- On Reddit: “Windows is being enshitified. How can we cope with it?”
- On Lemmy: “Windows is being enshitified. Good thing we’ve moved to Linux”
I think I see a pattern here.
On Reddit: “Windows is being enshitified. How can we cope with it?” On Lemmy: “Windows is being enshitified. Good thing we’ve moved to Linux”I think I see a pattern here.
Interesting. I guess it has to do with what you are used to and what feels comfortable.
Linus Torvalds once made this remark :
When you say ‘I wrote a program that crashed Windows,’ people just stare at you blankly and say ‘Hey, I got those with the system, for free.’
If I think back of the days that I was using Linux and I saw friends and family using Windows95 that had just launched (with a massive hype, and using a Rolling Stones song to promote it) the Blue Screen of Death was fairly normal for folks. And they lived with it, and they continued to live with it because they thought that they had no choice, and they were incredibly happy to not having to use DOS anymore. Later some of the folks I knew after having their Windows computer flocked with Windows viruses they bought a Mac, and as a matter of saying, lived happily ever after. Not everyone can afford Macs though.And not every “normie” is ready to use Linux.
Mac did have a better OS than Win 95 -Win98 It was smoother and crashed less.
The difference was that Windows still ran DOS programs, 5.25" floppy disks etc… They made the decision to maintain backwards compatibility.
Mac decided to drop support regularly for what they considered “outdated software and technology.” For example: when USB drives came out they canceled support for 3.5" floppies in their OS. Machines that had a 3.5" drive installed could no longer use it. Put a floppy drive in and nothing happened.
Although Mac was a smoother more stable OS, windows had more functionality and greater compatability. Windows was a far superior product because of it. Even with the regular apearance of the blue screen of death.
Linux at the time also suffered from being a terminal based OS. Too much like DOS for way too long. I used it for specific tasks where it excelled at.
last paragraph, “at the time”
(long, super recent story/rant)
I just switched to Kubuntu for my ThinkPad (not my first choice but hardware incompatabilities) over the last few days, and it still very much is a terminal-based system. It took me ~4 days to set everything up, and nearly every step aside from “change things in the settings UI” was “in a terminal, type…”
I dipped my toes into Linux… 19 years ago? As someone who likes windows up until 10, and heard all of the ‘it’s so amazing’ gospel from Linux users, two decades later I’m like: “it’s still not ready”
Shit, I wanted to install Debian 12(.5) with KDE on this TP. It has a snapdragon X55, that I need working, and previous attempts at getting it working (year+ ago) failed. I read docs, did more research, I was ready. Made a live USB, install it in the live environment, restart, and… it hangs during boot. Research, ‘use the option presented at the boot menu’. Okay. “no network” errors, that’s fine, it’s not a net installer. Done, restart. Hangs. Research. “use rufus, it solved my problem”. Rinse, repeat, hang. Isn’t Debian supposed to be super reliable? And Kubuntu booted fine, like what the hell?
Then cue the 4 days of setup. This machine is a very light use box, mostly to be a hotspot. Browser, email, password manager. Btrfs for snapshots (WHY IS THERE NO SNAPSHOT UI IN ANY DISTRO I TRIED?!). I’m far from a novice, been trying to switch for two decades. This will be easy.
deep breath
WHY IS GRUB NOT TAKING MY UPDATED SETTINGS (it’s a known bug in Ubuntu since 20.04?!)? WHY CAN’T I GET HOWDY TO INSTALL? WHY AM I GETTING APT ERRORS ON A FRESH INSTALL? WHY IS BITWARDEN FAILING TO SYNC? WHAT IS THE NEW-NEW-NEW METHOD OF SETTING UP NEXTDNS? WHY CAN’T I RESIZE A PARTITION (/) LIVE? WHY DOESN’T MY HOTSPOT WORK WHEN I USE WPA3 (still broken, actually, and WPA2 isn’t an acceptable solution imo)? WHY DON’T I GET ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THIS HAPPENS (a recurring theme)? WHY DO I HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH 3 DIFFERENT LOGS? WHY IS SEVERAL HUGELY-POPULAR PROGRAMS NOT IN THE DEFAULT REPO (omfg - Librewolf, Telegram, Element, Signal, Discord, Bitwarden…)? WHY DO THESE ALL TAKE DIFFERENT STEPS TO INSTALL ON MY SYSTEM WHAT THE FUCK WE HAVE A SYSTEM FOR THIS SCREAMS
E: WHY DOES KDE CONNECT JUST DECIDE THAT IT’S NOT GOING TO CONNECT TODAY UNTIL I TROUBLESHOOT FOR 3 HOURS, CHANGE NOTHING, THEN WORK?
