I started Hades recently and have been enjoying it a lot. I’m debating if I should pick up Sonic Frontiers, it’s been forever since I played a Sonic game.
Sonice frontiers is fantastic! Took me back to the good ole days of playing on a Sega Genesis and Dreamcast. Also a great opportunity to catchup on Sonic lore. Heres a good summary of the, though it does go over Sonic Frontiers, so beware spoilers!
I would really enjoy the nostalgia trip like that. Genesis is where I started with Sonic and became a Sega fan from then on too. Thank you so much for the link, going to check it out.
I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging, but I think that something important to remember is that computers are hard. I’ve spent my entire life studying computers and I’m still learning every day.
Most people grew up with Windows and learned how to use it over the years, but remember that it took years, and most of them still aren’t very good at it. Linux requires different knowledge than Windows, but it doesn’t inherently mean that it’s harder. If everyone grew up using Linux we wouldn’t hear about “how hard Linux is” but instead about “how hard Windows is”.
At least when something is broken in Linux, it probably has a cause (usually the user) and solution, and a way to debug what happened. When something breaks in Windows you’ve got about 3 things you can try before the solution is to reinstall.
As for solutions, I don’t know if there’s a certified pathway into Linux - I think installing something like Linux Mint and just using it like a computer would go a long way towards getting you comfortable with how Linux works without forcing you to study. Once you’re comfortable using the GUI, you can take a peek behind the scenes at your leisure - there is documentation everywhere for everything on Linux.
When Windows 3.1 came out I had a hard time understanding any of it and never left my cozy DOS CLI with its Norton Commander.
Granted I was still a child, but one might think that mouse-first and colorfulness would have driven my curiosity. Instead I switched when Windows 95 arrived.
When something breaks in Windows you’ve got about 3 things you can try before the solution is to reinstall.
From the point of view of a lifetime Windows guy, I have to disagree with this. Unless you have a malware problem (where it can be exceedingly difficult for the average user to know whether they've gotten everything out), almost all failures of Windows in the modern age are the result of hardware failures. If your Windows 7 or newer computer blue screens, it's very likely a bad piece of hardware, occasionally a bad driver. The OS itself is quite solid.
... there is documentation everywhere for everything on Linux.
In my experience and perspective, I've found the documentation for Linux things to be of varying quality and usually for an audience who already knows their way around Linux. Admittedly, I haven't had to go looking in quite a while, so maybe that landscape is different today than I am aware of - but when I was looking, I found myself quite frustrated more often than not.
Finally, with Windows, if you really have to, you can pay for support incidents from Microsoft. They're not cheap, but I've found their server and server application support to be reliable. Is there something like that available to a Linux user?
I don’t have a ton of experience with Windows lately, but from trying to troubleshoot family members’ PCs, it usually ends up being corrupted drivers or bricked bootloaders/failed updates.
As for documentation, the Arch wiki (and Gentoo wiki, Debian wiki, etc. etc.) is usually a good source of information for general topics, but there’s also decades of forums and stackexchange posts on various problems if you’re just using a search engine. Every program also has extensive official man pages on how to use them (example), and you can even use something like tldr to shorten the man pages into something usable right now (example). If you’re willing to read documentation, everything you use on Linux probably has a manual behind it.
With regards to paying for support, it’s not really my wheelhouse but to my understanding that’s what companies like Canonical, SUSE, and Red Hat offer.
| If your Windows 7 or newer computer blue screens, it's very likely a bad piece of hardware, occasionally a bad driver. The OS itself is quite solid.
Okay, really, though? Windows is solid and good because it doesn't kernel panic much? Who's getting kernel panics out of Linux without faulty hardware or doing something risky? I think you've equivocated a bit here: either we're comparing kernel to kernel or we're comparing userland to userland. You're comparing Windows itself to Linux userland or using some kernel even freakier than the weird patched-up stuff I like to play with.
