- Your experience and expertise with Linux is not universal.
- Many major Linux distros are at a transition point between Xorg and Wayland, and that will be hell for nvidia users (who should not be fucking shamed for just happening to have/need an nvidia gpu) (and yes, I'm aware a new driver drop is coming in the summer. No, I don't think that will magically solve all the problems plaguing nvidia + wayland)
- There exists no creative package in the FOSS ecosystem that is a drop-in replacement for the proprietary software it is supposed to replace.
- Relearning entirely new software is not easy, it takes time, and people are not shitty for not having the room in their lives to dedicate to a transition.
- About the only creative package I would remotely consider to be "professional grade" and has at least some market penetration in its industry is Blender. Its interface and workflow is still weird as fuck even post-2.7. The world still uses Maya.
- Most digital artists have invested years and a lot of money in the form of software, brush packs, etc., and dumping all that will cause a lot of workflows to collapse.
- Big Tech has invested decades and billions into locking people into SaaS ecosystems like Google Docs and Microsoft 365 that have provided value and ease of use for end users. People are not weak for benefiting from that ease of use.
- Big Tech is light-years ahead of most FOSS in terms of accessible computing, translations, etc. Your favourite go-to tool that needs to be compiled from a git repo might be absolutely useless to someone who only knows Farsi.
- Regardless of how you feel about it, some of the biggest games on the planet are Windows-only, and won't even run under Proton/WINE. People have built up social relationships and microcultures in those games that are just as valid as your local LUG full of weirdo IBM XT clone enthusiasts, and they are not fools or shitty for being human and forming social relationships and microcultures.
- "Tech support" on Linux is fucking abysmal, and always has been.
- "Just switch to Linux" is, and will always be, a temporary and personal-sphere mitigation against the inexorable march of cryptofascist surveillance capitalist tech. You will never make a meaningful enough dent in numbers to affect any kind of change simply by telling your friends to switch, and it will not stop the nightmare world being built up around you. Everyone would be better served by comprehensive privacy legislation, which means you have to get politically active, and message or call your reps.
- There are other things you can do beyond "just vote" but I ain't gonna write about 'em. Suffice it to say that the fate of our planet's ecosystems are at stake from people who think it's great that we can't tell what search results are real anymore.
- they/them
Gay badgercat who practically lives on bad puns and cursed computing. Fluent in typo
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in reply to @adorablesergal's post:
I have an arts degree and a nursing license. I'm intimidated by command lines. I like playing games and having a broad choice of photo editing software. I only very recently learned how to find the "releases" tab on GitHub. My last workplace would use Outlook to send me Excel files to work on, and the place I'm interviewing now wants to meet with me on Teams.
I'm sure there are ways to do most of this on Linux, but... I had to pay for a Windows license anyway when I bought my computer, and when I turned it on for the first time, Windows started right up.
And I am probably in the most computer-savvy 10% of the general population. For example, I've heard of Linux.
The idea that people at large are going to make this switch is incredibly insulated.
i am a professional programmer, regularly use the linux command line for work, have linux dual booted on my home machine for personal projects, still mostly use windows because i get enough "trying to get things to work" projects at work
I wish Linux was easier, I'd like to use it, but boy I've had nothing but bad experiences trying.
I remember trying to get a cheap, old laptop running Ubuntu back in college for a friend that needed a computer. It didn't have a built-in wireless card, so I got one of those Lynksys plug-in dealies. I figured "ah, the most biggest brand of home networking hardware, this should be fine". I was told (by a number of semi-helpful people) that I needed to write my own driver wrappers because there was no native support for Lynksys drivers. My dudes, I was a 2nd year comp-sci student, I was learning math theory and sorting algorithms, not writing firmware. They didn't even point me at resources to figure out how to start doing that.
Oh, and that one time I asked the Open Office devs if there was support for the new (at the time) XML Office format files (docx, xmlx, etc) and they called the format stupid and anyone that wanted to use it stupid and said they weren't going to and that was it.
Like Microsoft is user-hostile and terrible, but at least the drivers install and they don't personally call me stupid for wanting to open files I don't have control over the format of.
Literally I had Linux many many years ago on a cheap laptop that was having issues with Windows and thought it would be a solution.
- It couldn't run any of the drivers I needed
- The updates wouldn't work
- Because the drivers and the updates wouldn't work, it couldn't connect to the internet to access any of the stuff that could potentially fix that. I didn't have a secondary machine that could be used to access any of that stuff either.
I was a teenager just trying to have a cheap laptop to write fanfiction on. I have never risked having Linux as a primary OS since.
