this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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You aren't trying to suggest that experienced Linux users are a bunch of arrogant fart-sniffing a-holes who expressly enjoy gate-keeping inexperienced users by being as condescending and unhelpful as possible?
I tried talking about how absolutely horrendous their behaviour was recently, pointing out how completely unhinged and self-defeating it is, and someone actually literally said that this was a good thing because Linux is hard work and they should keep away people that aren't experts.
And first of all, if that's right it's an admission that linux will never succeed, and secondly I agree that's the effect but I think that's bad actually.
I honestly think there must be at least some amount of psyops in the community poisoning the discourse for everyone.
Microsoft running psyops to keep the Linux community as toxic as possible
Omg it really feels like that sometimes.
The youtubers who paint Linux as extremely unstable/not appropriate for gaming almost come across as sponsored by Microsoft. (Not to mention the overemphasis of the ubiquity of adobe suite users i.e. confirmation bias)
Mostly first Linux users will download Ubuntu, latest release, and I've not used a more bug ridden OS in my life. Everyday there was a new bug that made me have to hard reset my computer (mind you this is 24.0.4 noble). Display was grey after login, didn't want to login, laptop screen doesn't wake up, Wayland crashes and doesn't start backup. And that is the bugs that forced me to hard reset my laptop, then we have a whole slew of other bugs.
I mean some new getting recommend Ubuntu will have a horrible experience, and most of them do
It almost seems like Linux Mint is the default recommend now which is better. I had a kind of buggy time with Pop OS, due to the amount of unsupported extensions you need to run to have some customisability.
OpenSUSE TW with KDE has been the best experience for me in the end.
I don't think Linux caters to the casual crowd, maybe in the distant future, because it takes a lot of effort to create a good user experience, those resources are not available to distro makers.
In the PC world you have some different setups of devices, apple has it a bit easier they explicitly choose the hardware that they want to Support.
Also casual people have a hard time connecting a printer to their computer or fixing the wireless wifi.
I can't imagine them fixing anything via the terminal. My SOs runs Manjaro and she is like that, but I usually fix her laptop when she has issued.
I love Linux for what it is, this toy for a developer that can automate and customize stuff relatively simple, with a large opinionated community.
I would instead rather focus on those thing, than seeing Linux trying to compete with windows/Mac.
I never experienced any of those problems with Linux Mint (except hardware incompatibility with Mint debian, which they explicit state it's experimental and for enthusiasts). The user experience was sweet from the start, lots of preinstalled useful stuff, an AppStore that already is miles better than Microsoft Store, and my printer was recognized by the pc and printer program better than on my smartphone. Everything has a useful GUI knob to push or click, and i never use the terminal unless i want.
Agree with Manjaro being unstable, that's why no one recommends it as beginner distro, and Pop OS is the distro of System 76 computers, so they also mainly aim for hard and soft wares integration inside they ecosystem (the apple of linux) and people should stop recommending it to beginners.
Linux Mint is the Magnum Opus of desktop linux for me, and we should recommend ONLY it for the time being, as default choice.
Oh for sure, I'm not a "This is the year of the Linux desktop" kind of person. The average person probably doesn't care about privacy/software freedom enough, but I don't think think it is at all insurmountable for a normal person to transition to the simpler distros if they begin to care about those things.
Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn't mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn't take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad "contributions" until they're sick of everyone's shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they're dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it's hard to tell the difference between a troll who's trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn't know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.
Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, "aw... putty... windows..." So I'm like, "Listen, I don't care if you think I'm sad for using windows, I don't use linux because it's too much work" Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don't know what I'm doing it's not for me, and I'm like "Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?" Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to "help" me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they'd be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would've been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.
I'll counter your anectdote with my own. Every single Linux community member I have encountered on my journey to use this as a daily driver (arch BTW) has been incredibly helpful.
Where? Is this paradise oasis of helpfulness on the internet? Or is it offline somewhere?
I just came from another post where the user said they would love to switch from Windows and just needed someone to explain how to do it with a list of features and programs they always use and asking what the Linux equivalent would be.
They made the mistake of saying they needed Outlook for work and there was a commenter that basically said that that person was never going to like Linux and they needed to stay far away from it because the user “painted themselves into a corner.” The commenter even took the time to call it “Micro$oft” lol
I dislike Microsoft and basically everything they've done with Windows post-7. Every machine I own that isn't expressly for gaming is running Linux, and one of the two that are for gaming is also running Linux. When I build a new gaming tower to replace my current Windows one it will also run Linux, I just can't be bothered to switch OSes mid-way.
And yet people using childish denigrating nicknames like this immediately makes me disinclined to engage with the conversation. I don't understand how anyone expects to be taken seriously while throwing around schoolyard-grade name-calling like this.
Yeah, I love Linux and would use it on everything if I could, but the bottom line is, it’s cheaper to pay Microsoft for something that “just works” with the literal decades old software businesses have used without major issue than it would be to help fund development for a Linux based version.
It’s not fair, it’s not right, and you could probably make an argument that it’s not ethical, but the fact of the matter is, Windows does work. It’s got a whole boatload of quirks and every day I wonder why I hate myself so much that I chose a career that involves working on Windows so much, but it does do its job.
Plus, I know Canonical isn’t the most popular company either, but do people think them, Redhat, SUSE, and whatever other company isn’t out to make money?