Honestly my Windows 10 experience wasn't much different.
Atleast I can actually fix most of the issues that pop up on Linux
I was struggling to get an OS installed on my cousin's dell at one point. This machine came with that Intel Optane...shit with a spinning rust hard drive, I was replacing it with a straight-up NVMe SSD. Windows would get well into the install process, and then bomb out with an error that was something like 0x123a039f34798cd76eb1 UNDEFINED ERROR. This of course was in the Windows installer, which isn't a functioning desktop environment, so I had to type that manually into my laptop to google it, and got very few results.
I tried Linux Mint, and it apparently had the same problem. It said something like "BIOS Storage config error. Unable to mount file system. It may be that such and such setting is incorrect in the BIOS. See this page for further details." The last sentence was a hyperlink to a wiki that discussed the problem, which opened in Firefox because this installer runs in a live environment, AND IT HAD A QR CODE LINK IN THE ERROR MESSAGE to the same page so you could easily copy the link to an external device. Y'all that was a white glove concierge deep tissue massage of an error message.
No, I installed Windows on the machine I built for her to replace that one. THAT was the last time I've installed Windows on anything.
Got it. My wife is about ready to jump ship after seeing me running linux on my daily for half a year with heavy tasks.
She‘s jealous of the customization and versatility of linux.
Mine stopped asking me whether I'm hacking or not after I showed her a few images from her phone on my laptop. She doesn't know I copied those when she gave me her phone once.
I think she's kinda afraid of me now...
One time, when I tried to install the Windows installation tool on a stick, an error said something like (German) "Aus irgendeinem Grund konnte die Installation nicht abgeschlossen werden". "Aus irgendeinem Grund" literally translates to "for some reason".
Last time I tried Windows (with Windows 10), I actually struggled properly installing my graphics drivers. IDK what the issue even was, but after trying unsuccessfully for a while I just wiped the Windows partition and stuck with Linux.
Yeah, with Windows I just pray it won't break, cause if it does I might as well reinstall. And of course installing Windows, installing drivers and updating the system takes hours. How they made it that slow is beyond me.
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It’s funny, but as an adult now… I’m more concerned my ADHD is like this. It’s so annoying. I don’t even mean to do it. I set out to clean my desktop computer files and the next thing I know I’m painting the garage. Oh and ESPECIALLY if something is important. My mind creates these distractions or ‘focuses’ which allow me to fully set my mind on something, as long as it’s to avoid doing something else… 🤦♂️
Yeah last week I found myself thinking "blazeknave what the fuck are you doing?? You're prepping online research, for your meeting in five minutes. How did you end up sorting the linen closet? Fuck you man! "
I use arch and as long as you don't have a buttfuck of unnecessary daemons and aur packages (which can be said for any distro imo), it's as simple as sudo pacman -Syu
Until you're one of the unlucky ones whose PC gets bricked by an update. Happened to me twice. I agree, it's wayyyy more chill than people give it credit for, but let's not pretend using it as a daily driver doesn't come with its risks ^^
I once deployed a small service in 2016. It was a sort of configurable API, that other companies could post information to. Every company’s information came in a different json structure, but I built the thing to be able to accept a new structure, with new configuration data (no new coding needed for new formats).
Then in 2019, I was interviewing for a job and they asked me to talk about something I’d built that was reliable and I was able to report that this little service, running in docker compose, had been up continually for the last two years with zero errors.
I remember installing Uhuntu back in 2012 as middle schooler, and never encountering any error at all.
I'm on Debian and that kind of stuff basically doesn't happen. For the first couple weeks I broke stuff every once in a while because I didn't know how Linux worked, but it's basically been smooth sailing on all my computers for about six months.
Contrast with the Windows 10 on the same laptop which just the other day decided it doesn't want to play anymore. I guess I ran an update the last time I touched it (like a month ago) and now it won't boot. Debian boots perfectly. Even in safe mode, I can't boot into Windows and Automatic Startup repair refuses to work even using both the recovery USB and installation media. Probably going to have to reinstall Windows from scratch.
On that note, maybe just remove windows? Thats what I did. Some folks report that „really necessary apps“ would also run on a vm.
