“Hacker folklore that pays homage to ‘wizards’ and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.”
Tesla board member and close Musk confidant Antonio Gracias once took Musk's phone away to prevent him from tweeting late into the night, Isaacson said during a Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday.
"At one point when Elon was firing off tweets without filtering them in the least, they were on a trip and Antonio took his iPhone — Elon's iPhone — and locked it in the hotel safe with Antonio punching in the code so that Elon couldn't get up at 3 a.m. and start tweeting again," Isaacson said, describing Gracias as "one of Elon's closest friends."
Musk later got hotel security to open the safe at around 3 a.m. so he could start tweeting again, Isaacson said.
The biographer added that Musk is "almost addicted to the drama that comes with Twitter" and sees owning Twitter as a way he can be "king of the playground."
"It's something he loves — loves almost to the point of compulsion," Isaacson said, adding that some of his friends, including his brother Kimbal Musk, attempted to convince him not to buy Twitter.
At some point every professional computer person - programmer, sysadmin, whatever - will seriously consider piling all their computers into a big pile, lighting them on fire, and moving to the country to start a new life making things with their hands
Things made out of wood don't suddenly stop working cos you looked away for 15 seconds and Wood v2.1.4 is incompatible with Nails v4.0, but if you upgrade Nails you also have to upgrade Paint to v2.2 and they completely changed their API because the old API wasn't sufficiently cool anymore
Woodworking and rock climbing scratch the problem solving itch in different ways, on top of the creative (in woodworking) and physical exercise (rock climbing) itches common in most people.
Especially in the local wilderness where I don't get cell reception
It's nice knowing that literally no matter how important somebody thinks their problem is they can't reach me no matter how hard they try AND no matter how much my reflex is to check my email for "important" things that need taken care of I literally can't check it.
I am also an IT nerd that hikes as much as I can, when the weather permits. Too many of my local trails have decent reception so I have to just forget my phone exists for a while.
This past weekend, I picked up a little wooden craft kit. All the pieces were pre-cut and I just had to glue and fit things together. I put it together yesterday and I can confirm, it was the most satisfying thing I've built in ages.
Exercises using wrist strength actually help with those problems.
I haven't done climbing, but I do tend to include wrist related stuff in my routine.
e.g. nunchuck exercises are good for shoulders and wrists. Quarterstaff spinning has also been useful.
Climbing usually builds strength and helps to reduce chance of repetitive strain injuries. Finger injuries, however, are super common but fortunately don't typically hinder typing.
If you’re saying you think you’re too heavy to climb: while that may be true now, you could consider using that as an activity target. That is, you want to be able to do the thing, so you can figure out a plan (which might involve a doctor - I don’t know your situation) that gets you on a trajectory such that you will be able to get into climbing in a year or two. It won’t happen overnight, and it will likely not be easy, but you can get there!
Fwiw: I recently lost about 10kg and am doing well with keeping it off, mostly with just conscious lifestyle changes (portion control, forcing myself into more active habits, being more judicious - though not puritanical - about my food choices), and the difference in my average energy level is frankly remarkable.
Oh definitely, but far more physically than mentally when you start getting used to the country life. The good thing is that work comes in sprints with spring being the hardest by far.
I've been pretty much only trimming for days just to get everything under control and I'm still not done. And in like 2-3 weeks I'll need to do it all over again because you can practically see the grass and weeds growing. When it gets hotter and drier, the growth slows down significantly and it's more manageable. It's the same with crops, you break your back in spring and work hard in autumn, but summer and winter are pretty chill. Those sprints make it easier to get used to because you're not doing the same things day in and day out.
There's a surprising amount of overlap between programming and farming. Research, diagnosing, solving issues, refactoring, etc. And it definitely favours a DIY mindset for fixing and making things. For example I'm planning on building an automated watering system with microcontrollers because I could make it for a fraction of the price of a commercial product.
Organic is not that much more difficult if you're only growing for yourself. But being good to nature definitely makes everything harder. Like we could use chemicals to kill everything except grass, but leaving native plants is good for the ecosystem while making trimming far harder.
Make tons of money as a software dev and get a big collection of tools and retire early to
Spend the rest of your days as far away from software as you can
When does it happen? I'm 53, and still obsessed with software development and technology in general. Moving to the country sound like it's nice and quiet, but too far away from urban things I enjoy.
Oh don't get me wrong, 99% of the time I love my career and 15 years in I still get a kick out of crafting code to make the stupid little machines do what I want.
The other 1% of the time - a couple of days a year - I get home at the end of the day with a profound sense that these machines are driving me slowly mad
I've basically done that minus the lighting stuff on fire part. Moved out to the country, still making a living with the whole computer stuff but I own some forest, I'm a volunteer firefighter and I've got a huge, wild garden.
I chucked most of my computer stuff, but kept a laptop for work, and a somewhat aging desktop to game on rainy nights, and moved to a piece of forest far from others.
When we first got out here there wasn't even enough space to park our truck. I cleared enough Forest to park our travel trailer and live in while we built a tiny 12 ftx30 ft house.
