There’s a lot of little things to you need to learn, that you don’t learn until actually messing around with in Linux which absolutely make or break your experience with Linux, and that Linux users will mock you for asking about.
For a lot of people windows just works how they want it, so when they’re convinced to switch by a friend/family member/youtuber they now have to relearn what was incredibly easy for them, which absolutely will cause frustrations regardless.
And a lot of Linux dudes get really defensive and elitist when you ask them to explain or help, like screaming that you’re afraid of the command line when you’ve just never needed to use it before. So the initial learning curve is rough, to het more or less what you had before(For an avg user)
Like. I’m sorry, but having an issue keeping you from using your pc, and only getting advice to read the documentation of the distro, when you could have just kept windows, is going to frustrate people
The command line is always going to turn people away from Linux. I’ve only had to use the command line to fix a windows issue once in the past 10 years while I regularly have to use it every time I have to work with Linux.
People like convenience and will almost always go with the more convenient option even if it’s not the best option.
Until the majority of issues can be solved using point and click (and help forums show that method over command line), Linux will always lag behind Mac and Windows.
I think the answer to your question about why it’s frustrating for some people and not others has a lot to do with use case.
One use case that easily makes Linux way less frustrating is of developing software, especially in low-level languages. If you’re writing and debugging software, reading documentation is something you do every day, which makes it a lot easier. Most of the issues where people break their systems, don’t know how it happened, and can’t figure out how to fix it are because they default to copying bash commands from a Wordpress blog from 2007 instead of actually reading the documentation for their system. If you’re developing software, a log of the software you’re installing and using is open source, so you benefit tremendously from a package manager that’s baked into the OS.
If your use case is anything like that, Windows in particular is way more frustrating to use IMO.
If instead your use case is using a web browser and a collection of proprietary closed-source GUI tools, then most of the benefits that you’re getting using Linux are more ephemeral. You get the benefit of using a free and open source OS, not being tied into something that built to spy on you, not supporting companies that use copyrights to limit the free access of information and tools, etc. Those benefits are great and super important, and I would still recommend Linux if you’re up to it, but they definitely don’t make computing any easier.
If your use case is anything like the second one, you’re probably used to following online guides without needing to understand how each step works, and you’re probably used to expecting that software will make it hard for you to break it in a meaningful way. Both of those things directly contribute to making Linux might be frustrating to use at times for you.
If you’re in the second category, the best advice is to get used to going to the official webpage for the applications you use and actually reading the docs. When you run into a problem, try to find information about it the docs. It’s fine to use guides or other resources, but whenever you do, try to look up the docs for the commands that you’re using and actually understand what you’re doing. RTFM is a thing for a reason haha.
Is a different paradigm. The way you do almost anything is different from windows, from updating drivers to downloading programs. It’s frustrating in the same way driving in the wrong side of the road can be frustrating, or going a whole day using only your non dominant hand.
I’ve tried to convince a couple people over the last few years to convert, and their issues always baffle me, until my brother tried for a week and I finally understood. It’s just unlearned everything they’ve been doing for years, to do things a different way.
No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.
As a mostly windows user, I’ve tried a few times, using various distributions. When buying my last pc and installing a popular linux distribution, it did not recognise my network card at all. Researching online told me I had to compile the drivers myself, since my distri did not have any shipped with it yet. …which is pretty hard, having no internet access because of the network card not working. To be fair, that was ~8 years ago.
For non-tech users, I feel like some parts are still pretty hard to diagnose. If an issue arises you mostly have to touch the command line and I can understand people being scared of it, having to edit plain text files, or type and enter commands that aren’t descriptive, much less finding the right command by guessing. It certainly improved, with GUIs being available for most stuff, but if you want something specific, is still feels pretty rough on the edges sometimes, from the eyes of a normal user.
If you mostly need your basic apps, like browser, some office apps or a music player it works great, though.
IMHO driver issues are not normally a problem anymore. I have a ton of random USB stuff plugged into my Ubuntu desktop and it all just works. Like USB display adapters and studio interfaces. My nivida card works fine too w steam for gaming.