I still need that Windows partition for two reasons:
(1). I need Windows because my audio interface uses a proprietary driver only available on Windows. It simply does not perform as quickly on Linux. It's for real-time audio recording and production, so I need absolutely every clock cycle I can possibly spare. For that reason, a VM is out of the question for this particular application. On Linux with JACK, it uses JACK's default USB audio driver, which is really good but not as fast as the custom driver ostensibly using FocusRite's hidden features. It's not Linux's fault, it's FocusRite's for not supporting Linux and mine for "backing the wrong horse" about ten years ago when I bought it. To my knowledge, Linux pro audio was simply nowhere near as developed as it is now. It is only this exact piece of hardware, which I currently cannot afford to replace, that requires me to keep any copies of Windows alive. Other than for similar reasons where users are trapped, Windows sucks as an audio production operating system, whereas Linux with JACK is great.
(2). I need the Windows partition as it is because there is some old but important work there that I need to finish. I wasn't very organized about where I saved my work, i.e. things are all over the place. Eventually, I have to spend several hours moving the project files and effects off the drive. Since these projects were recorded on Windows, I will probably have to move all my Windows-exclusive effects to Linux. Yabridge actually does an excellent job for this, but it's not painless.
I'm currently in grad school for engineering, so I won't have time to bring over my project files until at least the summer. But even then, all the compatibility layers are starting to add up on Linux. The projects I want to work on were nearly maxing out the CPU and RAM on Windows. Really, I need a hardware upgrade, but I can't afford that for a long time.
Well that is understandable and highly unfortunate. I hope you‘ll find a solution for the driver at some point. There are awesome people that can reverse engineer stuff but its still a lot of work.
Same here. I came from Arch-based (which was already reasonably stable), and Debian is just flat out unbreakable in my experience.
I literally didn't even boot Windows for a month and then when I did, I got BSOD on boot, and it gave me some bullshit about not being able to find a device. How's that for maintenance? I can't say I miss it.
Must be doing something wrong if this is the everyday experience (especially for production). And there's the ones wanting to experiment, which is a different thing. I guess that's why this is a meme.
For me this video is the norm because i frequently experiment. There rarely is a problem wich doesn't require me fixing 3 different problems
This is after the third reboot, and automatic updates were off and I never accepted an update. All I wanted to do was sideload obtanium into the Facebook spy mask and I thought it would be easier than figuring out why it wouldn't show up in adb on Linux.
All I wanted to do was sideload obtanium into the Facebook spy mask and I thought it would be easier than figuring out why it wouldn't show up in adb on Linux.
Those are certainly words.
I didn't know about this project and will look into it for future use when family inevitably complains about their phones every time they get a new one without asking me what I think of it first. It's the quest 3 headset I was talking about. It does come with some apps I haven't tried that give the impression of bloat but I would be surprised if the device is within the scope of the project.
I did manage to install obtanium and in turn a bunch of other stuff though. Just needed to wait for windows to reboot an additional time, and now it seems to take an additional keypress to get rid of the lock screen before the password box. I'll probably just try to find the time to figure out what was wrong on the Linux side of things for the future.
This is why I use Arch. I enjoy the tinkering. One day Arch won't be enough and I will have to install Gentoo. You will probably never hear from me ever again after that. Mostly because I will be too busy compiling firefox again after a minor update.
Take a look at nixos. All the tinkering you could dream of with all the stability you could ever want
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Been running Fedora since June of last year, and it's the most "boring" distro I've ever used. It's been rock solid and I haven't experienced a single issue. None! I have an all-AMD build. The funny thing is that I recently installed Ubuntu 23.10 on a different PC, and I managed to break it after a couple of hours 😂
Been using Linux on and off since 2008 (ish).
I just turn on the Ubuntu computer, play games, Clic the occasional button to install updates and then keep doing my stuff. No maintenance stuff needed unless I mess something up on purpose with tinkering.
Community will crucify me for this, but Linux DE maintenance is the bane of my existence.
Shit "just works" until it inevitably doesn't, and it takes Linus himself to figure out how to unfuck it due to the absolutely insane level of version churn packages & distros see over the years, making most resources short of "just reinstall it" a fools errand.
