Do people just have to consume or what?
I honestly find mac worse than windows. like it works and all, it's just so fucking constrained. apple wants to keep you in their ecosystem the way they want you to use it
I’d become Amish before becoming an apple fanboy. Just such an incredibly insulting to the user design philosophy.
I thought the dongle stuff was a meme until I seen people really daisy chaining dongles. Like bruh wtf
I love usb C I just don't want to have 1-2 ports on my whole laptop. Sure make everything go through one unified port that's great but sometimes I want to plug in 3 or 4 or even 6 things into my laptop at once.
Hell, I want 2-3 usb C ports on my phone and my computer should have that many on each side + another on the back, and they could do that if they wanted to without sacrificing anything.
Honestly, they used to be so good. I grew up on OS 8 and 9 on a PowerMac. Frankly, even the earlier OS X versions were pretty good. I think they really started going downhill at the same time that they ended the Skeumorphic design era around 2013 or 2014 with 2013's Mavericks being the literal last version to introduce any meaningful features for power users or doing anything that anyone other than middle-aged suburban moms were interested in. I think that was their shark jump moment, before everything went downhill.
2014 brought Yosemite, and all that brought was a new visual style and iPhone integration to pair nicely with the iPhone 6, whose two new features began and ended with "screen bigger" and Apple Pay.
I miss being excited about tech.
I gotta be honest, I have installed Linux at least six times in the past 10 years, and every time I have come crawling shamefacedly to windows again.
it does not help that Bill Gates is smirking in my room saying I told you you'd be back, bitch
Be as honest as you want (without being hostile of course lol) libre fans here aren't mindless fanbois or something lmao we do realize there are obstacles that some might face and we just wanna help with that if possible... we also realize that a lot of people just don't have enough info to have an informed opinion you know
Linux has come a very long way in just the past 2 years and the train is only getting faster, when was the last time you tried it and what distro/DE did you use? What do you use your pc for? Also what problems did you have?
This time you can try to better decide on a distro/DE and instead of going cold turkey you can first try it out via Live USB and if you're still not sure you can dualboot until you figure it all out.
Btw we now have a linux support room on Matrix (discord alternative) for anyone who might be interested
Initially I used kubuntu, more recently lubuntu.
I generally use my PC for the internet and videogames, and my problems were usually stuff like I have literally never been able to make a single program work on Wine, or discovering that something I wanted to install had a prerequisite that had a prerequisite that no longer existed, or one time - this was a long time ago on kubuntu I actually managed to mess up the computer's ability to play sound by installing an mp3 codec so badly that I had to reinstall the OS.
In general it feels like linux trusts me a bit too much to know what I'm doing when my method of learning to do things is just trying things to see what happens.
So we can safely say that Ubuntu isn't for you :) The difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is about the DE and the preinstalled apps but otherwise they're the same.
I actually never had to bother with any codecs or even adding repositories to the package manager because I'm running Manjaro (not beginner friendly because it's a cutting edge distro)
For you I recommend Fedora , with Fedora you can easily add RPM Fusion which should provide you with all the software you want
For games outside of Steam you should use Lutris - what Windows programs did you wanna use on Linux? There are a lot of cross platform apps you should check out and there are also a lot of ways to run Windows programs on Linux
Hot take here but I actually like macOS, especially for the average user - it's a lot more hands-off and for the most part just works. You can still install pretty much anything you'd install on Linux and since it's a BSD-derivative it's a lot better for development than windows. I have a friend that even uses nixos as a package manager on their mac.
I'm the family tech support contact for a number of macOS users and windows users and the mac stuff breaks way less often and in ways that are much easier to diagnose and fix.
MacOS breaking less often is also because of their control on hardware and all that... Is it really hands off tho or is just incredibly dumbed down?
Seeing as you're their tech support, when are you switching them to Linux :sicko-yes:
Well yeah, it breaks fewer times and I have to spend less time fixing it so it is more hands off. None of the people that I'm family IT for care at all about customizing their hardware so it's entirely irrelevant for them why it breaks less. I actually care much less about customizing my hardware than the average Linux user too, once I get it working I don't wanna touch it for as long as possible lol.
The windows people are getting moved over to Linux as soon as their current windows machine is unusable, i don't want to move the Mac people just yet because it'll be more work for me in the long term than just letting them stay there so I'm not working on that yet lol
It's actually wise to focus on the Windows people first lol and by the time you're done with them things hopefully will be way better
You're doing god's work :rat-salute:
Hot take: You know how revolutionary figures like MLK get stripped of their true revolutionary message so they are more palatable to capital?
I'm afraid we will get our "year of the linux desktop" but linux will lose much of what makes it linux and revolutionary before that is allowed to happen.
Specifically I am afraid of media companies getting closed source software directly into the kernel in the name of anti-piracy, or something similar in the name of anticheat for videogames.
I'm also afraid of the fact that we're losing a bit of the "free on every level" philosophy that has lead to amazingly "end user" configurable desktop environments like xfce and kde, which are increasingly being passed over for the arguably even more walled-garden gnome desktop.
I'm afraid of big software companies starting to take linux seriously, but decide that they don't want to work with the existing technologies or ecosystems, so they build their own foundations, maybe their own desktop environments, their own distros entirely, in pieces of software which, if they aren't monolithic, will be at best oligo-lithic? e.g. Photoshop finally on the linux desktop! Only on AdoBuntu! It's sleek, it has pretty animations, it's linux.. technically, and if you want to write software that integrates and behaves like a first-class citizen like adobe's software does then you better learn how to use this obtuse API.We don't really have to worry about that anytime soon tho :) I do get what you're saying but the market share means that companies that try to work with the Linux community actually have to appeal to them you know? That's what the tablet maker Jing something figured out. The community is really committed to the ideals so something like kernel level anitcheat isn't gonna happen imo
I must admit I haven't given this much thought before
Oh and btw I'm a big KDE fan and I really like the volunteer culture they got instead of the corporate culture of gnome
nah I think this is just unwarranted pessimism. I mean, yeah, a complete fascist take over could take place and we’d lose all semblance of public propriety and GNU could be taken over by FUKU but there’s a billion distros out there with versions extending to all the way back in 1999 or w/e, the code is all open source. You could put it all back together to untether yourself from that potential nightmare.
You could put it all back together but would you have access to all the online streaming services? Look how long it took us to get netflix on linux properly, and we still aren't first class citizens there either. The rest of "linux" is going to move on and leave us behind.
Android isn't really consider Linux tho and it didn't hijack Linux in the way that raven means
