feelings on Linux this morning: wonderful!! but keenly remembering how even newbie-friendly distros like Mint can still be super daunting to non-technical people, and for good reason.
just this morning, the built-in software manager was poking me like "hey, you have a bunch of updates to install" and I was like yeah sure whatever. what I didn't pay attention to was that there was an nvidia driver update included among all the stuff, and my screens went black. I waited a few minutes, then force-rebooted, only to discover that my graphics were fucked up.
thankfully, being as desensitized to Computer Bullshit(tm) as I am, my reaction was to just go "eh" and restore an older version of everything using Timeshift, after which everything worked as before. then I combed through the software updater for the offending package, confirmed it was The Bastard by trying to install it again and getting Issues, restored via Timeshift again, and right-click ignored the update.
but wow like. literally several minutes earlier I had been walking a friend (on Windows) through installing a thing from GitHub, and they mentioned being spooked by the terminal booting up and spitting a bunch of stuff at them about installing .NET. and like, it's easy for me to go "lol, good thing I have snapshots" at my computer deciding to Rescue itself off the metaphorical arena but this would have easily been Beyond many people out there who just want to Play Game, Read Internet, and Draw Picture. yeah, Windows breaks shit with every update too, but not to the extent that it rendered my displays 75% unusable and I had to restore a snapshot to get them in working order again.
what frustrated me even more was looking up this issue with Nvidia drivers on the Linux Mint forums and finding people going "well you should always take a snapshot before installing" "well you shouldn't install new Nvidia drivers unless you Need to" and like... yes, correct, but this is missing the point that this is a really easy mistake to make if you're an Average Not-Computery Computer User. this was in the official updater, which will by default install every available update unless you go through and specifically uncheck ones you don't want, with The Bastard in question marked as a "security update." even if it wasn't intentional, it's still kinda rude for the response to "hey, can we do something about these bear traps lying around" to be "well, have you tried not stepping in bear traps?"
and to be clear, I do think there should be more computer literacy, but it's really frustrating when this is put on the individual instead of recognizing it as the shitty layer cake of structural factors that it is. there's no useful computer literacy being taught in schools and it's not that easy to pick up independently for a lot of folks, especially folks who are already low on learning-things spoons, and Windows has conditioned a lot of people to expect things to be a Certain Way (along with teaching you to think that if you disagree with it there's nothing you can do). I hope that as Windows gets progressively shittier and people start wondering what other options are out there, we focus less on saying "lol why are you using Windows" and more on understanding why they might still be using it; less on telling them to not step in bear traps and more on having there be fewer bear traps to begin with.
all that being said, despite these pain points, I'm still very happy with Linux Mint and have moved pretty much full time to using it, with Windows there just as a backup in case I Need FFXIV plugins. there are def some things I have to do differently than on Windows, but overall it's a lot cleaner, a lot more customizable, and I don't get constantly nagged to give Microsoft more of my information. I'm glad to assist anyone who wants to get it working as well, though with the caveat that I'm a Linux newbie in the grand scheme of things and do not know my way around the bear traps myself.
(fallen london stamps by