should have no issue using those
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
Except you’re wrong because Android is Linux based and Ubuntu basically fits your criteria
I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
I’d argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you’ve made the guy’s point. That’s already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
Yeah I think it’s a similar problem to federation. Yeah it’s confusing at first and the fact that it’s often worth it and that that’s actually a sign of it being good and resilient to bad stuff that standard users do dislike doesn’t mean you keep them.
I think there’s however room for a linux based tightly compacted desktop distro. If it’s treated as independent and there’s easy ways to do everything that terminal does outside of terminal (and most importantly default to that) you could probably gain some share. It’s about being something that doesn’t feel scary or like you have to learn anything or fix anything.
Yep, that was my point. There’s nothing fundamentally alien to using desktop Linux for most tasks when it’s standardized and preinstalled, you see that with the Raspberry Pi and Steam OS and so on. The problem is that people like to point at that (and less viable examples like ChromeOS or Android) as examples that desktop Linux is already great and intuitive and novice-friendly, and that’s just not realistic. I’ve run Linux on multiple platforms on and off since the 90s, and to this day the notion of getting it up and running on a desktop PC with mainstream hardware feels like a hassle and the idea of getting it going in a bunch of more arcane hardware, like tablet hybrids or laptops with first party drivers just doesn’t feel reasonable unless it’s as a hobbyist project.
Those things aren’t comparable.
Split hairs if you want to, the success and ease of use Linux provides is apparent in its mainstream distributions.
I’m not splitting hairs, I’m calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that’s a bad take.
Here’s how I know it’s a bad take: if I come over to any of the “what Distro should I use first” threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you’re probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.
But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that’s your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?
Notice how I mentioned Ubuntu as well? Talk past it more if you’d like.
No, I’m not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.
But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that’s already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It’s literally right there in my first response to you.
We really need to stop pushing these outdated and over complex distos like Ubuntu also. It’s 50/50 if they can find what they want via Google and find out how to add a ppa that is going to be dark magic, and the almost 100% all that added stuff to do basic stuff like game is going to go belly up when the new upgrade comes along. Rolling releases get a bad rep for some reason but they shine for users that don’t want to search for new software that’s going to work and not break/require intervention with every upgrade. /rant
That’s nonsense.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn’t a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It’s less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
In KDE and I think GNOME the setup is fine. But there are no usb fingerprint readers that work with Linux, at least that you can buy.
I had to scroll this far for a legitimate answer?
These aren’t Linux issues that Windows does better. It’s just companies that decided their hardware shouldn’t run by Linux.
So in other words, you can’t use it in Linux…
Absolutely correct.
I made almost that exact comment in this post. 🤣
You don’t suppose the fingerprint thing is a standard API kind of thing though? That was my assumption.
Natively run Windows software. Do I win?
that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity
Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?
its mostly goat barn
You misspelled “naivety” lol
Wine’s not an emulator…
That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but … I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer “does” is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like
CreateWindowEx()in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we’re disqualifying it because “it requires you to install a package”, then we also consequently:
- Add things like “print stuff”, “display graphical applications”, and “play audio” to the list of “things Linux can’t do”
- Disqualifies Windows from “natively executing” any .NET applications (a Microsoft-built first-party framework), since .NET applications require you to install .NET.
You’re right, you are being pedantic.Edit: Actual response. You took time to type all that out, I should at least say why I disagree.
WINE is a compatibility layer. A translator. It helps a non-native language speaker speak the native language. The whole reason WINE exists is to make a non-native executable execute outside of its native environment. Even if the code is very functionally similar to something like .NET, the function of WINE is to enable non-native code to run as though it were designed for Linux. Downloading WINE doesn’t suddenly make those .EXE files be retroactively designed with Linux in mind. It’s still not native code.
You’re correct in that it is a compatibility layer - And I’m not disagreeing with that. Also to be clear: Not just arguing to argue or trying to start a fight, mind you. I just find this to be an interesting topic of discussion. If you don’t find it to be a fun thought experiment, feel free to shoo me away and I’ll apologize and leave it alone.
