Right. I spent the last several hours trying to get a mixed batch of Win10, Win11, and Win10-upgraded-from-8 computers to talk to a printer and had just about enough of this argument. If you want a pissing match of who can be the biggest dick, take it to Twitter.
Locked.
But like - use Linux?
My employer keeps saying I can’t do this
I solved this by using Linux anyway and being way more productive than other folks.
Oh easy. Just use Linux
time to rice a linux to camoflague the desktop. as long as it looks like windows theyll not see the difference right
I trick Windows-only vendor programs in the exact same way
There’s only so much incessant bitching I can hear about dark patterns, intrusive automatic updates, shoehorned-in and useless AI, zero user choice, planned obsolesence, and being blindsided by enshittification before I say “just try using the free thing that doesn’t have those problems”.
“I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas.” If you have to for work or something, though, I totally get it and encourage the bitching.
I hear you, but in a lot of these cases the people with complaints are not competent. Anyone who has worked helpdesk or adjacent has seen boatloads of 'em. Imagine I’m an oldie or fool or even grew up without electrical power and I barely know how a computer works. I don’t really want to work with them and I think turning the monitor on and off is a reboot. Windows is horrible with all this bloat and AI and so much confusing shit but usability-wise it makes some sense I guess. I could do with a change but I can’t do anything confusing or outside of my limited range. I’m probably not installing a good distro. I am not partitioning a drive. I am not creating a bootable USB. What do I do?
The only option here is to have them go out on a limb and buy a machine online pre-installed with Linux or have someone else set it up, right?
What do I do?
Not literally, of course. But if you don’t have the baseline level of skill to exist in a technological society without being absolutely reamed by predatory corporations and other scammers and also refuse help to learn how to defend yourself, at some point that’s a “you” problem and you deserve to fucking lose.
No but genuinely I resonate with this answer so much. Imagine if you needed to pass a computer literacy test to own any sort of “smart” device/computer and needed a license to operate it. It would eliminate so many scam call centers and would make so many IT teams work load decrease 10x. Imagine the complete LACK of mis/disinformation on the internet. Sometimes i wish that were the world we were in.
They literally pointed out that a lot of the people saying this kind of stuff may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.
Why is it “trying nothing” when the other option to get up to speed enough to use Linux is to basically be taking some college-level courses on the side of their every day life just to be able to use their device appropriately?
For people who aren’t tech savvy at all, “Ain’t nobody got the time for that!” is a completely fucking reasonable response to being told they need to go learn a bunch of shit about some subject they could give a rats ass about.
It’s like telling someone who has a law degree and works 50 hours a week at a law firm that if they want more control over their car they need to take some courses on automotive repair so they don’t have to deal with an annoying repair shop. As above, ain’t nobody got the time for that!
Literally every Linux nerd seems to forget that this is specialized knowledge that not everyone has dumped skill points into.
I gave my grandma a Linux, she had no idea. All she needed was a web browser that didn’t feed her ads and give her issues. Fedora with KDE was super simple for her to figure out how to use and actually had better accessibility features for her. And it was free.
Linux is actually pretty noob friendly nowadays. And if you don’t want to mess with it yourself, you can buy computers with Linux preinstalled today.
I get that sometimes people just want to complain and not solution. But like, using windows and other surveillance capitalism adjacent products is a path to fascism so like…maybe people should just, critically evaluate their problems and think of solutions every now and then?
Many distros of linux are easier to use than osx or windows.
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with registry editor anymore.
I literally use Linux in my daily life non-stop. My desktop is free from Windows and I run numerous servers for various services and microservices.
I just fundamentally disagree with the hivemind that Linux desktop of any flavor is ready for casual user prime-time. Even if they don’t have technical issues with now that doesn’t mean they won’t have technical issues with it ever. In my personal experience, I have only ever had successful long-term rollouts of non-gui cli-only servers. I have always had issues of some sort crop up with desktop Linux eventually.
Further, depending on the DE, getting things set up properly for someone who has, say, vision issues so everything is easily visible for them can often be a fucking nightmare of numerous different config files for different parts of the GUI. Linux accessibility options are notoriously bad.
If you want to pretend Linux is a perfect solution for grandmas, go ahead, but as someone who is a Linux heavy user who doesn’t even use Windows anymore and hasn’t in a while I think that this attitude from Linux evangelists is deeply rooted in a rose tinted view of the OS and it’s user friendliness. And yes I use the term evangelist for a fucking reason, and that is because you people are as fucking pushy about your ideology as evangelical Christians.
The year of the Linux Desktop doesn’t happen when people shut up about Linux.
If I have to see you whining about windows, you have to see me shilling for linux.
/s
replying with “use Linux” to complaints about iOS is especially funny to me
me omw to install Linux on my iphone