And then, the 5G modem. Why in the shit doesn’t the fcc unlock tool just fucking detect, and unlock, automatically. Why. WHY. This is simple, the installer is already detecting hardware. It’s right there. This could be easy. Instead I had to dig through pages of solutions that didn’t work, until I landed on a page for my laptop (but seemingly a different architecture?) for Debian 13 (unstable) talking about needing to edit the installer with commands (omfg what) or the screen will just show nothing on boot, that you need to change wifi and bt stuff or they don’t work, etc etc… But in this heap of “I should just revert”, there was one line, the line I needed, to run this stupid fucking fcc unlock tool - and how to find the hardware address. Enter both, nothing (a ‘success’ message would be nice…). No further instructions in the doc. Luckily, I am persistent and went into the networkmanager anyway, tell it to connect to mobile broadband. Fill in my apn. Save. It works.
There’s a ton of stuff I glossed over, but it should not take FOUR DAYS with the terminal essentially living on my screen, with my browser having a dozen tabs at any given time for troubleshooting, for someone who has done all this shit before (minus the modem) many times in the past. It’s done, I’m setup, but there isn’t a soul alive who would switch their generic Dell machine running windows, spend several hours a day for several days, just to get their base system running. And the second they see “open the terminal”, which is still very much a necessity, they’ll be running to the hills.
I have a friend asking me questions about Linux since I’ve been harping on this the last few days, and I’m like… it’s not the easy path everyone says it is. I don’t want to push them away, but fuck they use many of the same programs that aren’t one-click installs, and I haven’t even touched gaming, multiple sound cards, gpu drivers; they use their machine for gaming, and mine is on W10 for a reason. It would be a nightmare guiding them through the minefield I just emerged from. Not to mention games that aren’t handled by steam/proton and don’t have guides, old games like Midtown Madness/2, Midnight Club 2, Insane/2…
It’s still not ready, not anywhere near close.
I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn’t owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I’m running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell… Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their ‘tablet’ plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that’s why I have the TP, it’s a “business” line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn’t get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn’t offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something ‘just worked’ with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don’t remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it’s WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I’ve played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don’t actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it’s what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?
I just dont get it, you pay for the OS, they monitor you like a hawk and sell that shit. Now they are like we need to make sure they get all these ads too, also we are going to ruin any app that you use, like search or notepad. We will milk this mother dry then claim users dont understand how much it costs to run the company.
If you have a monopoly and need to maximize profits then the question becomes: Why not?! You could extract more money this way, and it’s not like your users would go anywhere else at this point.
That is why it’s so important to fight and break up monopolies, and to limit what these companies can do. Because they have no reason not to squeeze every penny they can get out of you!
I get the point you’re trying to make but they made a free version of windows a while ago. The price for it is the ads.
There’s a free version of windows? 😮 Did they just give up because everybody cracks it?
linuxmemes
Windows meme
Checks out.
Shitting on windows is the most Linux thing you can do
And we don’t even need to, because windows users already complain about windows all the time.
Wait a bit Ubuntu is next. They already added terminal ads, embedded affiliate links for amazon, and sold user data to amazon.
The Amazon story is really old and Ubuntu did hear the critical voices and reverted the change. The terminal ads can be annoying on servers but you can turn them off.
https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Disable_dynamic_motd_and_motd_news_spam_on_Ubuntu_18.04.html
If you want to throw dirt on Ubuntu, let’s talk about Snaps and the messy Snap Store and how the current Ubuntu site looks like (not desktop user friendly really), and what they did to LXD
but you can turn them off.