Servers? Beautiful. Desktop environments? I literally can't anymore... Having something go to shit when I REALLY need to get something done has forced me to always have Windows on hand.
Which has turned into "Windows primary" and "Linux DE secondary " over the years. I hate Windows, I yearn for my plasma desktop, but it's almost always more reliably stable without maintenance for longer in my experience.
/rant
I don't understand what people are doing to their machines. I've been using Arch Linux exclusively for ~10yrs now and only ONCE had a problem when upgrading Java. That was fixed in about 10mins after reading the Arch update notes.
Most recently I've been running AwesomeWM for 2yrs and it's been so bloody stable and simple. I found KDE just as stable before but a bit heavy for my taste.
Exactly this, I've had the same install of the "most unstable de" -arch btw for about 8 years and its fucking fine, yes sometimes you have to remove some old dependancys... the command line had always told me exactly what's wrong and a quick google later if I'm unsure, blamo it's fixed like new... haven't used Windows in about 10 years
This sounds about right. Currently everything on mine works. But it's like... For how long?
Edit. Actually almost everything lmao. YouTube drains crazy battery ATM. Probably hardware acceleration not working.
This. This exactly. I'm wanting to teach my kids how to use Linux and first I want them to get used to it so I'm exposing them to computers through gCompris... So one of the features of the software stops working I don't know why I uninstall it I reinstall it. Same problem. So now I've got to go figure out what's wrong with the OS itself that's causing that problem in the software or just reinstall it, the OS that is, because that'll only take a few minutes to kick off and I can just leave it alone and it'll finish whereas the OS troubleshooting could take days or it could be something I never figure out.
Not to mention wrapping wifi drivers... 😭
For fun, I once decided I'd figure it out. I was doing a job where I had free time at work and there was spare hardware sitting around so I decided to go ahead and do it.
PAIN. So painful.
I love Linux, but I like to work on whatever I want to work on, not what the OS decides I need to work on that day.
I just turn on my computer and it works, sometimes I have to answer a couple questions zypper asks me when updates do weird things and cause dependency issues but that's not difficult
I don’t use Linux too much, but this matches my experience… I have a raspberry pi 3, running a home automation server.
One day I go to upgrade a plugin for it. It tells me I need to upgrade the home automation server first, so I go do that. It fails because my Node.js install needs to be upgraded too, so I do that. Then, I try to upgrade the home automation server again, but that now fails with a strange error. Stack trace says something about a missing C++ lib in my Node.js install, so I look it up. I try to install the missing library, but it gives more errors. I do more searching and find loads of other people with this issue, my raspbian version can’t support this C++ library version without first being upgraded. Damn, well, it’s midnight and I have work in the morning, I don’t have time for that. I try to get my home automation server up so I can go to bed, but it fails due to problems with the Node.js install. Can’t go to bed without this server running or my smart home accessories don’t work. I try to downgrade to the previous Node.js version. This fails with another error. Couldn’t upgrade, now I can’t downgrade, I’m stuck. I read a thread on GitHub… other people are reinstalling the OS from scratch and starting over. Damn… I start trying to backup my config files so I can do this too. One more check of another post on GitHub and I find some guy shares a command to downgrade Node.js without a fresh OS install. Perfect! I run this, restart my home automation server, and go to bed. Maybe I’ll try to figure out this problem another day.
See, this is why BTRFS is a good idea.
I borked one of my installs today by accident. I'm not even sure what happened... I upgraded the kernel, then weird things started happening, then X just froze, I restarted, runit would't even go to phase 3 of the boot process, X couldn't load, just gave a bunch of errors. Oh well, BTRFS to the rescue 😊. This is where things get interesting 😂.
I was on the phone with my wife while I was trying to bring back a snapshot of the volume... have no idea what I did, but I managed to wipe the root subvolume 😂. Not like just empty, but completely gone 🤣. OK 😬. Let's see if the snapshots are still there. Yep, still there. OK, recreated the subvolume and tried to load a snapshot of it, this time, wuthout talking on my phone 😂. Worked like a charm 😊. Restart, sure enough, it loads grub and the OS, everything's back to normal 😊.
Start using filesystems that can make snapshots, like BTRFS or ZFS. Sure, they have a bit of a learning curve, but trust me, it's worth it.