Now I spend my mornings feeding birds and doing minimal tending on a very wild (by design) garden.
Strongly suggest others who can do so to give it a try.
Especially people who are in any type of job where systems, thinking and infrastructure was part of your daily thought process.
Life out here is very hard at first as we set up the infrastructure but everyday it gets a little bit easier and eventually the workload should be smaller here than it is at a normal job. That's when I'll quit my normal job.
Yeah, I've learnt over the years that having non-computer based creative hobbies is really important. I did a bit of leather working for a bit - tools are cheap on AliExpress and it doesn't take up a ton of space unless you go really deep. Spend a few hours on a weekend in the garage making a thing that is tangible and I can hold and doesn't require maintenance
I grew up on a farm, any programmer that thinks farming or ranching is better is gonna have a rude awakening as to why there are very few farmers anymore.
So no not every computer guy dreams of the farm, repairing 10miles of fence every April for the entire month all day every day isn’t what I would consider an improvement over programming. And that’s the easy part wait till you gotta help an animal struggling to give birth.
I get programmers have this idea that farming or ranching is more pure somehow but it is murder on your body and soul in ways you wont understand. programming and computer stuff is a cakewalk in comparison. more politics but learn to play the game of thrones and its not too bad.
There was a team of students presenting their work to ~200 people. Right in the middle, a pop-up says updates are finished and the computer needs to restart. It has a helpful 60-second countdown, but "cancel" is grayed out, so all they can do is watch.
I was only in the audience and I still have nightmares.
For every 1 person who knows how to use the windows command line, there are 50 people struggling because they didn't embed their video into their PowerPoint, or worse, their USB stick only contains a shortcut to their actual .ppt file
I love these comments. If you need to use the command line (the largest argument people have against Linux) why are people still arguing to stay on Windows? Hell, Linux you don't even need the terminal if you don't want to use it and choose the right distro.
(I recognize that for schools and offices, people don't have a choice. These students were probably on a personal laptop though, so they could have a choice. The issue is Windows comes as default and no one actually makes a choice. They don't choose Windows. They just have Windows.)
Windows always gets a pass from it's fans. They also tend to overestimate average users' proficiency with computers (meaning windows) way more than linux users.
Most windows users would be afraid to change stuff on CP or Settings never mind opening up policy editor or registry editor.
They regularly fail to install applications on windows (a big part of them would probably not even try) or install something different than intended.
Usually they end up running million unnecessary things on startup, having completely unresponsive systems. They just shrug and cope with it till they pay someone to format their computer or they buy a new one.
The arrogance of some Linux users... You just can't fathom that most people just want to use the OS their PC came with. These people don't want to struggle with the incompatibilities that come with Linux systems. Troubleshooting Linux systems is a daunting task for most casual users. It's great that you use Linux because fuck greedy corporations. But stop being so uppity about it. This toxic behavior is what steers people away from Linux forums.
You just can’t fathom that most people just want to use the OS their PC came with.
No they don't they want to get a task done. The vast majority of users doesn't know what an OS or a browser is never mind that there are alternatives.
These people don’t want to struggle with the incompatibilities that come with Linux systems.
Most people are simply not aware of Linux systems let alone linux system incompatibilities.
Troubleshooting Linux systems is a daunting task for most casual users.
No shit, troubleshooting windows is a daunting task for most casual users. They either nag/pay someone to try and fix it or simply cope with it. And windows fucks up all the time, especially for most users.
It’s great that you use Linux because fuck greedy corporations. But stop being so uppity about it. This toxic behavior is what steers people away from Linux forums.
People don't just randomly get on Linux forums, especially linux memes forums.
Nor is my previous comment in any way or form toxic. I just pointed out the blind spot of windows fans, you just can't handle criticism.
Then it proceeds to take 10 minutes to boot. Happened to me before an important meeting once and i just couldn't believe it. wtf makes Microsoft think they can get away with shit like this?
Some versions like Home and Education might lack the options, but most Enterprise versions and LTSC versions can let you delay updates via the menu or disable updates completely via group policy fuckery.
Other OSes can update everything while running and you just reboot to the updated system. Microsoft could definitely fix their update process they are not incompetent, they just don't care.
The super duper shitty thing is that they could have canceled it by opening the Run dialog box and typing "shutdown -a", so it's not even like canceling wasn't an option. M$ just decided to be dicks about it
It only happens if you neglect to install updates for a very long time, which is a pretty dumb thing to do. This is actually a non-issue if you just install the damn updates once they're announced. Just update when shutting down. Also, using home edition is pretty dumb. With the pro version you'll likely never run into this problem.
I am using 2.99.18 (non release, unstable build). Non destructive editing has landed. You can make adjustments through the usual menus and then enable/disable the adjustment under layer effects.
I’ve tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I’m not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it’s hard to learn.
I use GIMP for memes and here's my two favorite tips
Hit the forward slash key / to open a command palette and jump to any action
To remove backgrounds, use a layer mask. select around the object and paint a white/black section on the layer mask. Here comes the trick: use a Gaussian filter on the layer mask to create a transition from black to white and the crop job looks a lot less choppy.