I had a bad time with ubuntu 18 lts and Bluetooth. Neither bluez nor the other one (forget which) would recognise the controller in my mobo. Tried the man pages. Searched high and low. Asked for help on the forums - got nothing. Decided to never again try using Linux for my workstation. I’m perfectly happy to use it to run my scripts, daemons and containers on a dedicated box, but there’s just no upside for my games and work machine.
Bluetooth. I had the same issue, just the other way around, with Windows 11. The Bluetooth option would just disappear, and only rarely re-appear after many restarts until I locked/shut off the laptop. But it always worked fine with Mint, so I know it wasn’t hardware issue.
As a mostly windows user, I’ve tried a few times, using various distributions. When buying my last pc and installing a popular linux distribution, it did not recognise my network card at all. Researching online told me I had to compile the drivers myself, since my distri did not have any shipped with it yet. …which is pretty hard, having no internet access because of the network card not working.
For non-tech users, I feel like some parts are still pretty hard to diagnose. If an issue arises you mostly have to touch the command line and I can understand people being scared of it, having to edit plain text files, or type and enter commands that aren’t descriptive, much less finding the right command by guessing. It certainly improved, with GUIs being available for most stuff, but if you want something specific, is still feels pretty rough on the edges sometimes, from the eyes of a normal user.
If you mostly need your basic apps, like browser, some office apps or a music player it works great, though.
I’m curious to see if oracle, amazon, or suse will try to absorb some of the RHEL derivatives like alma and rocky. Right now there seems to be a lot of fragmentation in RHEL derivatives. Not to say they are trying to compete with Red Hat, but Amazon and Oracle seem like they would try to do so this way.
I was under the impression that like Oracle, they used RHEL sources as their base (from git.centos.org). But it appears that they now (as of 2022) only use fedora sources and maintain other sources on top of fedora, so they’ve deviated from RHEL compatibility as far as I can tell.
KDE, but it seems I soft-broke it as well while installing after regular Gnome Ubuntu. Now I’m installing Kubuntu on my laptop and will try out any other distro on a new SSD I bought for my desktop.
As others pointed, doing stuff in a rush and blindly using guides and pasting commands makes everything more difficult. No matter how robust or good the UI is lol
Yeah it has been my experience that, even though it is technically possible to swap DEs in an install or even have multiple installed at once, they don’t seem to be designed for it, and they will start to fight. I once installed Cinnamon on Pop!_OS alongside their funky in-house implentation of Gnome, and Flatpak stopped working.
If, like Windows or MacOSyou just use it as intended by official support, it should be fine. If you start just adding everything and anything from anyone you’re gonna break stuff.
Other stuff is made to be idiot proof, Linux is not.
No. That would defeat the purpose of me installing Linux in (old) laptops. Windows feels sluggish enough with a sea of bad things wanting your minimum wage and have Windows Defender prevent it but not all of it, obviously.
I put all my attention to prevention and set strict rules on the router. It can be as simple as setting the DNS to stuff like dnsforge.de or DIY it with PiHole with hosts lists of your hearts content that update itself weekly, I do the latter. Nothing beats a cross platform solution that protects every device in the network, if you’re after 100% performance. Of course you can still catch bad things, such as social engineering by email that happened over at Linus Tech Tips. You better stay vigilant no matter what solution you use and don’t sleep on making backups, which can be as simple and automated when you use Syncthing for example.
You’re right. Syncthing isn’t a backup tool per se and the devs even tell you that in the FAQ. But forgive me if I did preach about it anyway, because you can enable file versioning (keep old and deleted files on each host) which kind of makes it backup incase something bad happens? Anyway it is my set and forget solution for Linux, Android and Windows. If you could recommend me a alternative that ticks these boxes I’d appreciate that. :)
People like that make me like systemd. Honestly, I see no issues and rarely have a problem with systemd. Shitposting about it is all well and good, but being an anti-systemd evangelist is tiring and weird. All these old heads can still just grab the kernel and build their own OS around it with whatever init they want.
