I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
I’m really curious what things people can’t get running or didn’t have good enough alternatives for in Linux? Obviously, if you are a professional in X field and you need a specific program that will not work on Linux for your job, then Linux is not for you at that job. You didn’t choose MS Win or MacOSX, the company that makes the software that you need to do your job made that choice for you.
If you are not a professional, and you pirate Adobe XYZ (or whatever), and feel like you must have it on Linux, and that GIMP or Krita (or whatever) are not good enough, I don’t know what to tell you. Ask yourself, if MS and Adobe found a way to require you to pay full price for that software, or you could not use it at all, would you pay? Or would GIMP or Krita (or whatever) suddenly be good enough? Is having that software (when you are not a professional) really a good reason to stay on an operating system with so many other drawbacks?
In my experience:
MS Windows Explorer is crap. I ended up buying Directory Opus to get a decent file manager. Too many good ones to mention in Linux (though I admit, most are not as powerful as DO; maybe Dired in emacs comes closest?). (DO is awesome - if you are stuck on MS Windows, I highly recommend it.)
KWallet (and similar security apps such as KeePassXC), the various clipboard apps, the various text editors, the media players, etc. are excellent in Linux and don’t have alternatives in MS Windows that are as good or as easy to install. Actually, I guess it comes down to the repositories having everything, and much of it being installed by default. (Of course, if you are just streaming stuff through your browser, media players matter much less.)
The choice of window managers and desktop environments is a killer feature for Linux. MS Windows barely even has virtual desktops.
I am not a graphics professional, so for me, GIMP and Krita are fine. And Inkscape. And Scribus. (And, for many people who are not me, LibreOffice Draw.)
I do do a lot of writing. LaTeX (several types) and all supporting software is super helpful, but must be found and installed separately in MS Windows. Will pandoc run natively in MS Windows - you have to install python first, right? It is python, right? I’m not sure, because I didn’t need to worry about it when I installed it on Linux, from the repository. On MS Windows, you’ll probably have to worry about it.
Sure, as mentioned above, you can install many of those on MS Windows. Are they in the MS Windows store? Do you have to update them all individually each time there is an update? I don’t - they get updated when I update my system, along with the rest of my system.
One little observation sort of sums up the Linux / MS Windows debate for me: in LibreOffice, no matter which program I am using, I can open or create a new office file of any sort. Last time I used MS Office, you couldn’t create or open an MS Word file while in MS PowerPoint, nor the opposite. Instead, you had to open MS Word separately. MS Office is a ‘suite’ in name only. LibreOffice is a suite, designed to go together. Linux distros sort of feel like that too. MS Windows (last I used it), not so much.
(Obviously, I have feelings about this. Been using Linux since 1998, so yeah, feelings.)
edit: spelling error / typo
I left Japan in 2008. Phones had had cameras long enough that the makers had to add the can’t-turn-it-off shutter sound because so many chikan were taking upskirt photos on public transport.
Less salaciously, there was also panic about people taking pictures of magazine articles in bookstores and then not buying the magazine. Not sure anyone really would have tried to read an article on those tiny screens, though.
Thanks for the info!
I have no idea, so in total seriousness, I would love to hear details.
Kind of feel like the box and whisker would look something like this, only worse.
Cool. Understood. Thank you.
True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who’d been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.
Important to note here the important difference between “mean”, aka the average, and “median”, the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used “median”, the situation is actually worse than people realize.
The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the “average” American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).
In other words, the median is the more “accurate” number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.
I was shocked to find HFCS (and a bunch of other sh*t) in SOY SAUCE in the USA! WTF?
Sorry, but if you look at real soy sauce in Asia, it has like 4 ingredients - water, soy, maybe some alcohol (from the fermentation?), and 1 or 2 that I forget. USA soy sauce (that I looked at) has like 10 ingredients.
Looking at labels (on Amazon) now, Kikkoman seems to use the traditional recipe - no HFCS. But, La Choy soy sauce does have HFCS in it.
Just as a sort of tangent to this - it used to be normal (apparently all over the world) for people to wake up after a few hours, get up and do stuff for a while, then go back to bed. Basically, there were 2 sleep periods each night.
BBC has a rather long and overly detailed article about it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep
Maybe all of us waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 is a remnant of that?
Any idea what causes the air quality to change so drastically? The aircon / heater not circulating air? Doors closed and no one going in or out?
Just curious if there are other ways to remedy the situation without opening a window in the (soon to be) middle of winter.
I think AllofMP3 had the best business model - price varied based on how high quality you wanted, and they offered soooo many formats. With no DRM, of course.
Is it really the customers’ problem if the USA and Russian copyright organizations didn’t communicate very well?
I don’t disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)
I’m going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith’s. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China’s factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world’s factories were on our side.
CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We’ll see how that goes.
Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn’t enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.
CJK isn’t an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn’t force systemd on me.
Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with ‘is it deb or is it snap?’. Not sure what I’ll go to.
Haven’t used it in a few years, but if it is still like it was, I highly recommend it for regular users. Solid, good choice of packages (for regular people). Don’t remember ever having any problems with PCLinuxOS.
(I switched away only because I’m not a “regular” user.)
I heard a lot(fuck, A LOT) here how Trump will make himself a dictator and destroy the system but if one stupid clown can do it may be it’s the government system that’s bad. Really bad. And maybe you should address that issue but nobody does.
I don’t think it is as simple as that. Fox “News” has been informing republicans’ world view for like 30 years. The Supreme Court has basically been taken over by partisan Republicans, which is super ironic given how long and loudly republicans railed against “activist” judges.
Much of the used-to-be credible media is now owned by billionaires. Even the ones that aren’t want to at least keep their access in the event of a Trump win.
Trump did significant damage in his first term, but, as the cliche says, “the guardrails held”. Thing is, he learned both about those guardrails AND which people he could trust to choose him over the Constitution.
So, yeah, there are things that should be done to make the system more resilient to internal attack, but without significant time and effort, no majority of USA citizens will every be convinced to support that sort of change.
That’s what makes Linux so much fun.