My anti-tip
Adding text and shapes sucks and I never found a way to make it better. Export your image and finish the job in Krita, Pinta, Photopea, ...
Smart people use terms like gaussian blur to refer to a blur distribution rather than a non technical term such as feather. Feathers are what helps birds fly for example.
Let's try:
"You can feather the pedals on your car to make it drift."
"You can feather the pedals on your Ford to make it do the Tokyo style turns."
Any tricks on getting the fuzzy select tool to work? Even after adjusting the threshold, it is just garbage in my experience. Nothing close to Affinity/Photoshop. Unless I am selecting something that is in front of a very solid background, I just use a paint brush on a layer mask in order to "cut out" an object.
The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% "just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with", 20% "you are wrong for wanting that in the first place" or "you are wrong for having this issue", 15% "this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching", 4% "OMG yes I have this issue too!"...
...and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it's a known issue.
It's infuriating trying to find solutions to issues with Autodesk.
But you did forget a classic one: "Hello I'm X from Autodesk support, you should open a support ticket so we can discuss this issue in a more one on one manner." And then the thread is closed without a solution.
Yeah, I recently found a post there where a person wanted to modify a downloaded mesh. The first comment was telling them they would need years of experience to do it well. The OP responded that they had figured out a solution that they were happy with, to which someone told him that his results were shitty and then explained a way to do it better. When the OP got upset at this back to back dismissal, everyone unanimously decided they were an asshole.
I've been using Gimp for years. It's the only way I know. If I tried to use photoshop I would have a hard time getting anything done too. I'm really good with gimp though.
I've used Gimp all through my teenage years. And I used it a LOT. It was quite a difficult transition to Photoshop (which my workplace uses). But once I got the hang of photoshop, I realized how convoluted Gimp really is.
Half the time spent in Gimp is making backups before making an edit. A third of your layers will be backup layers in case you change your mind about a design decision. The whole design process is super inflexible and therefor kills creativity.
Want to use an effect like gaussian blur or drop shadow? Make sure you backup your layer!
Want to edit text after you stretched it all out? I hope you made a backup of that layer!
Want to work with large files with many layers? You better hit ctrl S after every edit, because the program just might crash on you if you make a difficult selection!
To be fair, I haven't used much Gimp since 2.8, so if stuff is different now: awesome!
And I admire all volunteers that work to make stuff better. But for now, I'll stay away from it if I need to do heavy editing.
It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it's not a matter of the workflow just being different -- it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other "big" productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It's the only CAD software I use even though it's a pain in my ass.
The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.
For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.
And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.
I always wondered if I could contribute/volunteer to a FOSS somehow with some UIX stuff, but I don't even know where to start. Would you just draw a concept ui for the team to work out or something?
Not that I'm great at it, but man, we gotta start somewhere, right?
This is probably common. The people that work on UI often aren't the people who do pull requests. But I think if you want to contribute it would be best to get in touch with a maintainer on the chat of the project. Projects often have a matrix/irc/discord on the git page.
So, why do UI people not use and contribute to FOSS then? Are they all on Mac? Then go complain to them or contribute your desired UI improvements. FOSS isn't an all you can eat buffet.
Personally, I think UI people are less idealistic and I do look down on them for that.
It's super hard to get involved as a UI person. If you're a developer, you can just rock up to a project and fix bugs, and if you follow the coding style they'll probably get accepted.
If you want to successfully contribute as a UI person you have to convince a bunch of developers that you know what they should be doing better than they do. It basically never happens.
My old best friend and I used to be a programming tag team that worked pretty well; he'd slap together w semi-functional version of the idea we had and then id go in and make the UI make sense and fix all the logic bugs and typos.
I'm not saying I'm some perfect UI guru or anything but the way he (and other people I've met) seem to have no internal base knowledge of shit like "similar settings probably shouldn't go on completely opposite sides of the screen under different menus" or "5-deep nested drop-down menus hurt people's souls"
Honestly I still struggle a lot with this. I can click around a UI and feel what might confuse a user, but building a UI from scratch feels like such a shot in the dark.
There's also two main plus one lesser issue that are less commonly discussed:
Lack of manpower. FOSS devs often doing it as a side project on top of some other and/or a full-time job, so that even lowers one's ability of concentrate on stuff like the UI, when you're already working hard on fixing bugs, looking up things (which is getting harder and harder thanks to AI slop - I once managed to destroy a Linux on my Raspberry Pi while trying to adjust the path variables).
Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of your application. There are many times I haven't noticed a a very uncomfortable part of my GUI after months of use, then I had to refactor things, which obviously took time away from other things. This also affects the users already in the userbase.
Elitism is also a factor. A lot of people like the feeling of being part of a special group, and for them, the steep learning curve is a feature, not a bug. I've seen Blender users being angry at the devs for "spoonfeeding" the normies, and letting in all kinds of people. Also just look at OP's image.
KiCAD has also improved greatly over the last few years. It still has an opinion on how the work flow should be, but that work flow moves pretty well. It's gotten easier to find pre-made footprints, too.