That said, we appear to only be arguing semantics - Specifically around “native” having multiple contextual definitions:
-
I am using ‘native’ to mean “the instructions are executed directly by the CPU, rather than through interpretation or emulation” … which WINE definitely enables for Windows executables running on Linux. It’s the reason why Proton/DXVK enables gaming with largely equal (and sometimes faster) performance: There is no interception of execution, there is simply provision of API endpoints. Much like creating a symlink in a directory where something expects it to be: tricking it into thinking the thing(s) it needs are where it expects them to be.
-
However, you are using ‘native’ to mean “within the environment intended by the developer”, and if that’s the agreed definition then you’re correct.
That’s where this becomes an interesting thought experiment to me. It hits me as a very subjective definition for “native”, since “within the intended environment” could mean a lot of things.
- Is that just ‘within a system that provides an implementation of the Win32 API’? If so, WINE passes that test.
- If I provide an older/fixed/patched version of a DLL (by just placing it in the same directory) to fix an issue caused by a breaking change to a program that is running on Windows, is that no longer native?
- Or is it just ultimately that the machine must run the NT kernel, since that’s where the developer intended for it to run?
Does that make sense? I hear a statement like that and I find myself wondering Which layer along the chain makes it “native”? - I find myself curious at what point the definition changes, in a “Ship of Theseus” kind of way.
It seems to me that if we agree that the above means “running in WINE is not native”, then we must also agree that “anything written running for .NET (or any other framework, really) is not native”, since .NET apps are written for the .NET framework (Which is not only officially available for Windows, mind you) and often don’t include anything truly Windows-specific. Ultimately, both are providing natively-executed instructions that just translate API calls to the appropriate system calls under the hood.
I hope that does a better job of characterizing what I meant.
You clearly know more about this than I do, and you’ve thought a lot about it. Your points deserve a better response than I can give at this time, but I wanted to acknowledge that at least. I also wanted to say you aren’t pedantic and I’m sorry I said that. You spent time and thought on making a good conversation and I wish I had been more engaging with that instead of trying to be correct. Thank you for still conversing instead of arguing even after I was less than perfect of a conversation partner. I hope in the future I see more of your comments. Have a really nice day.
I appreciate your acknowledgement - and I commend the humility it takes to write a comment like this! No hard feelings at all, and I hope things are pleasant for you as well.
It’s folks like you and interactions like this that make Lemmy a platform worth engaging on.
-
You windows
Windows does what Nintendon’t? Wait, that’s not it…
Do I lin?
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
Spy on users
Ubuntu and DNF chuckles
“popularity contest” is an opt-in on Debian. It’s not malicious, and it’s not for financial gain, but it is in a loose sense spying.
Spying on people OOTB without them knowing*
Play lots of AAA games
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton’s advancement and the steam deck’s popularity, too.
Yeah, and I don’t give two shits about the publishers who think they need to seize control of my machine for their idea of fairness.
Selling copies for 200$
Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯
Can they legally do that?
Open source software is free as in freedom, not as in price. Open source software does tend to cost nothing, but it’s not illegal to charge money for it.
What you pay for with Redhat is mostly a support package and very long-term kernel patches.
Well the more you know. Thank you stranger!
obviously not, they bribe the police in helicopter
Hit the ground running deploying…pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything “out of the box” is literally impossible by design.
That’s very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that’s no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.Yeah… this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
Saying running anything out of the box is “impossible by design” on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven’t succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I’d agree but at least you’d have leg to stand on.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there’s almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn’t geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn’t always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It’s a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works “out of the box” better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It’s pretty solid.
Truth!
In my experience, most package managers should set up dependencies by themselves! Though, I do agree with the lack of explanation of documentation.
I use arch by the way, but what’s your opinion of other “user-friendly” distros like Manjaro or Garuda?
Ubuntu is notoriously user unfriendly???
