Linux is a useless hassle for most computer users.
I’d go a step further. Desktop computing as a whole is overkill for most users.
As much as I’m loathe to admit it, my cheap Asus Chromebook is likely more than what 90 percent of humanity requires. And most of them could easily just get away with using a phone or tablet instead.
I’m an old school guy. I love a good tower with a pair of monitors and stuff to do my editing and 3D design. But even those intensive tasks are getting better on smaller form factors.
It’s just not my world anymore. I’ve aged out of it.
I wanna disagree with this so bad but I’m willing to bet 90% of the business done on desktops could be done in a web browser without much problem. Though I imagine a lot of proprietary software that keeps businesses going benefits from having a desktop. Not that it couldn’t be retooled.
I could argue the same thing about Windows 11.
Can you imagine an average person going into best buy and buying a laptop, maybe in S mode, forced to make a Microsoft account and wait 5-8 minutes updating their machine before they can use it, just for Microsoft edge to pop up asking them to change their accent color. Or downloading a program online and a big old popup comes up saying “Available in the Microsoft Store!”
I personally argue Linux Mint is awesome and what’s best for most people. my grandma (81) didnt want to switch to 10 or 11 after Windows 7 was going to be EOL, she tried mint and she absolutely loved it.
For me it’s com to a point that drivers are better on Linux. Linux is still missing drivers for a lot of devices but the ones we do have work seamlessly compared to windows
I still have issues with fingerprint readers, but other than that, my experience with drivers is waaaaaaaay worse on Windows.
I’m a fairly savvy computer user and its always looked like a hassle to me. Maybe I’m just lazy and dont want to put the effort into learning it, but MS practices with windows lately are really pushing me into finally doing it.
The hassle is the price of having more control over what’s happening inside your computer. Some people don’t want to care about that, and for those people, Absolutely it’s too much of a hassle.
I think the controversial opinion isn’t whether or not Linux is more hassle than Windows or Mac (it is…of course it is), but whether or not that hassle is worth it. Does the extra control over your computer outweigh the few extra things you need to do to keep it running right.
For me, the answer is yes. I don’t find having to be a little extra careful about some precautions before hitting the update button a huge inconvenience, or working through the occasional glitch when an AUR package upgrades past its dependencies.
But would that be too much hassle for someone like my mother, for example, who literally just wants to play games on Facebook? Of course. And there’s nothing wrong with thinking that.
The “hassle” depends a lot on what kind of distro/de you’ve been given and how willing you’re to start hassling around.
When I first decided to try Linux, I was hopping distros and going through every possible way to customize the UX and it was purely TO tinker.
Now it’s just a fire and forget with Debian stable and GNOME. Just works and doesn’t have too many unnecessary bells and whistles
Maybe one day you just buy another SSD and give it a try on there… Thats how I did it 2 years ago and I couldnt have guessed how much it would eventually, over time, become worth it to me.
I initially installed PopOS but it worked so well that after 2 weeks I though to myself, “well this is boring, I installed it and now what?” and proceeded to try Arch (unsuccesfully at the time).
To add to this. Most complaints about windows from linux users are just people who don’t know how to use windows, which is kinda embarrassing considering its the most used OS by a really big margin.
Do you have any examples? I dont think I have seen complaints about Windows that are invalid if you knew how to use it.
I have another example from a few months ago where a guy was complaining that he couldn’t uninstall Edge without doing a bunch of registry tweaks and unofficial things to remove it, and that was why he switched to Linux. When the Chrome version of Edge came out though, there’s literally a setup.exe that you can run with an uninstall arg and it will uninstall it no questions asked.
https://lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/6845923
A few posts down from yours. It’s literally the same on windows if installing the windows store/xbox version.
Linux based OSes are by far most popular globally. Windows is only super popular on desktops and laptops.
I’m willing to bet that 95% of the users using a ‘Linux based OS’ would have absolutely no clue, and if you put them in front of a desktop with Linux on it they’d be as lost as anyone else.
Isn’t that mostly due to Linux being widespread on servers, and by extension Android? (And if we’re talking Unix, then MacOS, too)
I don’t understand iOS. It’s super unintuitive. Maybe it’s coming from the fact that I grew up in the DOS generation and had to fumble around with everything to get it done, that I am just fundamentally incompatible with a hardened and uncustomizable OS? I keep looking for “obvious” functions that simply don’t exist, and am continuously flabbergasted when someone hands me an iPhone to do something.
Linux, Windows, Android? I’ll figure it out in seconds.
I also have this problem with apple products, but I hear people tell me it’s more intuitive. Maybe I just havent spend enough time in the whole ecosystem to learn the hieroglyphs.
Ah, yes - the typical “I don’t like it/it’s too much of a hassle for me therefore it is useless for everybody.”
Same thinking pattern that prevents the USA from adopting the metric system: I like the old system (because I grew up with it and don’t want to learn something new) therefore the new system is bad.
These people should really try to be a bit less egocentric. Is it so hard to recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around you?
Actual direct conspiracy is usually not necessary to achieve the outcomes of most nefarious things people worry about. Two rich people which both want to protect their own wealth can look at each other and their respective actions and then take next steps working to protect their wealth without ever talking to each other and get basically the same outcomes as if they had coordinated. Shared interests and a reasonable understanding of the likely outcomes of choices can be almost as good as direct conspiracy.