I feel like discussion of this topic is plagued by double standards and shifting goalposts :-\ Apples to oranges comparisons, refusals to even consider things just because they're 'foreign,' blaming "Linux" for things that really aren't its fault (neither in the OS sense nor in the broader sense) ... including of course (sometimes) turning the discussion into an "us versus them" thing. Software on Linux has iffy documentation! ... But the same software exists on Windows, or the equivalent(s) is(/are) just as bad. Linux kernel documentation is scary or weird! ... But no one relevant is touching it anyway and wasn't touching Windows kernel anything either. The UI is different! Yeah, so's the new one on every version of Windows you get forced into. Casual Windowsers all hate it every time but somehow "Linux" is unusable because they won't learn a new UI unless Microsoft tells them to.
You can buy (a licence to, if MS likes you lots, borrow) a copy of Windows and apparently buy support for it too... yeah okay, but that's business, not a software issue. There are enterprise distros and software packages with all' that business-type support, unless they've all vanished? That's how that stuff works, no?
I'm not demanding anyone switch and distro hop over the course of months to find a distro they love but I'd really prefer to see some more fairness discussing the matter. "Linux" is never going to be "usable on desktop" if it's always just the enemy to be spurned and derided.
(Also, sorry this got so wordy. It's not meant as a diatribe, just I feel like there's a lot to say and I'm not saying much of it 🤷♀)
TLDR: It's unfair or outright dishonest to blame an apple for not being tart enough and hide that your actual standard is "is it an orange."
Windows auto-recovers from almost any issue the average user might encounter. It cannot be understated just how hard it is for an application or driver to break modern Windows. It goes much farther than just fixing a kernel panic. It will reset to a serviceable state for almost anything you can think of ( e.g. bad display settings, borked application install) and even in the worst situation will still give you some sort of GUI and try to walk you through the problem.
Linux sort of just gives up and lets you shoot yourself in the foot if you really ask it to. It's up to you to then figure out how to fix things and that usually involves diving into the terminal. But even ignoring that, a lot of Linux applications have a serious UI/UX problem. I cannot count how many applications just do things like throw a config file at you even for common tasks and expect you to read a doc page in order to figure it out. I have better things to do than read yet another wall of text just to do something simple like remapping key bindings (e.g. mpv). That would be an unthinkable thing to do to a Windows user.
Linux developers seem to want to develop software for other developers. Windows developers develop software for average people. The fragmentation of 1000s of Linux distros, each with their own quirks only make matters worse by further complicating where and how to get help.
I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging
The average person would fail on step 0 of Installing the OS. In fact 90% of the problem could be attributed to Linux distros not coming preinstalled on PCs sitting in big box stores.
All of Linux's success stories for the average user (Android, Steam Deck, Chrome book) have one thing in common. They are low cost, simple, purpose built for very specific tasks with a bunch of exclusive games/software that people want to use. We need to start looking at PCs almost like they are highly moddable game consoles. It should come with the expectation that most users don't want to leave the comfort of the walled garden.
I went to Dead Reckoning the other day and afterward it occurred to me why I don’t go to movies very often anymore. With advertisements and travel time both ways, it worked out to a 4 hour commitment. I have kids. I don’t often have that kind of time.
So do ducks. It depends on what the animal is doing. Cows stand around and walk for miles this they are red meat. Ducks migrate 100s of miles thus are red meat. A chicken on the other hand only needs it’s muscles for short flights and such and even then it’s legs and thighs which support its weight all the time are considered dark meat aka approaching red meat.
I've been seeing a lot of good stuff about Baldur's Gate 3, but for a variety of reasons a bunch of other CRPGs I've played haven't clicked with me. So, since I owned Divinity: Original Sin 2, I decided to pull that back out and focus on it for a bit to see if it got my attention this time. The very early start up trying to break out of the fort is a bit rough, but once you get past that it gets compelling fast. The tactics play out really enjoyably, and I really find it enjoyable to take bigger encounters, if I get stomped, and figure out the optimal positioning I can set myself up in to beat the odds on the next try. After a good few too many hours I'm finally off the first island and it's starting to open up for real.
This might have convinced me to the BG3 first and save Starfield for a while, even though that and FF16 both look damn good too.
I found it easier to setup adguard as my DHCP server, because I wasn’t able to change the default DNS settings of my isp’s router.
Additionally The web interface was quite laggy on my raspberry pi 1b and it always filled up my sdcard with log data (it’s been over a year since when I last used pihole though)
I bought my own router and modem because of that. Cox started locking router features away inside their app and wanted $10/month to change settings on a modem/router combo I was already paying $8/month to rent!
