#walloftext — Public Fediverse posts

Microsoft turning the Windows start menu into an ad delivery system has ignited the "Linux as a daily driver -- feasible or not" discussion again. In my official capacity as someone who's been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 15 years, I sadly have to say: the short answer is no. The long answer is no, unless you are willing to understand that a lot of the time you will be working for Linux, instead of Linux working for you. This won't necessarily happen, but if it does, it will likely result in a really bad experience. As in, a "screw this, I'm out and I regret ever going in" experience.

I could write a whole essay on this, but here is one story that really sums up the problem. 2 years ago I needed a NIC for my Linux desktop. What NICs work with Linux? No one has an authoritative answer on this. Manufacturers would rather gargle acid than actually write "supports Linux" on the package. The one that did -- not even a NIC, some Edimax dongle (I got desperate) -- turned out to have "Linux Support" in the sense that they expected you to compile the drivers from source, and these were for an old version of the Linux kernel. I got as far as doing some shallow debugging of the source code to see if I could get the thing to at least compile. I could not.

When I gave up on that I was desperate enough to use a product that didn't declare Linux support, as long as enough redditors were willing to say it was going to work. That's how I ended up buying an Intel chipset NIC that proudly said on the package "supports Windows 7, 8, 10 ONLY". I plugged it in and it did, in fact, work out of the box. I wrote a reddit post explaining this with all the right keywords for the next poor soul that needed this information, and got the following amazing response: "What version did you try this with? Oh, Ubuntu LTS? Well, great, but anyone reading this should know that while Ubuntu support is there as you've verified, this NIC isn't supported in Debian".

Debian! Come on! I'd have understood if it had been Arch, but Debian? Ubuntu is, like, what, a fancy Debian maintained by a corporation -- so you're going to brag to the whole world that "hey the works-out-of-the-box experience of FOSS has gotten so much better" but really all the credit goes to Canonical Ltd.?

This is ONE story; I have dozens more like it. In practice it means if someone wants to get into Linux I have to tell them "ignore everyone who says installing Ubuntu makes you not one of the cool kids -- go ahead and start with Ubuntu". But then you also have to deal with the way the entire world treats the fact you are running Linux as Your Problem(tm). If you can't parse MS-Word documents specifically engineered to be difficult to parse with any software other than MS-Word, well then you're the problem. If you need to use some obscure piece of software for work that naturally only has a Windows version, and WINE isn't having it, well then you're the problem. The average user is just not ready for all this bullshit. They also aren't ready to be told "well uh actually there is this thing called a VM".

I don't know what the solution is to all these problems. All I know is when a friend asks me if they should switch to Linux I feel it is my moral obligation to warn them that if they do, a lot of the experience is going to suck. And this is a shame because the upsides are pretty great.

I know the above text is supremely uncool by the standards of modern discourse, because we've all reached an unspoken understanding that if you've personally committed to something -- a person, an ideology, a movement, a programming language, a piece of software -- it is your unofficial duty to evangelize for it, to extol its virtues, to recruit for the 'cause' so that it may grow, and if people suffer some sort of buyer's remorse well then hopefully by then they're in too deep and cognitive dissonance can do its thing and they emerge out the other side of their experience exhausted, but ultimately converts. I say screw that. I believe in honest evangelism. People being evangelized to should understand what they are getting into, the good and the bad.

#Linux #Windows #walloftext

Microsoft turning the Windows start menu into an ad delivery system has ignited the "Linux as a daily driver -- feasible or not" discussion again. In my official capacity as someone who's been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 15 years, I sadly have to say: the short answer is no. The long answer is no, unless you are willing to understand that a lot of the time you will be working for Linux, instead of Linux working for you. This won't necessarily happen, but if it does, it will likely result in a really bad experience. As in, a "screw this, I'm out and I regret ever going in" experience.

I could write a whole essay on this, but here is one story that really sums up the problem. 2 years ago I needed a NIC for my Linux desktop. What NICs work with Linux? No one has an authoritative answer on this. Manufacturers would rather gargle acid than actually write "supports Linux" on the package. The one that did -- not even a NIC, some Edimax dongle (I got desperate) -- turned out to have "Linux Support" in the sense that they expected you to compile the drivers from source, and these were for an old version of the Linux kernel. I got as far as doing some shallow debugging of the source code to see if I could get the thing to at least compile. I could not.

When I gave up on that I was desperate enough to use a product that didn't declare Linux support, as long as enough redditors were willing to say it was going to work. That's how I ended up buying an Intel chipset NIC that proudly said on the package "supports Windows 7, 8, 10 ONLY". I plugged it in and it did, in fact, work out of the box. I wrote a reddit post explaining this with all the right keywords for the next poor soul that needed this information, and got the following amazing response: "What version did you try this with? Oh, Ubuntu LTS? Well, great, but anyone reading this should know that while Ubuntu support is there as you've verified, this NIC isn't supported in Debian".