I stuggled with GIMP at first, it was super frustrating because it does UI things differently than other image tools.
i.e. in other tools your active layer masks your drag selection, and in GIMP I would constantly be grabbing lmages from another layer, till I realized the pixel under pointer determines what image is moved. That function can make you highly productive since you don't need to preset layer, but god was it enraging at first
Photoshop is also hard to learn. What's your point? Just because it's different to what you used to does not means it's more or less difficult to learn.
Not having Paint.NET sucked when I switched to Linux. I got very used to it and that was the one I missed most... it took a few years bouncing between programs but I'm happy with Krita now. GIMP just never clicked for me unfortunately.
I sometimes think about making a Paint.NET clone for linux but i have too many other projects and hobbies i wanna do instead yk
Just how old this meme is: OSX 10.9 mavericks was the first free mac update, it was released in 2013. The meme should be created before that. Iirc Windows 7 was the first win with forced and annoying updates, it was released in 2009. So this meme should be from that era, 11-15 years old.
Use debian oldstable, usually 1-2 security updates each months, nothing else. If you need a newer app, install it as flatpak, they can't bork your system.
I tried to install Win 10 in a VM recently and it spend hours updating after installing from the ISO. Also you have to turn off the internet to not create a Microsoft account? What a pain it is now.
There are newer releases, obviously if you download an older build of windows, you have to download and install each updates manually. It's not a win only thing, it's the same with every os, e.g. download Ubuntu 16.10, it will take a while to upgrade to the current version. Windows 10 was released in 2015, I don't know which release you downloaded.
Well, now they just make you throw out the old Mac hardware and buy new for $1299 (8gb RAM lol) because it's now out of support for the latest MacOS and the newest versions of Adobe Suite/MS Office/insert productivity work related proprietary software suite here is on board with Apple's bullshit and won't run on older MacOS versions.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We gotta figure out a better way than strapping ourselves to a continuously exploding bomb and pulling some serious Gs for 8 minutes.
Wonder how some of those SSTO space plane projects are doing...there was a British one I can't remember. Used hybrid air-breathing scramjets, switching to internal oxidizer once it was going fast and high enough.
Space planes carry along heavy-as-fuck wings, control surfaces and a lot of other bullshit that's only useful inside the atmosphere, and which massively increase fuel consumption for every single maneuver while your space plane is actually where you want it to do stuff - in space. And the only benefit is that the atmosphere helps lift and fuel your vehicle to about 10% of orbital velocity. The other 90% it will have to accelerate just like any other rocket.
The SpaceX approach is much better: Land and reuse all parts of your rocket, but don't carry them with you further than where they're useful. Rockets leave the atmosphere where wings would work within a few minutes anyway.
While courts have ruled source code is first amendment protected. Your statement is still very very wrong. Just because it's first amendment protected doesn't mean it can't be classified normally or made illegal to leak because of ITAR.
But go leak some of the source code from XKeyscore or a schematic of a pair of GPNVG if you'd like to test our code classification and ITAR systems.
I'm not taking about sealing some government secrets. I'm taking about building a fun hobby project with some sort of targeting system. Think a small rocket that drops a payload or a water balloon launcher.
Okay but that has no relevance at all to what the comment you were replying to was about. Companies contracted by the government and DOD specifically to create rockets are guaranteed to be covered by ITAR. Meaning open sourcing them would be impossible, regardless of the first amendment or anything else.
There's a massive massive difference between the software for a DOD contracted rocket like SpaceX makes, and hobbyist rocketry.
Olay but again as has been pointed out to you, that has no bearing on government contracted products like this, whether that's code or rockets or anything else the government doesn't want to just share with the entire world.
Why not. If everyone has it, everyone will be afraid to use it, because they know everyone else has it, but what they don't know is how many have developed a working prototype.
Conditioning everyone to see their computers as media consumption kiosks instead of the powerful, productive machines they are. That's where MS OSes are headed. They tried too early with Windows 8 Metro, but they haven't lost sight of that concept.
"My TV shows ads so it's only natural my computer does too." - I bet a lot of people already think like this.
The Telemetry collection service does a good job of that already, especially on laptops where it wakes them from sleep, and eats through the battery while idle in a backpack. I've been stung by this many times since Windows 8 - I now unplug then hibernate my last remaining Windows laptop, work-issued.
Also moved as much personal gear as possible over to various Linux distros a while ago, except my PC where some games cannot detect my sim peripherals & freetrack emulation under WINE
Hilarious when people want to resort to “I WASN’T WRITING FORMALLY” in these situations. Just take the L and acknowledge it was a flub. Much less cringe that way.
Lol it's not grammar, you've used an entirely different word that just sounds kinda similar. You're essentially saying the actual words used don't matter in these two sentences because they sound similar:
Consider this: when you speak the listeners know what you mean based on the rest of the sentence. When you write you give the reader the intended word through spelling. People who read will see your words and assume you really meant "then" instead of "than", and the sentence will make little sense.
The words "I" and "eye" sound similar, but if you write "eye" I will read a sentence first thinking you are trying to say something about an eye, then when it breaks down, go back and find the issue.
End that my friend is less then eye-deal for comprehension.