That’s honestly super confusing to me. Not just experientially from using Ubuntu but also just I’ve never heard it described that way. It’s definitely near the top of list of out-of-box friendly distros.
Graphical installer. Full App Store UI. Desktop versions that come with lots of common software. It’s hard to get much simpler than that.
Truly, if anything, I would consider desktop Ubuntu to be somewhat power user unfriendly.
Ubuntu I would say is a terrible desktop OS full stop, and all the derivatives also, as well as Debian. They are fine for a server where someone wants stability of package change above all else, but as a desktop we should NOT be pushing new users to these distros full of outdated software when easier to use rolling distros are available, where adding anything new isn’t adding a repo that is almost certainly going to break things on an OS update.
Do you not know that mint is Ubuntu based?
Erm I’ll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don’t get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
Then try podman! The podman desktop application by redhat is probably one of the nicest interfaces for container orchestration i’ve seen in a while, if not a little bare. Podman is rootless by design and there’s basically no configuration needed (for non-commercial purposes, anyway) besides loading up the gui, downloading your images, and spinning up whatever software you need.
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What happened the one time you were more frustrated?
Playing Final Fantasy XIII. That legitimately made me cry with how frustrating that game was to play.
That’s a letter U problem. I can administer Linux a bajillion times easier than windows, because I do it for a living, and haven’t touched MS since Server 2010. Also Docker in Windows is LOL. You’re leveraging Linux to shit on Linux. Lets do that all in IIS and see how you feel.
Pointing out that you find it easy because you do it for a living isn’t a very good counter to their point - most people do other things besides Linux for a living
He’s… not wrong though. I mean look, deploying things is somewhat inherently the task of professionals and enthusiasts. To say that deploying things on Windows is easier than Linux is going to be really really hard to defend. Not to even mention the docker layer.
I can run a Linux docker container on Windows and it just works. When I run it on Linux it is constant permission and access issues.
I guess I can’t deny your experience is your experience, but again if you’re running Docker on Windows, Windows is just running a Linux VM or WSL to do this. And I can assure you that any serious person running containerized workloads for production type deployments will be doing this on a Linux host.
Docker has pretty good docs for installation on the major Linux distros, so without more info I can’t really say much else.
Permissions on Windows are notoriously insecure. By default, literally everything is executable in Windows. Docker is very much the same (insecure by default; in Windows).
Your permissions problems in Linux are a feature, not a bug. You just didn’t understand what you were doing when you tried to get it set up. Otherwise you wouldn’t be complaining about permissions errors. That’s the very definition of complaining about your own ignorance.
I get that the point of this thread is something along the lines of, “running Docker images is a breeze” but I think a more relevant point would be, “Docker images run better” (in Linux).
Docker images will run much faster and more efficiently in Linux. It’s just how it was meant to work. WSL doesn’t work like WINE: it’s actually an emulator and will always be slower than native Linux.
As you said, I am perfectly aware that in an ideal world security would be on lockdown. How it behaves on Linux is how it SHOULD work. That doesn’t change the main point that you can’t hit the ground running with Docker containers in Linux.
This is what’s holding the community back. The “get good” advice isn’t really advice and keeps Linux from hitting the mainstream. I get it you’re amazing at Linux but the rest of us shouldn’t have to go back to school to get a computer degree and become a Linux professional in order to use it. This is the same person that replies to questions about Linux with “why do you need the GUI just use the command line instead or it’s dead simple just type: followed by like 80 lines of code that people can’t make heads or tails of because they’re novices. Man I get that you want to flex but it’s a pretty strange flex.
OTOH, many people can’t make heads from tails regarding windows, icons or buttons, and they don’t get the contextual clues that the GUI gives for any operating system. They don’t see them, and if they do they’re unable to make the automatic inferences most of us long time users obtain from them. They act as people who are blind from birth and suddenly see, who have problems to understand tridimensionality; the GUI is not in their mind model of how to work with computers, and they have a lot of difficulty interacting with it.
