points by chx 5 years ago

> Do we have to get cool people to use Linux?

Every time this comes up I am here to offer a perspective perhaps few have.

I started using Linux before it was 1.0. It was so long ago, quite a few ppl here weren't even alive (and then again, I am sure there a few here who started in '91 or '92). For a while, only at university department level servers. Then dual booting it at home, with Windows 2000 (maybe even Win98 at the tail end of that, I don't remember) and having Linux as my daily driver first on desktop then on laptop 2004-end of 2017.

After this long, I must say, anyone using Linux on a laptop has Stockholm syndrome. You can choose between Ubuntu where infrequent OS updates shatter your system so throughly you can't work for days or you can use Arch Linux which rolls and breaks smaller parts of your system from time to time, mostly scanner, printer, Bluetooth. That's how it goes. https://xkcd.com/619/ this is 1000% true. Oh yes, I use Linux on servers to this day, it's great.

Sure, if your usage is plain home wifi and browsing the web, basically something just a tiny bit beyond a Chromebook, it might work but heaven forbid you'd try to connect to some funny enterprise VPN or even worse, enterprise wifi or as I mentioned, have a Bluetooth speaker or an MFD.

And there's no help. None. Nobody knows any more what's going on. We had a pretty good handle on how the various parts of the system fit together because it was damn simple but post-systemd noone understands it any more or if they do, they don't share. I posted this more than once, my favorite example here is the DisplayLink adapters (which are awful but they are often a necessary awful) and people said, read the Arch wiki page, well, back then, even like three years after I did, the meat of that page was what I could scrape together from mailing list and blog posts of the relevant driver authors but that's it. I certainly didn't understand it and people blindly copypasting out of the wiki didn't either and if you hit a problem, bam, who is there to help? Or to the previous point and this no help together: the IT lead at my workplace asked some years ago how to make the F5 VPN w/ two factor work on Linux and the deafening silence is the answer. I managed to make it work by running an old enough Firefox as root (!) which could run the F5 NPAPI extension. It's just plain nuts. Yes, F5 should have provided a native Linux client which supported 2FA on Linux but they didn't. It doesn't matter whose fault it is but at the end of the day, I am out of work if I can't log into the VPN.

I am running Windows 10 since 2018 January. Not a problem. I ran O&o shutup, I use Classic Shell, so I never even see the Win 10 Start menu, I use WSL and -- everything just works. I have no problems with the system installing security updates at 5am, I set my system once so it only installs those, big updates are postponed by six month or forever and the whole thing just. works. Yes, Windows Subsystem For Linux, because the Linux command line tool are just great. It's everything else that is less great.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/iej5y6/netf... look at this and despair. Once again: I don't care, I have translated Doctorow's speech to Hungarian to spread it, to help fight DRM, no matter how little, even that was 16 years ago, I fought yeah, but the reality is, it's here and I don't want to bother with this. Look here, Linux people say, it-works-or-at-least-ought-to-with-this-workaround this is what I am saying: people will bend over backwards to defend their OS... I am not sure whether I am able to get my point across. sigh.