It's not grammar it's an entitlement different word. It would be like refusing to call a dog a dog because you think it sounds better to call it a cat.
Edit - you know what, I'm leaving that auto correct in. Entitlement looks better here to me than entirely.
We write our language (swiss-german) like this 😂 everything is allowed and there are strangely very little misunderstandings. Only bad thing about is, that swiping keyboard rarely work with it.
And us german-germans think you are very weird and you might as well call your spoken language something other than german, cause no one can understand it anyways. Also why are you so afraid of this: ß?
I do with English would switch to phonetic spelling, including the eventi of the speaker, but we're never going to switch. At least the standardized spelling does have a very minor advantage in terms of disambiguation with homophones. But then we had to go and mess up read/read and lead/lead.
Read/ret lead/let -> easy 😜 but how to write "do" I mean it is not a normal spoken "o" and not exactly a "u" like it is a "u" but without (yo)u
Write phonetic is more easy in German, I think, or maybe only because it is my birth language 🤔
They reject u even though you spoken truest worders good are.
Nobody who spoke English that read your sentence misunderstood what you said based and than vs then and that English doesn't have to be pretty to get the job done
I had to read your comment at least twice before I could parse it.
So basically what you're both saying is that you are so incredibly selfish, you don't care if someone needs to read your comments multiple times in order to not misunderstand you, as long as it's easier for you and you don't have to bother learning to be understood
But it is fluid and changing. Do you know anyone who would know what Þæs oferéode, ðisses swá mæg or some other sentence from old english means, or someone who thinks that jail is spelt gaol?
No, you're thinking of an orgy. Trains and gangbangs are both many-to-one, with the difference between them being that the former is sequential while the latter is simultaneous.
This is more porn knowledge. Most people don't actually experience gangbangs or orgies in their lives. Maybe if someone is into the whole swinger culture.
Edit: and yes, this joke is older than the gods as evidenced by the presence of finger, and I'm not sure clean is a thing in modern UN*X distros. Not in FreeBSD at any rate
Look, some of us take our time, and so others think the process has stalled, but it will complete eventually. Just take a number and you will be summoned in the order you arrived.
And will someone hose the party favor down? And how do you even get that on the ceiling?! Joey TAKE THE HOSE OUT OF YOUR ASS!
American here, never once heard this phrase used. Seems kind of dumb to have it, like it doesn't even save time describing the situation and if you're already talking about this then you're past the point of vulgar language.
Getting (CONSENTUALLY) gangbanged by A LOT of guys, like enough that it starts to involve logistics planning to accommodate that many people being in a single space at one time.
Programs running graphically (Firefox, your file browser, etc.) need a way to tell the system "draw these pixels here". That's what the display server does; it takes all these applications, works out where their windows are and manages that pixel data.
XOrg has historically been the display server in common use, but it's very old and very cobbled together. It generally struggles with "modern" things that must people expect today. Multimonitor setups, vsync, hdr and all that. They work, but support is hacked together and brittle.
Wayland is a replacement for XOrg that was designed from scratch to fix a lot of these issues. But it's been an uphill battle because XOrg is the final boss of legacy codebases.
tl;dr They're both software that manages drawing pixels from applications to the display.
That hill has a name. GNOME. Wayland's governance on the whole is a fucking disaster (alternatively, the best sitcom you'll ever see), but GNOME is a particularly malignant growth on the project's taint, with completely baseless NACKs that have delayed some protocols by months, and missing/incomplete features in Mutter.
So it's software that handles software wanting to display things on the screen. Because having each piece of software do it itself would be not only chaos but a massive security concern. And it's a big deal because it fixes (by replacing) the old software with something that's easier to work with than the old ways of doing things (due to all new code that's not spaghetti that's hacked together over decades).
Because having each piece of software do it itself would be not only chaos but a massive security concern.
Not really, the main point is that (most) apps don't know where they are on the screen, whether they're minimized, on the active workspace, ... and they don't care either. That's the responsibility of the window manager.
The app tells the display server "I need a window to display these pixels" and that's it. And the window manager, well, manages these windows.
On the topic of security, X11 doesn't handle security at all, that's one of the main issues. So any graphical app can read the other windows' pixels, grab everything you type, everything you copy, ... OTOH Wayland isolates apps so they can't do that by default. Apps that really need to (screenshot apps, ...) can use "portals" to ask for these permissions.
I use wayland, but be warned that there are downsides.
X11 is 40 years old. Which means that even though it has 40 years of bad decisions baked into it, it also has 40 years of features and tooling built around it.
And in some cases, things are purposefully broken in the name of security as mentioned above. Writing a keylogger on X11? Easy. Every app can watch the keyboard even when they aren't in focus. So if I type my password into firefox, Discord can listen. Hope you don't have any malicious apps just patiently listening to all your keystrokes.
Getting rid of input listening sounds great! .... Except for the concept of global keybinds. Have a Push to talk button in discord that you need it to be able to listen to while youre playing a game? Sorry, the game is in focus, so discord can't see ANY of your input. Including the push to talk button. Different wayland servers have different ways of handling this with their portals. Some don't have it at all. And the ones that do don't always have great solutions.
