this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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TechConnectify@mas.to - Oh my gosh I just figured it out.

Okay, all you open source evangelist people: your knee-jerk reaction to come at people who are talking about a problem with whatever commercial software they use and suggest Your Favorite Alternatives™ is exactly like saying "why don't you just buy a house?" to someone complaining about their landlord.

TechConnectify@mas.to - Actually, to borrow from @DoubleA, it's worse than that.

It's like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home.

You have to be at peace with the fact that some people just want to exist and not worry about so many things. And they still have a right to complain about their situation.

Link to thread: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111539959265152243

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[–] bou@kbin.social 64 points 11 months ago (28 children)

@morrowind funny to find this here when I wrote my reply just a while ago:

"It's like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home."

Maybe if you're suggesting them to install Linux From Scratch, then yes, it is.

If you're suggesting them them to install any of the many very simple (and very usable OOTB) distros like Fedora, then it's not.

In that case it's like the house is free, already built and furnitured, and right next to their own; but they have to move their personal belongings from one house to the other and learn a different room layout.

Sure, they still have the right to complain about how their landlord treats them like crap. But they sound pretty damn stupid if they do so while having an available free house right next door, and refusing to move because they don't want to learn a new room layout.

[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (16 children)

How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?

I'm talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, ...

  • That house isn't furnished.

And don't forget, plenty of popular software isn't even compatible. Meaning you got to use alternative software that doesn't always do what you want it to do.

  • So buy a new couch, cause that one isn't getting in.
[–] Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think you are talking about the situation that might be true 15 years ago, vut right now you'll be hardpressed to find anything that doesn't work out of the box on any modern distribution. I don't know what plugins and dependancies don't work on your machine, but I assure you it's not a universal experience, far from it.
Also, most of the software that you use on Linux is free, so you don't "buy" new couch if your old is built specifically for your old house, you learn to sit on any of the new ones that you can get for free at any moment

[–] DestinyGrey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I say this over and over again, but I'm going to say it again. I disagree firmly with the second point because there is such a lead and usability and ease of use for popular commercial software such as Microsoft office and Adobe software. It's available in so many languages, it has so much functionality, and yes, both surpass FOSS solutions by a wide margin in functionality.

If you don't need Excel, I think Linux and libre office might work fine for a lot of people, but there are still gaps in usability and accessibility. I don't really see the same for anything Adobe does in the Linux space however.

Linux is like 90% of the way there, but these are people with jobs and families and shit. You can't expect them to spend time having to overextend themselves with technology.

[–] Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 11 months ago

I wasn't saying that we have everything available for Linux. Not yet, anyway. I was saying that whatever we have there is usually free and very customisable.
People committing from Windows and especially Mac infrastructure think that since they spent hundreds of dollars on software they use, they will have to do that again if they will swith to Linux. For a lot of people the thought of free software just never crossing the mind

[–] Stowaway@midwest.social 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

DraugerOS wouldnt even boot from the thumb drive for me. Garuda sort of worked, the live boot was damn near perfect, from a stability and basic performance perspective, but after a basic install there were some annoying artifacts like a block behind the cursor on some windows, steams store page would flash rapidly and performance was trash in any game even on low settings. A Logitech mouse scroll wheel was hit or miss working. I mean like you spin the wheel and while the wheel was free spinning the browser would start and stop responding to it. 8 hours of messing with kernels, drivers, and settings it I threw in the towel. Not worth the effort to just get it to run normally let alone

Arch was similarly poor performance. Mint was also poor performance. Im not a fan of the PopOS style, but it actually ran great on my machine so, I'll take it.

Point being, I tried 4 different distros before finding one that worked mostly well out of box.

Edit: wrong name for draugeros

[–] Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Where the fuck have you found whatever weird esoteric distribs you are talking about, and why on earth did you went with those? Depending on the answer to the question, I kind of understand how you managed to make Arch "perform poorly" whatever that means in that regard, you need to have at least basic understanding to use Arch (or treat it as an opportunity to learn).
But you don't start your experiments with something from third page of Google, at that point you're an alpha tester.

[–] Stowaway@midwest.social 3 points 11 months ago

Google best gaming Linux distros. DraugerOS, Garuda, and popos are all prominent distros focused on gaming.

DraugerOS is Ubuntu LTS based.

Mint, not gaming focused, has been around for ages and is Ubuntu based. I've used it previously on older hardware with no issue. Just apparently doesn't like newer hardware.

Garuda is arch based, probably why it was such a pain.

Popos is Ubuntu based as well.

I've also tried KDE plasma, ubuntu based, and man was that slow as hell. Works great on some hardware not on the hardware I tried.

I've installed Ubuntu in the past and had WiFi driver issues.

You mentioned any modern distros should work out of the box. The only one listed that mostly worked out of the box with semi reasonable performance was popos.

if someone is looking to install a distros to play games, theyll probably google "Linux for gaming" install one of the prominent distros listed above geared toward gaming then bang their head against the wall and quit.

We may understand arch is a full time job, but when Joe from sales builds a new gaming rig and took someone's advice to install Linux and save money he doesn't know all Linux distros are not created equally. Maybe he gets garuda or draugeros and bangs his head against the wall then goes back to windows.

There are a million different distros and yes some of the major ones work fine, but not always and if you run into issues it can be exponentially harder to fix the issue especially if you have no IT experience. Making it even worse is toxicity in forums or other support places where people treat you like you should know better because they have of knowledge of Linux and forget that we all have different levels of experience, many people have no experience.

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