Isn’t that line of thinking the same as this post is making fun of?
If being able to turn off ads make them ok then i guess we can’t complain about windows ads yet either.
AFAIK the “terminal ads” were suggesting Ubuntu Pro when using the package management. It’s very far away from actual ads. Just the free version suggesting the paid one. Not ad space sold to third parties.
Just the free version suggesting the paid one. Not ad space sold to third parties.
You’ve read it here, folks. Microsoft just needs to promote Xbox deals and such, then it’s not an ad space sold to third parties. (Either that or you’re holding Canonical to a different standard than Microsoft.)
The Linux infiltration of PC gaming communities has been one of the most successful covert operations in the history of espionage. So successful that the agents don’t even need to hide their identities.
Sorry, joke just flew over my head
Well hey, at least it “just works,” right?
I just use ameliorated windows 10, never been bothered by anything else.
What’s that?
3rd party modifications to windows iso that basically amounts to trusting an internet stranger.
You are talking about the old Ameliorated, the new one doesn’t modify an iso instead its a tool that modifies an already installed windows instance.
Also kinda weird to word it like that since with any open source tool we are trusting internet strangers
My bad. Sorry.
Tell me again how Linux is hard to use
Fucking with display drivers to get your shit to boot is several magnitudes harder than ignoring an ad.
Fucking with display drivers to get your shit to boot is several magnitudes harder than ignoring an ad.
Found the Nvidia user.
Nah, the last time this user tried Linux was probably 2005. You can get to a desktop and install proprietary drivers from the app store relatively painlessly on most distros.
Nope, last Christmas I struggled to get Linux Mint to play a Steam game using Proton. Booting would lead to a crash, adding some flags would lead to the game being incredibly laggy. Mint had an option for proprietary drivers, but the game would crash regardless of the flags. In the end, turns out Mint was downloading the wrong drivers, and I had to manually download the correct ones from Nvidia’a website to finally get the game to work with average performance.
It took multiple hours of troubleshooting during my one Christmas vacation of the year. Meanwhile my brother, who had an identical laptop playing the same game on Windows, ran it flawlessly with great performance.
At this point I’m not sure if this is a meme or what…
Last time I switched distro a few years ago I tried a dozen of them (dropped the ISOs on a Ventoy drive). None of them had trouble getting a usable desktop of correct resolution.
Now sure, if you want an optimal, accelerated driver, on some of them you may have to figure out that distro’s preferred way of doing it. But that’s also true on Windows. And on Windows the vast majority of people don’t bother beyond the install, because it makes no difference to them.
Optimal drivers are essential only to a small subset of users like gamers and I expect a PC gamer to be able to figure out how to install a driver.
But I repeat it’s not even an issue on most modern distros. (I have an Nvidia card too.)
Meanwhile Linux users trying to ger wifi to work
Yes, but like 10 years ago. That was probably the last time I ripped out chunks of hair and snapped off teeth trying to configure a half supported broadcom wireless card.
Every kernel update on Ubuntu kills my wifi driver. So I automatically recompile and add my new driver…same driver each gaddam time. But it’s not an ad 😂 lol.
Get the maintainer to PR it to the linux-firmware team if its unique.
It didn’t affect me, due to using startallback. It replaces start menu, taskbar and explorer. So my start menu is Win7 and my task and explorer are Win10.
It used to have a 100 day all access free trial and was 5 bucks, but I haven’t checked lately. I gotta keep a Windows machine around for art. My Gaomon tablet was able to use wacom drivers on Linux with some terminal tinkering, but it couldn’t map the scroll wheel by design, which was a deal breaker.
A lot of the ‘ads’ can be turned off with a toggle or two, it’s wild that people are losing their minds over this. Microsoft is shitty for making the call, but it’s an avoidable thing which doesn’t warrant this level of reaction.
People with this level of energy should be complaining about the online search not being a user facing option to turn off easily in Windows Home edition!
Linux users trying to do anything