One major issue that has been in wayland debate hell... how do multi-window apps communicate with each other. For example GIMP. The editor window is a separate window from the toolkit which is a separate from the layer view. GIMP on X11 knows where all of its windows are because it can see everything. if you wanted GIMP to save all the window positions, it could. GIMP on Wayland has no idea where each window is relative to each other. Each window knows its own size and shape. And thats it. It doesnt know where on the screen it is. Which means it doesnt know where it's other sub windows are relative to itself. Which means GIMP on Wayland can't really save the window positions for next run. Wayland is working on a protocol for handling this, but its been caught up in debate hell last I saw. This is a prime example of a thing X11 had. And Wayland will someday have, but the 40 year headstart and disregard for security gives X11 a huge headstart.
Most of these problems have workarounds and solutions, but you might find yourself in a situation where you do in fact need to implement a workaround instead of having everything Just Work.
"Better" means different things to different people. Architecture and security and technologically? Wayland is better. Just Works and its what your apps were probably built to run on so less weird edge case issues? X11 is still better just due to inertia. (And again, I use Wayland, I'm willing to deal with the workarounds, but you do you).
But it's been an uphill battle because XOrg is the final boss of legacy codebases.
Also because Wayland forces every compositor to be an unmodifiable monolith instead of following the UNIX philosophy. For example I'm currently running i3 inside of Xfce because the de, wm, compositor, and every other part are doing their own thing and can be replaced. With Wayland I'd need to fork the compositor and spend a ridiculous amount of time on something that's trivial in xorg.
And let's not forget the garbage pile of tools that got abandoned a week after release because Wayland introduces breaking changes on a regular basis. You want unified shortcuts across multiple compositors like with sxhkd? Tough luck, the only tool was abandoned after the first version and doesn't work anymore. On the other side you've got 15 rofi alternatives you need to dig through to find out which ones are still maintained and might work on your device.
On top of that Nvidia GPUs have so many issues, and while that's not solvable by Wayland, it's still a major issue that still hasn't been fixed after 15 years, but might maybe soon™.
Finally, the security improvements have gave me nothing but headaches whenever I tried using Wayland. No matter the distro or compositor, screen sharing and recording never worked for me. Give permissions, share whole screen or just window, it's either black or the program is not showing I'm trying to share ate all.
You can't blame it all on xorg when Wayland is still simply far worse for a large part of the community.
The Wayland protocol board can never agree on anything. It takes them years to decide to consider adding something.
Also Wayland is just a protocol at the end of the day so implementation is up to the software developers. I also think that the Unix philosophy holds back software that could be good. You shouldn't prioritize it over good battery life and low overhead.
I also think that the Unix philosophy holds back software that could be good.
IMO the UNIX philosophy is the reason why Linux survived. Imagine if every distro had a single DE, or you had issues with pulseaudio and couldn't replace it with pipewire.
You shouldn’t prioritize it over good battery life and low overhead.
And why would separating functionality into different tools cause you to have a worse battery life? You don't get to have tlp on other OS because it's all integrated
Q1: No, it does not require X. But some software even if not graphical, requires X libs for whatever reason (e.g. Using Qt)
Edit: to answer Q2: I don't think there is technically a way to interact with the system without a TTY but thats technicalities. Your more practical answer is to use SSH to log in and interact. This is how most IoT things work which run Linux and have no display capability at all.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fbterm can take care of some of the limitations (use TTF fonts, for example) but support in general for nongraphical environments on Linux at the moment is not amazing
Wayland isn't software as it is just a set of protocols. The desktops and window managers take the place of X on Wayland. That's why it has better performance.
2 other responses I got confirmed that such thing happens and you say otherwise. Doesn't Gnome breaks third party extensions that provides users basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place but the devs don't want to implement? Is the meme wrong?
Not that guy but phrases like "basic functionality" are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can't live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.
I haven't run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.
How much do you use your OS, though? I'd characterize it more as it works best by staying out of the way.
I turn the computer on, load a game or an occasional productive application, and I don't think about it any more than that. My only real interaction with it beyond picking some initial settings is super+search for the thing I actually want to interact with.
Basic functionality, as in Server Side Decorations(SSD) along with Client Side Decorations(CSD); features both users & application devs expect to be there. Gnome Wayland lacks SSD which is a big problem for devs that build applications without CSD, e.g. especially Game devs, and it even causes negative effects across the rest of Linux ecosystem. Literally everything; KDE Plasma, Weston, Windows, MacOS and so on have both SSD & CSD; that's how ubiquitously important this feature set is; delivering the best of both in a manner that gives developers flexibility while keeping consistency for the end user. In fact, Gnome not having both is damaging for accessibility (e.g. users with limited vision) across the Linux ecosystem as well.
The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn't exist.
Last I checked GNOME devs said "no, we will never support it, because we've DePRecATeD the tray in GTK".
It's functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn't fall under "basic functionality" is either a GNOME dev or a troll.
Swear I'm neither of those things, but you're talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?
