5d ago

I see these MFs on a daily basis

You're viewing part of a thread.

Show Context

779 comments

That example just proves my point further. No average joe is going to alter the execution policy because they aren't running unsigned powershell scripts. They just want their applications to install and work. They don't want to debug shit. You being fine doing all that is great but other people don't want to mess with it and won't.
Half the time instead of downloading and running an executable that works with nearly all versions of their OS, they have to figure out which os flavor they have since it's not just "Linux" it's Debian, Red Hat, Arch, Kali, Suse, CentOS, Mint, Pop, Ubuntu, etc. and then does it need to be compatible with gnome or kde or something else, then is the configuration even a supported option, oh wait it only supports versions newer than 5 years where anything older will fail, or only till 5 years ago and anything newer will fail. Or the one project that solved the issue stopped developing it 10 years prior and no longer works. Or there just plain isn't a native app so now you have to try and find an alternative way to connect to a service you pay for that has an equivalent feature set and price.
Linux is a fractured mess overall. It is not user friendly. It is not out of the box ready. It's a great option for someone technical that wants to type shit in a terminal. And it's a bad option for anyone that doesn't want to figure out what the magic words are that took the place of their double click.
- My example wasn't literal, I have had to do similar things for drivers, sound, USB, search etc. And windows support is just randos telling you what they think might work.
  As to your second point, the sane applies as windows is a collection of who knows that the hell software and random hardware. Which hardware? What driver? What vendor?
  
  But I can select nearly any software since Windows 7 and it will still work on windows 10/11. That is far less common on linux. It's more a rule on windows with some exceptions vs linux being the inverse.
  Support is stupid for both platforms. I don't even want to touch that mess. Assholes and cunts on both sides and in different ways.
  
  But I can select nearly any software since Windows 7 and it will still work on windows 10/11. That is far less common on linux.
  This is so demonstrably, laughably not true it's not even funny.
  
  Granted it is becoming less true on 11. But I am not wrong about the rest. I run into abandonware that doesn't work far more with Linux.
  
  I mean, there are a lot of projects that were supported by like one guy that stopped updating it 10 years ago, that's true. But more often than not, if the software is useful enough, there will be a modern fork of it, or someone rebuilt it from scratch, or the functionality was repeated by some later project, or at the very least it's very easy to patch some modern dependencies, and there is a very easily googlable helpful instruction on that.
  Personally, I know of only two big products for which this isn't the case, and they require 20 years old kernel to run, but those are esoteric outliers, and I'm not even sure people are still using it.
  
  It may work, but it also may fuck up something else. I run into that a lot with users and windows. How do they fix it or get rid of it? Say hello to our friend regedit!
  
  Again though, those times are more exceptions than rules. I'm not saying Linux hasn't come a long way. A lot of the distros I've worked with are much better than they were a decade ago. They just still aren't the oobe needed to capture general end users.
  
  No they are more the rule. I have to deal with windows every day. I do all of it remotely using Linux. Because Linux just works and I don't have time to deal with windows bullshit. Linux has been stable and reliable, particularly on my laptops where I do nothing but update or upgrade. My desktop has caused me a few issues over the years, been rolling Arch for 6 years or so, but I think that is to be expected.
  Windows on the other hand, what a pain in the ass.
  But I will agree that end users, in general are unlikely to use Linux over Windows in most cases. Not because Linux isnt ready, but that is what os their computer came with, that is what they are familiar with, and largely it is what they will make apologies for. I mean lets be real: most people don't want a computer at all. I can't blame them. My elderly mother vastly prefers her iPad over a computer no matter what the OS is on the computer.
  
  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.
  
  I'm aware not all software is consumer grade. And many depts like sci/lad/manufacturing/medical definitely have more to worry about with upgrades. Windows 11 is a shit show even at the consumer level, I'd hate to be managing a migration to it for an office, let alone any dept relying on custom hardware. But blaming windows for something that would just as easily happen on a linux machine is a bit disingenuous. Upgrades break shit across all the OSes. I've had to rebuild linux servers because an upgrade would break them and keeping them air gapped on a closed loop wasn't an option.
  
  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.

779 comments