I use Navidrome with play:Sub (paid) or Amperfy (free as in beer) on iOS. I also use the Volusonic plugin with Volumio to play music throughout the house. All my music is curated using MusicBrainz Picard and the files are mounted read-only for Navidrome.
I looked at Roon briefly, and I know many people like it, but I can’t justify the cost. Plex and I don’t get along; pretty sure it’s operator error and/or grumpiness. Jellyfin looks promising, but I ran into challenges with it as well. I think if you’re just hosting music, then Navidrome is fine. If you think you might expand to series or films, something like Plex or Jellyfin could be better long term.
I’d recommend navidrome over jellyfin, even if you have an existing jellyfin instance. It’s just that much better. Lidarr does a pretty good job organizing files, even if that’s not how you’re acquiring your music, but Picard is great. I use a Picard docker right on my server that streams the ui in a browser.
I think the issue is that while Linux is capable of a lot when you can take full advantage of it, each task requires way more knowledge or a good tutorial and no complications.
For me, I love working with Linux and have been doing it on and off for decades, but it doesn’t tend to remain my daily because of the extra steps and limitations.
I think if I had a more full working knowledge of Linux and I knew Python or had a stronger grasp of other languages, I’d be a lot more able to fill those gaps. But without that, it there are all these barriers to productivity that aren’t there otherwise. Instead of doing the thing I’m trying to do, i end up spending the night messing around with some depreciated program or struggling with a weird use case and it simply requires way more of my time to get there.
Considering that I have a lot more experience with Linux than the average person and still run into this regularly, I’d say it’s a big barrier to wider adoption.
Honestly the solution is probably more on the end of getting together to make some of these issues less complicated than on the end of expecting everyone to become a well versed Linux enthusiast. With such a high learning curve, unless you’re using it for something it’s particularly good at doing easily, you kind of have to want to get into Linux for its own sake in order to learn enough to make it easier to use. And even then, it’s a struggle sometimes.
Ultimately I agree. Open source software is the only software that’s sustainable and that benefits humanity in general more than it benefits some company somewhere. I choose open source software basically whenever I can. I hope that some day in the future that’ll extend into operating systems for personal computing and game servers, but unfortunately that’s not the case at the moment for my use cases.
I have installed Linux for purpose based computers in my IT and production line of work. And I’m curious about this topic. It’s sort of a dilemma. I work mainly in environments that require full fledged reliable tracking sessions in Adobe and Avid outboard hardware, etc. any time I tried to use Linux as a daily driver I regretted it. … But I want to use it. I agree with the values, and I prefer the customization and optimal use of my hardware… am I missing something as a Linux user about which distro or the way in which I’m using it.
are some of these considerations also part of what spurred your post OP?
I swapped to Linux back before COVID after I realized that the few Windows specific tasks I still ran were running in VMs anyway. Since then, I've been fully Linux and I've rarely needed Windows for anything but installing custom Android ROMS and reading Adobe DRMed files.
Microsoft actually made the process easier by making Office 365 useful. If I need MS Office specifically I can just run it well enough from a browser.
You’re making a very important point about virtualization. I have probably not spent enough time using it in the Linux environments that I built to feel like it was reliable. I guess my fear would be related to external thunderbolt audio equipment. But I havnt even taken an honest look to see who may have already paved the way with similar equipment.
@bijuice I recall when achievements were still kinda new and weird a little game called viva pinata. While it was a creative sandbox of sorts, the achievements essentially guided you to get 'everything' the game had to offer, and it ended up being one of the only 'monster catching' games I actually finished completely and loved.
I think that's probably the way to do it. Freedom to do what you want, but a guide to encourage you to do most of it.
I have used Linux for around 10 years. My daily driver has changed a couple times but I always go back to Mint. I think its better than Ubuntu personally. Its what I always recommend and I’ve been a sys admin for 5 years and dealt with production environments across all the core distros.
All that said it really depends on what programs you are using. Some have alternatives sure but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you will have a program that just pins you to Windows until you don’t need it anymore.
You should list out what things you use that you need. Take some recommendations on their alternatives or how to set them up in Linux and see if it sounds like it’d work for you.
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