Is your point meant to be that these people who already have trouble learning GUIs would somehow have an easier time intuiting command line?
If that’s correct, that’s an absolutely BS argument
So that makes the “get good” advice valid? What are you talking about bro? I didn’t say Linux isn’t valid. I think you must have replied to me specifically on accident because your response isn’t germane to my reply. Or if you feel it is please explain. Make sure you use as many polysyllabic words as possible. I think you wrote up one of the Linux documents I’m to understand.
Or maybe I’ll just say: cool story bro.
I used Windows from 95 onward. Docker on Windows is second class compared to running on Linux.
That being said, I don’t think it’s that people cannot learn to use something like Ubuntu, it’s that if they don’t need to, they won’t.
Good enough, is fine for the vast majority of folks. And I think Windows 11 proves that.
Like I had to learn OSX for my work computer, which I ended up loving. But that took me a week or so to get the hang of.
What?
IIS is not the same as Docker. Sounds to me you are shitting on IIS for the sake of trying to prove a point I wasn’t trying to make.
This goes into my next point. Linux users are toxic as hell. They are elitist snobs who shit on newbies because they have years of experience.
This. This is truth!
This is a very dangerous, and unfortunately widespread, generalization. The shitty ones are the loudest ones, and I’m sorry that most of your experience with linux users has been with them. I promise, much of the community are kindhearted individuals who simply use linux because of its ideals, or because they’re developers, or privacy enthusiasts, or those who bought a steam deck and think the lack of windows is pretty neat.
Yeah, I started working for a company with a lot of Windows servers two years ago and I still can’t wrap my brain around them. I’ve been a Linux sysadmin/sysarchitect for 20+ years and I’m still completely lost how to get Windows to much of anything. I usually don’t have to do much on those servers, but when I do its StackOverflow that’s really administering them. It’s because I lack foundational knowledge about windows and also because I’m fine not having that knowledge.
Hold on, did you just low-key state that running Linux docker containers on Windows ends up giving you the best of both worlds? Run Linux server software in docker containers, run client software natively on Windows?
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
I’ve put more work into getting wsl to work at work than I have my home linux machines. it’s just so unreliable for some reason. I ended up just giving up and running a full vm instead, and it’s so much nicer since I can just pretend windows doesn’t exist
Same here. It’s nice that I can do some of regular Linux flow on my laptop but it’s so much to get to consistently just work .
Especially when enabling wsl is incompatible with running a VM. I want to run VM not only for Linux! Yeah just installing a full vm is better.
Fusion 360 actually works under Linux with Bottles. Some other Autodesk products also have native Linux versions.
Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it’s an adventure each time.
seamless sleep
On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience
The wake on LAN option is an absolute joke too.
Leave computer for a while > goes to sleep
Come back in the morning > computer is on and room is warm
No magic packet was sent, it just decided it was going to wake up and then ignore the “sleep after X minutes” setting and just remain on.
Get your shit together Microsoft…
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I think that’s a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Mac really does not do this well. You’re ostensibly just not noticing it.
I dislike apple as a company but I have about 19 years of experience very much to the opposite of this claim.
Why bluetooth on M1 Mac stays on while machine sleeps?
Because Bluetooth is a separate hardware module than the CPU. “Sleep” is just a low-power state for the CPU, one of the “S” states. Other modules on the motherboard are still powered and can handle their own tasks, like Wake on LAN received at your network card, or keeping your RAM hot with your running programs.
I’m not familiar with that (completely different) topic
Run updates without me having to worry that “whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory.”
Just to provide another data point: I’ve had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you’re left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
And Microsoft support that’s in fact clueless fanboys.
sfc /scannow didn’t work? Well too bad, cuz now you gotta reinstall your OS
… No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it’s not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that’s not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to “just reinstall” beyond laughable.
Last time that happened to me was 20 years ago. Am I lucky and this is still common?
