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I'm Not a Programmer, but Here’s Why Linux Is My Daily Driver
(www.howtogeek.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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To reinforce the author's views, with my own experience:
I've been using Linux for, like, 20 years? Back then I dual booted it with XP, and my first two distros (Mandriva and Kurumin) are already discontinued. I remember LILO.
So I'm probably a programmer, right? ...nope, my grads are Linguistics and Chemistry. And Linux didn't make me into a programmer either, the most I can do is to pull out a 10 lines bash script with some websearch.
So this "Linux is for programmers" myth didn't even apply to the 00s, let alone now.
Relevant detail: Microsoft's obsession with generative models, plus its eagerness to shove wares down your throat, will likely make this worse. (You don't use Copilot? Or Recall? Who cares? It'll be installed by default, running in the background~)
My mum is using a fossil like this. It has 4GB or so; it's a bit slow but it works with an updated Mint, even if it wouldn't with Windows 10.
I gave the link a check... what a pain. For reference, in Linux Mint, MATE edition:
That's it. You click a button. It's probably the same deal in other desktop environments.
So Mint can perform the same role as a tablet, which is what my elder family use, and they prefer it.
I keep seeing these posts and comments, trying to convince people This Is The Year of The Linux Desktop. That you have to try to convince people of this says it all.
My standard response to "just go Linux" :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with MS's awful shit going on.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying "you should manage data in a proper database app". No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel, takes seconds.
Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century? How's that not "programmer level"?
Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won't even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95.
Someone else said it better than me:
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's on a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment, or if you need things to "just work" as a user.
Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users. Fuck, Mint's shell doesn't support right click. Again, in the 21st century, WTF?
One more thing: process management. By default, Linux uses a process management model that gives equal time slices to all processes - including the GUI... So the UI can lag if you have high cpu. Windows prioritizes the UI by default so this happens less - I routinely run video conversions on a 5 year old SFF, and have no UI lag whatsoever, with the cpu at 90% for hours at a time. Yes, you can swap out process management on Linux, but that's kind of in the programming realm, no?
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers/IT, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands). As I support friends and family (a couple dozen) this is a very real issue. Trying to support the varied needs of even these few users would be a massive undertaking using Linux.
As an old teacher would say to me: "Who you trying to convince, me or you?"
Yeah, you could argue that Mint allows that laptop to perform the same role as a tablet; it's at most used for simple image edition, web browsing, and listening music through the SMB network (from my computer because hers has practically no storage).
Without a Linux distro the other options would be to "perform" as electronic junk or virus breeding grounds.
Drop off the strawman. That is neither what the author of the article said, nor what I did.
The rest of your comment boils down to you noisily beating that strawman to death, and can be safely disregarded as such.
As a M$ Windows user for years, I can tell you there's little to no incentive in Linux development. That's why M$ Windows is so much better than Linux, they give incentives / rebates to hardware manufacturers if they can sell pre-installed Windows PCs/Laptops. So they are willing to build device drivers to support Windows.
I don't get it why you have to blame Samba devs? SMB protocol was built by M$. It's not easy to build something like Samba, at least they need to analyze how the SMB protocol works. If you want a better compatibility for sharing data with SMB you should use M$ Windows.