If you recognized yourself in a few of these points, that doesn’t mean Linux isn’t for you. In fact, you can count it as an invitation. It just means you’ve spent a long time in an ecosystem that treats you more like a product than a participant.
  1. You love giving your data away
  2. You enjoy being tracked by your operating system
  3. You’re happy when your computer tells you “no”
  4. You prefer someone else deciding what you can run
  5. You feel uncomfortable if you get to have options
  6. You’d rather battle corporate tech support
  7. You’d rather rent your software than own it
  8. You think ads belong on your desktop
  9. You love being lied to about what’s “industry standard”
  10. You like rebooting for every little update
  11. You’re uncomfortable when software is transparent
  12. You think community-made tools can’t be “professional”
  13. You want intrusive AI everywhere, whether it helps or not
  14. You think the command line is only for hackers
  15. You never really wanted your computer to be yours anyway
  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    16: I’ve had more headaches getting multiple monitors to work in Windows than I ever have in Linux. Try connecting 2 monitors of wildly different resolutions in Windows and witness the abject failure of windows to handle that elegantly. Your mouse can slip off into a “void” where no monitor exists, and yet your content can just disappear to, dragging the mouse between monitors slips the cursor way off and to the right, screenshots are a mess, etc. etc.

    17: I only play games in Linux and I never use emulators… unless it’s for things like SNES.

    18: I don’t know what you’re getting at with this one. Software is way more shareable in Linux. You just say “it’s in your package manager” or “install this Flatpak”. Windows and Mac on the other hand have half-assed app stores and a culture of "just go to ${URL} and click “download, ok, ok, ok” which inevitably leads to stuff breaking and no discernible way to determine what failed 'cause your machine is full of rando installations.

    19: This is fair, though most high-profile stuff like CrowdStrike works for Linux now.

    20: I cannot begin to tell you how much Windows and Mac don’t work. Like, at all. Just today I spent an hour on a call with another developer stuck in Windows trying to get a JDBC driver to work. The constant ambiguous error messages, useless documentation directing you to "just go to ${RANDOM_SITE} and install some-cryptically-named-executable.msi that craps out with error messages about missing runtimes… the whole operating system is hot garbage and that’s before you factor in the missing keyboard shortcuts, flaky monitor support, creeping AI, and ads shooting into your eyeballs. The only way Windows “Just Works™” is if you redefine “works” entirely.

    • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
      21·
      2 days ago

      For #18, here’s how my sneakernet software sharing goes: Windows: I copy the installer exe, or a zipped version of the software as installed to a flash drive. The person can then run the software from the drive, or copy it to their own PC. No Internet required, no outside connection called for.

      Linux: after determining that they have the right distro type for the software, I have to walk them through either getting it from a GUI repository client, apt, pacman, flatpak, snap, or whatever other cockamamie thing it’s on. They have to install it from the central authority - which is not sharing the software. It’s suggesting that someone else connect to the Internet and download a thing.

      If it requires the Internet to for a typical user to share software on media, your operating system is hostile to freedom.

      • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        If you want to share software like that, just use AppImage. It’s perfect for sneakernet software sharing: no internet access required, and it requires less technical knowledge from end users than telling them to use a package manager. Just copy the file and run it.