They also seem to congregate on FreeBSD… it’s my preferred os but eventually it’s going to bite them seeing how most new server apps (including lemmy) seem to rely on it!
Having said that they have Firefox 115 running fine without any system level wrappers so not sure why he’d be having issues on a non-systemd os if the FreeBSD Firefox maintainer can figure it out.
Some are pretty legitimate, like the lack of Adobe or Autodesk support on Linux, which means a lot of people just 100% cannot participate in their industry using Linux. It’s borderline illegal to use Linux if you’re a mechanical or civil engineer; Solidworks and MATLAB are pretty much regulatory requirements; you’d probably lose your engineering license if you turned in a drawing made in FreeCAD. In the art space, tell a publishers you drew something in Inkscape and watch their personality leak out their ears. Everyone hates Adobe, but glory to Adobe.
There are also legitimate culture shocks; there’s this LTT video where they had iJustine on, and Linus and Justine swapped platforms, he on a Mac, she on a PC, and they were given basic tasks like “install Slack. Take a screenshot. Paste that screenshot in a Word Processing document. Save it as a PDF. Send that PDF to James in a Slack message. Uninstall Slack.” Justine immediately started looking around the back of the monitor for USB ports, rapidly found that a fresh install of vanilla Windows doesn’t (or didn’t at the time) come with a word processor that could save documents as a PDF, Linus immediately went to the web browser instead of the app store…They did similar stunts with their Linux challenge later on, though I’d kinda argue about the tasks they were set to do (such as “sign” a document, which Linus started to do cryptologically but didn’t have any keys enrolled because who the fuck does, and Luke just…copy/pasted an image of his handwriting?) But anyway. Linux is different than Windows to use, and even a VERY windows-like DE like Cinnamon is going to have differences that will feel foreign. I remember tripping over “shortcuts” being “links or launchers depending on what you want to do.”
There’s also the fact that Microsoft has done a world class job at making the average normie hate and fear the command line interface. Because universally, when you see a cmd prompt appear in Windows, it is a bad thing. That hate gets transferred to Linux, where we do routinely use the terminal because while it can be a little arcane, with a little bit of learning you can do some powerful stuff. But, because people have been so conditioned to hate the CLI by Microsoft, you get exchanges like this:
“Hey I’m trying out Pop!_OS because you nerds keep saying it’s good, and my laptop can connect to the internet with ethernet but not Wi-Fi, what’s up with that?” “Well let’s see, could you open a terminal and type sudo lshw -C network, and then copy-paste what it says here for me to look at?” “NO!!!11!! NEVAR!!! How DARE you suggest I use a computer by doing anything other than pointing at little pictures?! The indignity! It’s current year!!”
Finally, before I hit the character limit for this post, there’s just a reputation around Linux. I’ve had this happen more than once, someone will ask to use my computer to look something up on the internet. “Sure.” They find the Firefox icon on the quicklaunch bar just fine, it pops open, they’re doing fine, then they notice the color scheme and icons are a little different and they ask “uhh, what version of Windows is this?” And I say “It’s Linux Mint.” And they lift their hands off the keyboard with the same gesture as if I just told them my cute furry pet in their lap is actually a tarantula. They have it in their head that Linux is deliberately hard to use because it’s for computer nerds–they think all Linux is Suckless–and because they’re not computer nerds, they can’t use Linux. So the second they know it’s Linux, they “can’t” use it.
Side by side test with my headphones showed better speration of the range (including bass) and a more solid connection, especially while flying. Kept having LADC constantly try to bitrate switch on me, and when I set it on highest quality it kept cutting in and out at times. Sample size of 1 so YMMV.
You can change it once connected, but every time it defaults back to LDAC
ah, yeah a couple phones do this, IIRC SetEdit can fix this, but you should be careful if you do try to use it since it opens up a lot of settings that shouldnt be tinkered with
For me it all depends on what I connect to, my head unit in the car defaults to AAC, my portable BT speaker is using LDAC, my bookshelf is using AptX-HD.
Thanks Android for supporting all of them automatically!
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