free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.
These criticisms sound more like they’re from 2003 than 2023. The only time I’ve ever had to “install drivers” when using Linux was back when I had an NVIDIA card, and even then a working open source driver (nouveau) came included by default, as is the case for most peripherals.
If anything the situation is significantly worse on Windows, where you still have to download .msi files from hardware vendors’ websites to get even the most basic shit like wifi working on a clean install, and that’s assuming you already know exactly what’s in your computer to begin with.
The “if you don’t value your time” argument applied 20 years ago. These days it’s mostly plug-and-play for typical users, you spend far less time troubleshooting than you would dealing this type of BS like OP does. My time is too valuable to be using Windows even if it has some advantages.
Installing drivers on Linux is faaaaaar easier than on windows. Most of the time you don’t have to do it and it’s just in the kernel by default, with the only major exception being Nvidia GPUs (in which case just open your software centre and search Nvidia then press install) and some broadcomm WiFi adapters.
I spend far more time working out how to do something on windows than I do on Linux.
Like when something goes wrong and I get an error code like “E819664167” and I’m like what the fuck is that supposed to mean??? Then you look it up online and all you find is people saying “I dunno, maybe you just need to reinstall Windows”.
Meanwhile in the extremely rare instance where something goes wrong on a Linux machine, the error message is typically very searchable or even immediately understandable, like “incorrect permissions to access [file]”
Wow, a reply that’s not from the Linux circlejerk that seems to be the default of the fediverse. I had to make sure that I was still at the correct website.
Linux isn’t that bad nowadays, though when you hit a problem it still entails quite a bit more work than when on Windows. I do get the frustration with the oldheads though!
Linux isn’t that bad nowadays, though when you hit a problem it still entails quite a bit more work than when on Windows.
I really don’t understand the people who say this. Having an issue on Windows is an absolute nightmare. You have to navigate through countless menus, look through a bunch of SEO farming shit pages that say they have solutions but they actually just want to sell you DriverEasy or whatever, look through similar if you’re lucky microsoft support pages, that basically all they say is “oh, do sfc /scannow in the terminal… oh it didn’t work? delete everything and reinstall windows”
On Linux if I have an issue I lookup the error and the solution is in the first few results, which is usually “put this command in the terminal” or “change this in this config file” and everything starts working again immediately. Most of the time I don’t even have to reboot.