This seems like it'd fall pretty neatly in the "you use it, so you think it's required basic functionally; other people don't, so they don't care about it" realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn't seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.
I can see how frustrating it'd be if there's something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it's not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don't care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that's an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.
I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can't be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream "I'm running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!" Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.
It's not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME's bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common... Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.
I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME's approach is incompatible with "general use" and only works (for now) because of canonical's weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.
Also they didn't replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.
Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.
I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.
Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.
I wouldn't recommend sway to someone who isn't actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).
basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place
Who gets to decide what's "basic" functionality? Each desktop's team has their vision for what they want to implement. Something that might be basic to one person might not be in someone else's vision or...
the devs don’t want to implement
...is being worked on but needs design. GNOME is design-oriented. It doesn't matter how much you scream that something needs implementing if no one designs how that implementation will work and why it should be implemented in the first place. It's not about "not wanting", it's about making sure that when something is implemented, that it'll work well both now and in the future.
Their whole attitude towards development is similar, down to not working with other dekstops and insisting on doing things the way that works best for them regardless if it's worse for the linux ecosystem overall.
I guess congratulations on proving the point I made on my other post?
Gnome’s attitude towards everything seems to be “$#¨$ you, like just actually go &%$# yourself. You do things our way or you use something else. We have decided these things are useless, if you think they are necessary you are a $&@# and %$#$ you and the horse you rode in on”
Nah, GNOME is worse mostly because it's the default on a ton of distros, so them having this attitude actively get's in the way of cross-desktop development instead of just being annoying.
If you refuse to understand I'll just refuse to engage further then, keep wasting your time on pointless discussions on free software built by volunteers and what they spend their time on. I'll go back to actually working on them in whatever way I can.
The only thing you got wrong is that the toilet extension would be a third-party thing, and Gnome devs would actively insult anyone who dared be upset they broke it.
Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome workflow and got used to it, but I'm really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.
I've been daily driving the pre-alpha since January, it's definitely got a bit of jank, but it's in really good shape. The alpha should be pretty usable, and I think by the beta it should be pretty much good to go.
Maybe I'll have to give it a shot! I'm on a 3070 Ti, and I've had issues in the past but I'll have to figure it out eventually, since I'm trying to make the switch away from Windows :D
A month ago as of tomorrow I got fed up with Windows and googled "gaming Linux", picked Garuda because it was near the top result and I like the FFXIV Garuda, was wiping my Windows drive within fifteen minutes of deciding I was done, and have been gaming with my 3080 since. Haven't touched X11 because Garuda defaults to Wayland and I don't even know the difference between them, and so far everything has just worked
I've heard that the brand new Nvidia 555 drivers actually work with Wayland. I was ready to switch my gaming laptop to Linux but I may wait a few weeks for the driver to release out of beta. (Arch users shut up, lol.)
When I first started on Linux with Fedora probably a little over 15 years ago, I used gnome just because it was different. At some point I played with Enlightenment, and now I use KDE. It was different when I was more interested in screwing around with my system. Now that I use it for work, I just need everything to be as reliable, persistent, and easy as possible. I haven't used gnome in many years, but I hear these stories all the time and I just don't want to deal with something that'll wrench my workflow when I have other shit to do and no time to play diagnostics.
Yeah, KDE's basically at the point you don't need GNOME imo, it's so customizable you can make it basically look/function the same as GNOME without having to put up with GNOME's dumber decisions
Do you know how vim has distributions like lunarvim, lazvim, nvchad, etc.? Simply installing something like lazyvim can quickly and easily convert vim from a text editor to a full blown IDE.
I think Gnome needs something like this. A curated set of plugins that are easy to install and maintain compatibility with different versions of Gnome - something that would deal with the API churn in Gnome while maintaining a stable, usable desktop environment.
I don't know if this is feasible, because I haven't used Gnome since 2.x, but I think it would really help make it an actual full blown DE.
The problem is the Gnome team doesn't give a flying rat's ass about maintaining a stable api. I've never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it's much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.
I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can't be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality
You forgot multi-monitor support. The extension broke for me a couple of years back and the author became AWOL. My workaround is to open the clock app on my secondary monitor when gaming in order to track time now that I can't see the clock in the taskbar.
It's more like, there is one way to go to the toilet but it involves going into a small porcelain cup. They refuse to admit that's not practical, or that it doesn't work for everybody, or allow people to use anything else. You will use the little porcelain cup no matter how absurd it is and that's it.
If the goal of a DE is to attract users, Vanilla GNOMEs implementation fails to be attractive to most people as it is too foreign from established standards. Extensions are something that are actively not supported officially by GNOME, so using them would not fix the fact that a user expects a minimize, maximize, and close buttons and will not have them on vanilla GNOME, they will not have a Windowed start menu on GNOME, nor a System tray or traditional taskbar. What this user is saying is not "wrong" as they are saying the developers of GNOME want their DE how they want their DE, and people who prefer a more traditional desktop will most likely not like Vanilla GNOME because of that fact.
No one is entitled to random free custom development work.