Debian! Come on! I'd have understood if it had been Arch, but Debian? Ubuntu is, like, what, a fancy Debian maintained by a corporation -- so you're going to brag to the whole world that "hey the works-out-of-the-box experience of FOSS has gotten so much better" but really all the credit goes to Canonical Ltd.?

This is ONE story; I have dozens more like it. In practice it means if someone wants to get into Linux I have to tell them "ignore everyone who says installing Ubuntu makes you not one of the cool kids -- go ahead and start with Ubuntu". But then you also have to deal with the way the entire world treats the fact you are running Linux as Your Problem(tm). If you can't parse MS-Word documents specifically engineered to be difficult to parse with any software other than MS-Word, well then you're the problem. If you need to use some obscure piece of software for work that naturally only has a Windows version, and WINE isn't having it, well then you're the problem. The average user is just not ready for all this bullshit. They also aren't ready to be told "well uh actually there is this thing called a VM".

I don't know what the solution is to all these problems. All I know is when a friend asks me if they should switch to Linux I feel it is my moral obligation to warn them that if they do, a lot of the experience is going to suck. And this is a shame because the upsides are pretty great.

I know the above text is supremely uncool by the standards of modern discourse, because we've all reached an unspoken understanding that if you've personally committed to something -- a person, an ideology, a movement, a programming language, a piece of software -- it is your unofficial duty to evangelize for it, to extol its virtues, to recruit for the 'cause' so that it may grow, and if people suffer some sort of buyer's remorse well then hopefully by then they're in too deep and cognitive dissonance can do its thing and they emerge out the other side of their experience exhausted, but ultimately converts. I say screw that. I believe in honest evangelism. People being evangelized to should understand what they are getting into, the good and the bad.

#Linux #Windows #walloftext

Microsoft turning the Windows start menu into an ad delivery system has ignited the "Linux as a daily driver -- feasible or not" discussion again. In my official capacity as someone who's been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 15 years, I sadly have to say: the short answer is no. The long answer is no, unless you are willing to understand that a lot of the time you will be working for Linux, instead of Linux working for you. This won't necessarily happen, but if it does, it will likely result in a really bad experience. As in, a "screw this, I'm out and I regret ever going in" experience.

I could write a whole essay on this, but here is one story that really sums up the problem. 2 years ago I needed a NIC for my Linux desktop. What NICs work with Linux? No one has an authoritative answer on this. Manufacturers would rather gargle acid than actually write "supports Linux" on the package. The one that did -- not even a NIC, some Edimax dongle (I got desperate) -- turned out to have "Linux Support" in the sense that they expected you to compile the drivers from source, and these were for an old version of the Linux kernel. I got as far as doing some shallow debugging of the source code to see if I could get the thing to at least compile. I could not.

When I gave up on that I was desperate enough to use a product that didn't declare Linux support, as long as enough redditors were willing to say it was going to work. That's how I ended up buying an Intel chipset NIC that proudly said on the package "supports Windows 7, 8, 10 ONLY". I plugged it in and it did, in fact, work out of the box. I wrote a reddit post explaining this with all the right keywords for the next poor soul that needed this information, and got the following amazing response: "What version did you try this with? Oh, Ubuntu LTS? Well, great, but anyone reading this should know that while Ubuntu support is there as you've verified, this NIC isn't supported in Debian".

Debian! Come on! I'd have understood if it had been Arch, but Debian? Ubuntu is, like, what, a fancy Debian maintained by a corporation -- so you're going to brag to the whole world that "hey the works-out-of-the-box experience of FOSS has gotten so much better" but really all the credit goes to Canonical Ltd.?

This is ONE story; I have dozens more like it. In practice it means if someone wants to get into Linux I have to tell them "ignore everyone who says installing Ubuntu makes you not one of the cool kids -- go ahead and start with Ubuntu". But then you also have to deal with the way the entire world treats the fact you are running Linux as Your Problem(tm). If you can't parse MS-Word documents specifically engineered to be difficult to parse with any software other than MS-Word, well then you're the problem. If you need to use some obscure piece of software for work that naturally only has a Windows version, and WINE isn't having it, well then you're the problem. The average user is just not ready for all this bullshit. They also aren't ready to be told "well uh actually there is this thing called a VM".

I don't know what the solution is to all these problems. All I know is when a friend asks me if they should switch to Linux I feel it is my moral obligation to warn them that if they do, a lot of the experience is going to suck. And this is a shame because the upsides are pretty great.

I know the above text is supremely uncool by the standards of modern discourse, because we've all reached an unspoken understanding that if you've personally committed to something -- a person, an ideology, a movement, a programming language, a piece of software -- it is your unofficial duty to evangelize for it, to extol its virtues, to recruit for the 'cause' so that it may grow, and if people suffer some sort of buyer's remorse well then hopefully by then they're in too deep and cognitive dissonance can do its thing and they emerge out the other side of their experience exhausted, but ultimately converts. I say screw that. I believe in honest evangelism. People being evangelized to should understand what they are getting into, the good and the bad.

#Linux #Windows #walloftext