just the thought of having to configure it all again makes my skin crawl

It took me ages to get the nerve to redo my media server. Then some of my hardware failed and I had to redo it again… By the third time redoing it I had become a lot more confident.

Also you learn to take notes on everything you touch and make backups lol

I just feel like bringing these pain points up in the hope that someone might have an answer for me or others, I guess?

Completely valid and I encourage you to keep doing so. Denying there are usability problems does not fix them.

This kind of thing is why backups / snapshots are so important to do. On Linux we actually get that option so much more easily than on Windows, so it’s worth doing. On Windows, updates are painful enough that out of habit I just reinstall Windows every year to head this problem off.

Not trying to minimize your pain, it’s something I had to learn to deal with too and it does take time and energy to properly resolve, which isn’t free. The experience will also vary dramatically between distros and hardware.

Lastly if you’re a long time Windows user try to remember what it was like when you were new, when you had no idea how the pieces connect to each other; it takes time to get into the groove.

You might prefer a more curated experience like Bazzite.

Moved to CachyOS. Most things just worked. “update” is literally an alias that updates your OS and packages. Once had a bad update, snapshot rolled me back into action within 3 minutes.

With Windows that could warrant a reinstall/reimage if it’s bad enough. Fucking wild.

I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.

The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.

When my friends talk about what books they’re reading and it comes back to me I just joke and say “oh I largely read non-fiction”.

I read every manual, decision tree, process document, whatever lands in front of me.

RTFM is life

Absolute stealth hit. The last table tennis game… Man that hits hard.

I watched it expecting the same campy tropes from other fantasy/sci-fi movies of the era and what I got was a movie deeper than it lets on. That score too, amazing.

It’s all in one place. You look at your “feed” of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.

RSS exists, sadly average people just couldn’t figure out how to use it.

With our HP laptops they would work perfectly so long as you only ever used them with one brand of dock. If you mixed dock brands without doing a full restart (like say having one brand at home, suspending, and then using another brand’s dock at the office) Wi-Fi, suspend, and several other features would no longer work or work intermittently. We had HP and Targus working on it, even their engineers were puzzled.

Problem was non-existent on Linux…

The difference is that if an upgrade breaks a Linux install (which is much rarer in my experience) I can often simply change the setting, revert the update, use a different distro/version, or even undo the change myself. Hell if it’s was kernel deep, nothing stops you from recompiling yourself, if the problem warrants it.

We can more easily run special Linux versions in a virtual machine without having to do a bunch of registry/gp magic and hope it sticks because Microsoft likes to force updates through your settings anyway.

There are more options for dealing with problems and they suck less.

You can’t be serious? People buy other file managers because the Windows one sucks so bad. I would know, I purchase our software.

We are doing a review of all of our software to prep for Windows 11 right now. It’s not going nearly as well as you think because not all software is consumer-grade.

Not too long ago a bunch of our scientific devices got knocked out by Microsoft fixing an old serial bug. Turns out all the software to run these was built to workaround the bug and quite a few of these items are long since unsupported (or the vendor is gone). Some of these are tens of thousands of dollars, we can’t just replace these on a whim.

Windows: “PROGRAM_NAME experienced an error: DEEZ_NUTZ”

Yep that’s what we’re calling a useful error prompt these days. So much better than Linux lol

I’d argue that as Windows continues to abandon its (relatively) sane configuration UI for the newer useless Settings screens, it has reached the point where it really is sometimes easier to just look up what you need to do in Powershell.

This problem is only getting worse over time, so I don’t think it’s fair to hand the win to Windows.

Implying suspend works on Windows either. I’ve got like a 50/50 chance my monitor connected with DisplayPort actually gets signal after waking on Windows. This shit has been a problem for a long time.

Shouldn’t have to use fucking group policy just to stop your machine updating at inopportune times. Fucking Windows.

When I was first learning programming I had a teacher who insisted that the only resource we could was the Java docs.

When you want to know what parameters you need to pass or what certain flags do, it’s a great resource. When you don’t even know how to iterate through an array, it’s not the first place to look.

No sadly, in Canada actually. You really wouldn’t like how low IT pay is here.