“Install Linux”, is usually a hurdle for most people. We should be willing to help with that part.

Alacritty is fine. If you’re not combining it with tmux and zsh/fish, id pluck those fruits first.

I’ve used DOS, 3.11 to all the way to 11. Switched to Linux as main driver around 2009. Used MacOS at work for over a year now. I occasionally boot into windows for rare game that uses some anti cheat that doesn’t play well with wine.

I’m old enough that I just want things to work. I don’t care for any fanboyism. These are my opinions:

• Windows is a mess. It has different UI from different decades, depending on what and where. NT kernel is ancient. The registry is a horror show. The only edge it has, is third party software, like propriatery drivers. that’s it. And that’s isn’t a merit of windows, but rather market share.

• MacOS is inconsistent at every turn. It’s frustrating to use, and riddled with UX bugs, and seemingly deliberate lack of functionality. The core tooling, like the file manager, is absolute garbage. The only good thing it has going it, is that the Unix core is solid. In that year, I’ve experienced a soft brick once, that almost was a hard brick, and the reason was having set the display refresh rate from 120 to 60 Hz. Something I changed BTW, because certain animation transitions in MacOS took twice as long on 120 Hz… Yeah, top notch QA there Apple.

• Linux. It has its own flaws. For sure. But as for “just works”, it happens so often, that it’s exactly why Windows and MacOS feels so frustrating. I’d have my grandmother use Linux.

And, I’m not just saying this. When I upgraded components on windows, I spent 2 hours debugging problems. One of the problems was also that it reverted a GPU driver, where every single version information was unmistakably older. It also made it not work.

I’ve also experienced that the WiFi network adapter also doesn’t work until I download some proprietary software over ethernet cable.

On Linux? I didn’t need to do a single thing in either case. It for sure didn’t use to be this way. In 2009 I was hunting WiFi drivers for fedora over ethernet. But in the last, say 5 years, on Arch, it’s been amazing. Did I mention that I use arch?

Ps: The last 4 times I’ve had problems on Linux have been:

• 1. A Windows update fucks up grub.
• 2. Reboot from windows doesn’t release hardware claim on WiFi adapter, so it doesn’t work on Linux.
• 3. The system clock is wrong, which was easy to notice because of 2. leading to a lack of remote sync. This is due to Windows storing system time as local time, and not UTC. If you do software development, you’d know how dumb the former is.
• 4. Raid partition destroyed because a windows 7 install decided to, unprompted, write a boot partition on a disk with “unknown” file system.

But then again, you did comment on what the article was about. Which would make it relevant to know what the article was about.

I’m not. You implied that my point was that it was easy to write OpenOffice, or the equivalent. From the context, it should have been obvious that this wasn’t my point, and I’m not interested in entertaining such straw man arguments, and my responses tend to be rude. Apologies.

I don’t feel like paraphrasing myself either, but in the spirit of good intentions: I made the comparison that document productivity software is orders of magnitude simpler than something like Blender. If you disagree on this, that’s fine. Inferring that this means productivity software is easy, that’s all on you.

If you read what I wrote, in context. I’m sure you can get a better idea of what I meant, than what you’re implying here.

should also see what they can do to make Microsoft improve/fix their ODF implementation since it is an ISO standard. There has to be something to get that ball rolling.

The answer to this should be the same as when some standard S is implemented in software X, Y, Z. If Z doesn’t follow the standard, blacklist it until it does. That’s the whole point of having a format standard, that it shouldn’t matter what software you use.

If people, companies, institutions and governments have this stance and attitude, MS will need to compete on actual user experience, and not degrading the UX of the competition.

They’d get their shit together mighty fast. I’d expect them to lose too. Software to edit documents isn’t complicated. If we can have things like blender, which I’d say is about 3-4 orders of magnitude a greater endeavour, for which use case has the inverse potential user base, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason that MS Office is a thing (i.e. in raking in billions in license fees… 49 billion USD in 2022), is shady business practices.

It still pisses me off that in my country, when they had a group of experts make the evaluation of which document standard to follow, all experts agreed on ODF. But, because of shady MS money being thrown around, they ignored the recommendation, and went with DOCX.

The solution that solves ODF compatibility issues is to not allow applications that do not adhere to the standard. In other words, to explicitly disallow the use of Microsoft products. It’s not by accident that MS Office products are slightly fucking up documents, it’s by design.

Since many companies use MS Office, when they do a pilot to see if they can use ODF, it ends up “causing problems”. If anyone tries to use it in a mostly Office based workspace, it’ll also “causes problems”.

MS only has very good reason to always be just subtly off, and everything to lose if they aren’t.

Just be aware that windows has a bad habit of fucking up for Linux when you do. Which sounds like it shouldn’t be possible, right?

Windows can claim hardware resources that it doesn’t release properly, so your WiFi adapter doesn’t work in Linux, but works fine in Windows. Windows also (used to, at least) “correct” a boot partition, because, I presume, it sees something “unknown”. Oh, and the system clock might be off every time you switch between one and the other, because windows thinks it makes sense to write the current timezone value and not UTC.

Those kinds of things.

I appreciate that your appreciated the breakdown!

Calling people stupid and lazy in nicer words is still calling people stupid and lazy.