I get beat up every time I post something like this. Almost every nasty thing we see in the world is a simple case of an individual or group working towards their own best interests.
But why then do people do shitty things that they have to know will hurt someone? It’s not that they’re evil, they just don’t care if you’re not in their Monkeysphere.
Can’t think of anything I’ve read that puts this together so well. Yeah, I know, cracked.com. Give it a spin, it really changed my thinking about the world. (It’s old so the formatting in kinda hosed up.)
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
I read the article. It was entertaining, and there’s definitely a lot of truth in what they write, but I found the whole thing to be, very ironically, over simplified. I think what bothers me the most is the author assumes/implies that human empathy does not extend beyond our line of sight. As if it’s impossible for me to be considerate towards people I don’t know. Which is complete bullshit. Their arguments seem to assume that a general sense of morality does not exist amongst people.
I, personally, believe that most people are good and value being good. Certainly there are plenty that do not, but I believe they are the minorty. Fortunately my gripes with the article don’t really discount the main point being made, it just suggests that things aren’t as simple as the author tried to make it seem.
I’ll bite: most people don’t give a fuck about the fediverse and the hassle of having to understand it all in order to navigate it is only a barrier to entry that will slowly drive away people until the platforms die a slow, painful death.
Everyone on here saying they like it this way and prefer it over the mess that is Reddit or X are completely missing the point that negative growth will only lead to a failed platform.
The fediverse tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for everyone, while promoting itself as the solution to everyone’s problem.
You’re right, most people don’t give a fuck about it, and many of the attitudes on Lemmy aren’t shared by the vast majority of people. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it is if you think that Lemmy is going to suddenly overtake Reddit.
The Fediverse tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for everyone
I beg to differ. Twitter and Reddit CEOs having meltdowns affect more or less everybody who uses those platforms, don’t they? Learning how the Fediverse works is a small price to pay for a guarantee that their platform will never disappear out from under them again.
Twitter and Reddit CEOs having meltdowns affect more or less everybody who uses those platforms, don’t they?
Not really. On many popular subs, most users seemed to be pissed off that mods were closing due to API calls blocking third-party apps. As for Twitter, those that just ignore Musk’s antics probably haven’t noticed a significant difference.
Learning how the Fediverse works is a small price to pay for a guarantee that their platform will never disappear out from under them again.
Many of these people have had accounts on these sites for over a decade, which is probably the longest account they’ve ever had outside of email. Nothing has changed for them.
Even if it did, people want to go where others are. No fediverse product has anywhere near enough people to make the switch worth it for anything outside of niche topics. Hell, even Threads is a bit empty for the average person, and most see it as a billionaire retaliation to Musk.
So yeah, a manufactured problem for the few.
Why will growth be negative? At worst it will be zero. Once people get over the initial hurdle of figuring out how federation works they don’t tend to leave. We’ll have slower growth than non federated platforms because of it, sure, but we aren’t going to lose users.
Where I have (mostly) found myself freed of political extremists and bots on lemme, they’ve been replaced by relentlessly hubristic tech pedants who can find fault with anything I can think of to say.
So it’s gone from infuriating to endlessly aggravating. I guess that’s an improvement?
Marketing should be banned.
Its sole purpose is to get people to buy shit they do not need, in order to make someone more money than they deserve. All through manipulation of your brain.
It’s the sole reason we are over consuming.
Consumers would just search for those kinds of products themselves if they encounter a problem they feel the need to improve. They don’t need to be told those products exist.
In a platonic world, marketing is for getting word out to the community of a product or service. For example - “I suddenly need a back doctor and don’t know any”, or - “I wish there was some place in town that had organic shallots and asparagus and watercress, locally-sourced honey”.
In the real world, the tool is used and abused beyond the breaking point; before we even realized how we got there, we were bombarded by insurance ads from all sides simultaneously. Political ads. Male enlargement pills. Online casinos. Pharmaceuticals, with the fast-talking asshole at the end warning about “suicidal thoughts” and “serious risk of stroke” that comes along with their shit product.
The platonic ideal of marketing is always there. There is a flow of useful information. Unfortunately, it’s buried and intertwined with a flood of noise and excrement.
💯 on point here. Everyone knows it and doesn’t understand why.
https://bettermarketing.pub/the-great-marketing-deregulation-2125a0efe094
Copyright and intellectual property as a whole is actually bad for artists and authors and only serves the interests of large corporations.
The idea of coffee copyright is good, but corporate lobbying and the current most-money-wins legal system makes our implementation of copyright harmful. TL;DR: Interface good, implementation bad.
I think even the interface is just intended as a band-aid fix for the current economic system (not gonna say the C word). In a better world art and media would be a public good.
But I do get your point. Could absolutely be improved for the current system.
No copyright need a nearly ideal system, where the people go to the original creator by themselves to get more content.
But in the current reality, without copyright big coperations would just take the stuff of indi creators and get bigger because the masses know them and stay by them.
While I agree that this is true currently, I do not believe that it necessarily must be. Life plus 70 years is some top-tier bullshit, and no one who isn’t a corporate bigwig will fight you on that. But 20 years from release date is not, especially if enforced equally on all creative works instead of just the ones made by artists who can afford corporate lawyers. Imagine if we had some way to protect against art theft or freebooting besides the honor system. Imagine if OpenAI actually had to pay artists to use their works to train Midjourney instead of just saying “it would be impossible to do this without massive amounts of copyright infringement, therefore you should just let us.”