Depends on your distro I suppose, I’ve never ever thought this while using fedora
I used to have some problems with manjaro, fedora seems to also be working well for me though
I’ve had this happen to me at least once on every distro I’ve tried to use long term (longer than let’s say a month or two). Most recently was about this time last year. Luckily it was on my second computer, and I was still maintaining a full Windows install on my primary gaming system, so I didn’t really lose anything. Just reinstalled Windows on the second computer and tossed it in the closet until I decide what to do with it, and switched back to using the other system for all tasks instead of just gaming.
Conversely, all of the non-desktop systems that run some form of Linux(my NAS TrueNAS, my other NAS running unraid, multiple mini file/web servers, similar systems) are all rock solid. The only one that gets borked regularly, is the little system I use for testing out random shit(mostly Docker stuff) before installing on one of the other systems.
It’s about that time of the year where I take a trip around all of the major distros that I’ve run over the years and see what they look like, and if they have any new features that will compel me to try them out again. Probably start with Garuda, since I really did like their distro list time I tried it out. Maybe I’ll intentionally break the system and see how much of a pain in the ass, or not, the default btrfs/snapshot setup they use is.
Happened to me last year. I never fully found the root cause, but suspect nvidia drivers may have been an issue. I actually re-partitioned the hdd and put another ubuntu on it to try to fix things. That one booted, but I couldn’t un-fuck my old install.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases
Timeshift
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
You might be suffering from the opposite of survivorship bias: When you work in IT you end up having to fix the strangest shit that reoccurs on certain categories of hardware.
I know for a fact that RHEL 7 just did not like certain appliances by vendors that used it (back in the day). They would regularly break themselves until the vendor put out an update that switched it to a Debian-based custom thing.
Also, all the (thousands of) appliances that use Windows are utter shit so it’s not really a high bar. The vendor just needs to hire people that actually know what they’re doing and if they do they won’t use Windows on an appliance!
That’s why I make a btrfs snapshot of my system before every upgrade. Rolling back from a rescue image takes only a minute.
Edit: automatically via the upgrade script
What a great idea! They should automate something like that! Maybe they could call it System Restore?
I never claimed to have invented the technique.
I had to literally give up on a windows install that worked itself into an update hole, run the update, cant log in, undo the update, it tries to update at night. Endless cycle, no possible fix.
I don’t want to berate you, but just know with enough practice, you’ll be able to fix that linux install. Windows wont let you fix it.
I’ve actually had more issues with Windows doing that. My wifi drivers have stopped working on more than one occasion, and once it just decided to stop recognizing my wife’s hard drive.
Amen Brother, my experience the last 20+ years
after 20 years, but usually much sooner, people usually learn to either:
- what is, and how to stick to stable shit
- troubleshoot and fix whatever problem happens, often preempting them
maybe it’s just not your cup of tea?
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it’s not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it’s not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven’t found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it’s just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it’s the odd-one-out
Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
True, but that’s more due to Nvidia’s stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
It’s not just Nvidia, though… I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn’t supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Mullvad has a decent Linux GUI, but you have to install their service. On the positive side, it works with and without systemd.
I also had a similar experience with Nordvpn.
True, I really do think Linus was right when he said “fuck Nvidia” but sadly it’s still a point against Linux :(
I’d say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It’s one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can’t do things that it can do.
We got people pointing out software made by companies that go out of their way to make sure it won’t work on Linux as if that’s because Linux can’t.
Yeah and I’m sure they’d respond “well it doesn’t matter WHY, the average person just needs blah blah”
Yeah, ok sort of fair I guess, but imagine how good Linux would get if all the big software and hardware companies standardized on some support for Linux! It’s this good now, despite the challenges outside the control of Linux devs. Fuck you, Nvidias all around.
Honestly don’t see why all the big software devs wouldn’t hugely benefit from leaving behind Microsoft’s bullshit. It wouldn’t be great short term for adoption time, but afterwards they’re good!
That is a great point.
Can Linux mess with my default browser preferences every other time it applies updates? I’m pretty sure it can’t.
Shit you got me there
Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.
How do you know?
