The following sums up my experience with Linux thus far: “It’s never been easier for the newb to jump right in, but heavens help them if they ever stray from the straight path”.
There’s been a lot of effort to make things easier for a newb (used to Windows and all that shit) to do what they need to do in most cases. There’s been all sorts of GUI-based stuff that means for the ‘average’ user, there’s really no need for them to interact with the command line. That’s all well and good until you need to do something that wasn’t accounted for by the devs or contributors.
All of a sudden, you’d have not only to use the command line, you may also have to consult one of the following:
Well-meaning, easy to understand, but ultimately unhelpfully shallow help pages (looking at you, Libre Office), or the opposite: deep, dense, and confusing (Arch) Wiki pages.
One of the myriads of forum pages each telling the user to RTFM, “program the damned thing yourself”, “go back to Windows”, all of the above, or something else that delivers the same unhelpful message.
Ultra-dense and technical man pages of a command that might possibly be of help.
And that’s already assuming you’ve got a good idea of what the problem was, or what it is that you are to do. Trouble-shooting is another thing entirely. While it’s true that Linux has tons of ways to make troubleshooting a lot easier, such as logs, reading through them is a skill a lot of us don’t have, and can’t be expected of some newb coming from Windows.
To be fair to Linux though, 90% of the time, things are well and good. 9% of the time, there’s a problem here and there, but you’re able to resolve it with a little bit of (online) help, despite how aggravating some of that “help” might be. 1% of the time, however, Linux will really test your patience, tolerance, and overall character.
Unfortunately, it’s that 10% that gives Linux its “hard to use” reputation, and the 1% gives enough scary stories for people to share.
This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don’t really feel like windows is much better. I’ve had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I’ve had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn’t defective.
You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that’s also true on windows without 3rd party software. I’ve had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn’t support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let’s you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.
I honestly feel like Linux isn’t really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there’s a lot less help available online as well.
Same! What pushed me to Ubuntu was that Windows broke like three times in major ways in the span of a few days. One time, Windows update… disappeared bootmgr.exe. Another time, Windows bug checked after a few minutes of use. Yet another time, Windows update broke the boot partition. idk if that’s exactly what happened, but point is the issues were big. How this happened in the span of like 3 days is baffling to me, considering I installed Windows from scratch each time.
What I just said, on the whole, isn’t exclusive to Linux and can be applied to Windows as well (maybe except the “go back to Windows” mantra, and possibly the RTFM culture of Linux—but then again, the general refrain of LMGTFY is common enough for one to argue that a similar complaint exists in Windows as well).
Having to fall back to the command-line, however, is generally a rare experience in Windows. I personally never have had any need to. However, that’s mostly because I was never a power user in Windows, and I’ve never had any experience like having to fix messed-up partitions. Windows have its own set of problems too, like the registry system.
Whatever my complaints about Linux might be, it doesn’t make Windows any better. I am still daily-driving Linux for a reason (or several).
The 90%, 10% and 1% thing I said at the end applies to Windows as well. It is a general rule of thumb I’ve mentioned to highlight that, the scary things oft-talked about Linux are a small percentage of what a user might encounter. And it’s even less, probably non-existent, if you stick to the “straight and narrow.”
I was typing an earlier version of my reply to you when it got lost in the aether. Sorry, but I forgot about this bit which I shall be putting in a separate reply.
people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there’s a lot less help available online as well.
I agree with this, wholeheartedly. However, I think those who use Linux are a self-selecting sort. This means, unfortunately, that the type of person who might be able to best help a “typical Linux newb coming from Windows” isn’t using Linux in the first place, or have already gone long past the point of being able to be in a mindset best suited to help.
I use Synapse as Matrix server and Element as client. It doesn’t need port 25 (8008 and 8448 are needed in my setup). On Lemmy and Mastodon I configured outgoing mail using smtp via my existing mail hoster, so I don’t send mail from my own server. Also, all googling I did said to stay away from selfhosting email, as it is a hassle not to be immediately blocked as a spam mail server …
So yes I got synapse installed and I use element as a client but when I tried to register an account it wants to send me an email from my own server and since port 25 is blocked.
It’s not that Linux is hard, it’s that people are used to other stuff and have very little interest in learning something new for no good reason.
Unless you really convince someone that there is a good reason to put in the work, how little it may be, to get used to something new, they won’t do it and complain.
Meanwhile, Windows changes its whole-ass UI (possibly a slight exaggeration but it's enough that they complain every time) every time a new version's out yet somehow "something new" doesn't apply, all of the software people would actually be using is just the same anyway, and the removed/forced "features" don't count as "good reasons." Bleh.
I fell off a little after I got to the second section (the ring of islands with the thing in the middle) - it was starting to feel a bit same-ish. Does it get a bit more varied?
There’s a third party tool for AdGuard which allows syncing multiple instances. Very nice because if you want something to be redundant in your home setup, it’s DNS. This adds the ability to sync configured rulesets and custom DNS entries.
EDIT: There seems to be a similar tool for Pi-hole as well.
If we had an option to hide image/text/link based posts from our browse selection, especially ‘all’, then I think we would be able to find them by accident much more easily.
I have run my own PiHole previously. Then I wanted Ad blocking on my phone, so I also setup OpenVPN that ran alongside my PiHole so I could get ad blocking anywhere. I travel often, and then we moved, so I never got it set up again, at the same time I discovered AdGuard could be configured on both home networks for network-level blocking, but they also have device profiles for iOS.
I haven’t had to fuss with PiHole now in years.
If you are happy to do the administration of a PiHole, and the scope it provides, it’s good. I didn’t want to have to fuss with it anymore.
Tbh, after using Linux since 2019, i always needed to reinstall ubuntu based Linux distros and I have a tendency to just hate them for being so hardcoded and trashy. Feels like Windows but its evem more hardcoded. I ended up using Manjaro and yeah, I somehow mamaged to fix most but not all problems caused by Manjaro. But it was also not a good distro. I ended up at Arch Linux and somehow managed to just never reinstall it because everything is actually… finally… not fucking hardcoded. It mostly has a good wiki page that explains the details.
The problem with Arch is that its not beginner friendly nor for people who just want things to work. Its a long process of installing and setting everything by yourself, with the advantage that you finally have a system that is fully tranaparent to yourself and easy to manage and understand it.
I used to comment a lot more than I would post back on Reddit, but I’ve been putting in an effort to try to build up communities here, both my own and others. So I’ve been scraping all my old pictures to find useful content, and as a result, have more posts than comments.
You know I thought about deleting my account, but with a combination of nostalgia and the hope that some of my comments would still be useful led me to decide to just leave it in stasis.
So far, pretty much everything I’ve posted on Lemmy has been new OC, but I think I’ll start scraping and reposting some of my old reddit posts eventually.
Scraping the old content is not a bad idea knowing that the information can be on a place that you might feel is better for the long run makes sense, But makes sense that you wouldn’t want to spend so much time moving every little bit across.
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