I think that’s a bit unfair here. What I’m saying is that expectations often seems to be that “Linux should be effortless, but it isn’t, so Linux sucks”, and then we quickly talk past each other on which aspects we are referring to. Let me make up three categories:

For users transitioning to Linux from Windows, and …

1. … it shouldn’t be an effort, but unfortunately sometimes is frustrating or annoying

• Hardware control, e.g. drivers. More often than not it works with less effort than on Windows, except for very new hardware, and hardware that actually requires specific software (RGB led patterns, Gaming mouse profiles, all that stuff)
• NVidia drivers can be a pain
• When dual booting and Windows manages to fuck up something in Linux, and it looks like Linux is the culprit. (E.g. restart the computer from Windows, but it doesn’t release claim on hardware, which doesn’t let Linux claim it, so stuff like the WiFi adapter might not work.)
• Specific software not available, like Adobe, Autodesk, etc.

2. .… is something you can get someone else to do for you, but it’s just how things are, unrelated to Windows -> Linux or the other way around.

• Installing the OS – downloading ISO, burning a bootable USB, BIOS, etc…

3. … it’s expected that you figure out / learn, and if unwilling, Linux isn’t for you

• Using the OS, which at the very least, cursory knowledge of the software/package manager, and roughly how this works.
• Familiarizing yourself with KDE / Gnome, etc.

So, I assume people who just thought I was calling people lazy and dumb thought I meant categories 1. and 2. I just mean category 3. If you expect everything to be the same as Windows, and the effort required to understand the differences is too much, then only Windows will fit your needs. The impression I get is a general unwillingness to “figure stuff out”. Not knowing shit is fine, complaining and not wanting to put in the effort to know stuff… how is that not being lazy?

It was intended as kind advice without any the implied judgement of calling people dumb or lazy. If you don’t want to have to figure stuff out related to the third category, Linux will likely not be a good experience, or even a productive or good change. If you move to another country, you should make the effort to learn the culture. It’s not a good look to complain that things are different.

If I were to try to suggest “a point” with all of this: Don’t suggest to people that Linux is effortless for Windows users. Linux is immensely better, in almost every way (though mind examples in first category). But, it requires learning the basics of how shit works. It’s not hard… the information is well put together and available.

People who expect an effortless transition from Windows to Linux, are better off sticking to Windows. You are expected to be able to read stuff, and make some effort to understand it. It shouldn’t be any less than what you’d expect if going from Linux to Windows.

Many things will be different. You’ll get a long way with learning some fundamentals. If you make the effort, it’ll be well rewarded. If it’s not worth the effort, stick to windows.

This was news to me as well, but I assume that the Arch Linux logo in question suggests that it might be strange to use an Arch Linux specific illustration, for something that isn’t mentioning Arch Linux.

Did that clear it up, or were you just being rude?

Use arch with AUR, and cross your fingers that at least someone checks the changes. I sure don’t.

Last I used Ubuntu, removing snap was a one time thing that took 5 minutes, of which 4 of them was looking for my notes from the time before.

I ditched Ubuntu, but it wasn’t because of snap. Maybe this has changed in the last 3 years?

In the EU, it sort of isn’t.

Takes a long time to write a proper response for all the GDPR stuff. The responses surprisingly don’t change all that much whether or not I do, so I might as well save me the trouble.

It saddens me that the best to have compatibility is to never touch MS Office. They are the largest player by far. Subtly fucking up or deviating from open document standards will always be seen as “well, the issue is non MS office”.

Don’t know why you were downvoted. In any case, all terminals can be configured to start with a specific command and arguments. So, depending on your terminal, you might need to read the documentation, and/or search the web.

In alacritty config, this is:

shell:
  program: <CMD>
  args:
    - <ARGS>

Then one of these:

1. <CMD> is the path to tmux, and you have configured tmux to run the shell of your choice. Search the web for how.
2. <CMD> is the path to your shell, and it supports launching in tmux. Search the web for how.

For me, it’s the second one. I use fish, and I launch it with fish --command=tmux. So the above config looks like this:

shell:
  program: /usr/bin/fish
  args:
    - --command=tmux

Alacritty, launching tmux with fish shell. The latter shell could easily have been zsh. But a good and fast terminal w/tmux is such a nice thing to have.

Any time to wish you had bothered with tmux, is when it’s already too late. If you go for this, you’ll never look back.

Absolutely. Those you suggest there are good examples.

Good enough that, instead of “is/isn’t” programming language, it would be more a “ah, so, how do you define that then?”. Now that I’ve had some sleep, one could argue that I could have been nicer and suggested that approach for HTML as well. After all, it’s just words that mean stuff, and transfer a concept between people, that translate to the same (ish) idea. The moment the latter isn’t the case, it’s no longer very useful for the former.

Most disagreements, I find, are just cases of different understandings. Discussions worth having is when both are correct but different, and both want to figure out why they differ. So, on second thought, I think I was appropriately rude ^_

Both LaTeX and roff are Turing complete, but they are also DSLs with a somewhat narrow “domain”. Sounds exactly right that these blur the lines between what is/isn’t. You could even argue that claiming one or the other is just one way to express how you understand that difference.