To build further on your big tech bullet points, Google et al. have successfully captured large sectors of the business class with whom some amount of technological alignment becomes mandatory -- e.g., using Google Docs and Gmail for writing my drafts and sharing with editors is non-negotiable unless I can personally convince Conde Nast to stop using Google products writ large.
Shout it louder so the people in the back can hear - this nails every point so well
just more dumbass ai shit that nobody asked for or wanted
Evidently someone wanted it. Otherwise I doubt they'd have built it. It's still dumb shit though.
Corporate executives trying to justify their next 200 million dollar bonus don't count as "someone". In any sense of the word.
Dont mind me wrestling with AppArmor and SELinux lately for the sake of just learning about them.
Very useful skill to know how to use the command line and read system logs but I wouldn't wish this on any common user ever. The rabbit holes are a big fat time waster.
Once some distro implements intuitive desktop customization, and a better way to work out problems without needing almost a Bachelor's Degree of education to interpret and troubleshoot from system logs, then I might refactor my own system to Arch or Debian.
Fortunately for windows users there's safe ways to strip out most of the junk Microsoft wants to force.
This is a great post! Very good points.
Unfortunately, the people who need to read it the most won't.
The X/Wayland transition is a big one, and is not going to be solved quickly. It's really disrupted so many things, and not in the "cool techbro" way.
i feel like a lot of linux users - especially at least the ones on this site - know most of this already, and i feel like this really could've been summed up with "linux is an alternative and not a replacement," rather than as a passive-aggressive 500 word post. i don't think i've seen anyone on cohost say that you should unconditionally use linux and that it's entirely superior to windows - but these are all excellent points and i completely agree.
People do link to my posts from elsewhere, and this is the only place I'm currently set up at to write long form passive aggressiveness.
yeah, there are definitely a lot of people out there not on this site who either don't understand these things or actively refuse to. fair enough there!
You're completely right. however
Knowing that I personally have the technical know-how to dodge whatever horrible shit big tech has planned for us is the only thing keeping me from falling down an anarchoprimtivist pipeline.
If not for this, I'd be much more sympathetic to the "after the revolution, there shouldn't be an internet. We should destroy it and never build a new one" people.
It is my comfort blankie and I need my comfort blankie
anarchoprimitivists can go eat shit, lol I'm solarpunk all the way. That mindset is so goddamned toxic, basically falling into ecofashy "humans are the real virus" thinking, and that we can never be trusted with tech.
Most people are alright, tho. It's the ones at the top who suck ass and need to go.
Oh I'm not a misanthrope I'm just a massive pessimist and during 2020 a bunch of anprims online tried very very hard to convince me of their point of view. The thing that kept me going was "computers don't have to be a corporate nightmare" because I knew first-hand that my computer wasn't a corporate nightmare because I was doing poweruser stuff.
Yeah, like you can choose to just...not do deliberately evil stuff with a computer. We all can.
Computers are hella useful. I hope they never go away. I would love it if we all had the leisure time to choose to become power users who have tender conversations with code. It feels like so little to ask, like wouldn't that make us all more productive? Wouldn't capitalism benefit from that?
...but then, capitalism isn't about that, so I guess the next best thing is to just claim tech for ourselves. One might call it "industry disruption"
THANK YOU
i am an artist who prints and cuts my own stickers and stuff, i need my drawing tablet and my other extremely finicky peripherals and a lot of very specific software with no open-source equivalent to run, so the endgame is like. i end up running everything on a virtual windows machine anyway, and all it introduces is new problems and new annoyances in my workflow. sometimes i am just... flabbergasted by people who know everything there is to know about Linux, and so much about computers in general, and yet are still so nearsighted that they'll be like "come to Linux! GIMP is really good! you'll be fine!!" I WILL NOT i'm a tropical fish and you can't just dump me in your cold freshwater aquarium! i will die even if it has a cool resin castle in it!!!
There is a Linux OS that can reasonably be a 1:1 replacement for regular, everday users who only need it for web browsing and using office apps that just works out of the box. Unfortunately, that Linux Distro is ChromeOS.
Listing out things one could do other than "just vote" would have been great actually.
Tech just is not a passion for me, I do not have the motivation to learn about computers in the same way I have the motivation to learn about biology and history. So Linux is just going to make me confused and frustrated. And with my anger issues, the frustration is going to lead to more extreme and destructive emotions, and then I'll fear to touch it again lest I have another outburst.
Also, pressuring people into things is generally one of the worst ways to get them into those things lol