Meaning gnome devs themselves are not entitled to the free custom development work of the third party extension devs, and therefore gnome is actively taking advantage of the third party developers(Third-party developers feel undervalued & exploited, potentially leading to burnout and abandonment of projects) while all round making it harder for them to maintain the extensions(GNOME's decision not to provide a stable API for extensions makes it challenging for third-party developers to maintain their work across GNOME versions).
This is where KDE Community is different, they actively support, communicate, collaborate, etc. with 3rd party devs to build a strong relationship & a strong ecosystem.
In fact, Gnome devs are all around abrasive to the entire Linux ecosystem, including but not limited to the Wayland development team & the development teams of other desktop environments(GNOME's design decisions, such as only supporting CSD & lobbying Wayland to mandate CSD & the controversy over the accent color protocol, have led to conflicts with the entire Linux ecosystem), their own user base(GNOME's communication style is dismissive & unresponsive to community feedback), application developers(GNOME's decisions sometimes force other projects to adapt or create workarounds, as seen with the server-side decoration controversy, further complicating development efforts), third party developers, and even amongst themselves(There are reports of conflicts even within the GNOME development team, suggesting internal tensions).
Gnome will die the second Cosmic (Epoch) DE gets remotely close to 1:1 parity. It will be more stable, it'll be more feature complete & support modern features, it'll have a similar level of polish, a similar yet way more flexible design language and the devs will actively work with the Linux ecosystem & so on.
At that point the only people left over for Gnome, are those stuck on x11, and die hard shills/fanboys. Many developers are very much sick of Gnomes shit already and only put up with it because it's popular.
Perhaps or perhaps not. Every new desk top was going to be better than Gnome when introduced. I remember having such high hopes for Elementary back in the day too. It was so elegant and smooth to use.
System76 is no stranger to desktop development nor Rust-lang. Their team is relatively large, skilled, diverse, and highly dedicated, with years of experience in high-level and low-level development, UX/UI design, and even an OS built from scratch (Redox OS), and so on. Unlike elementary OS's Pantheon, which builds upon existing frameworks like GTK & forked Gnome components, Cosmic (Epoch) is entirely written from scratch, toolkits and all. System76's approach is also more comprehensive and ambitious compared to elementary OS. They're developing native Rust applications like the COSMIC app store, terminal, screenshot tool, and text editor. Early performance tests show promising results, even in virtual environments.
The company's financial resources also allow for significant investment in COSMIC's development, supporting a dedicated team and a long-term vision. This contrasts with elementary OS's more gradual, community-driven growth.
Pop_OS! is also an already very popular distribution, and importantly popular amongst newbies. System76 is also a hardware vendor meaning they can tightly integrate Cosmic with their hardware, and in fact do so much more easily than what they've already been doing with Pop_OS!.
Compared to ElementaryOS, System76 is in a much better position.
As I said, I briefly used gnome in the far past and just remember being weirded out by the design choices that felt very "Apple like" . So them pulling an "Apple" and doing the "we know better than the user" doesn't feel out of place.
Microsoft at least isn't trying to be a walked garden (at least, they didn't used to)
It's not much, but the bar to be "better than Apple" from that perspective ain't exactly high
(Also, since they didn't mention Microsoft at all or make some statement about how Apple was the worst, I don't see how it even implies that... If you inferred that, I think that's on you)
Apple is garbage but they have made some good design decisions. Microsoft rarely has. And no it's not "on me". Anyone using Mac windows and Linux over the years would see that most Linux DEs copy a lot from either MS or Apple, most outside of gnome primary mimicking windows.
Anyone using Mac windows and Linux over the years would see that most Linux DEs copy a lot from either MS or Apple, most outside of gnome primary mimicking windows.
So you literally just know gnome and kde plasma. That's cute.
Everything out there is heavily influenced by MS and/or apple, the majority of influence coming from MS. Feels pretty apparent in my experience that if you're shitting all over apple uis then you prefer the alternative. Apple's so easily criticized but like 90% of their design choices I think fall outside that and are vastly more intuitive than MS shit.
When did I state any opinion on UI in this conversation? I just said not everything is apple and MS, and no shit most stuff has similarities people get used to features and there's stuff that just can't be done in more ways. Also I actually find KDE like a sweet spot between windows and android, with a few original and apple features. Just keep whining about how superior you think you are like an average apple fanboy
I don't get this comment. Gnome is not trying to make a walled garden, and Microsoft has taken every chance they get at making walled gardens (Windows phone, windows 8 arm, various proprietary file formats and protocols), they just haven't been very successful at it.
In some ways I think the filesystem is philosophically the exact opposite of systemd --- I can boot my system with an ext4 root, with a btrfs /home...or vice versa. Or add some ZFS, or whatever. The filesystem is (with the exception of some special backup schemes) largely independent of the rest of the system, despite being of core importance.
On the other hand, I can't change my init system (i.e., systemd) without serious, serious work.
It's also "infectious" software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn't all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments. https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/
This isn't a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.
Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn't immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
It's more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they're forced to use doesn't even respect their concerns, they're going to start rejecting the tool.
it doesn't run a job it waits for your jobs to end. You can set the default want time. Its the same thing on windows that asks programs to close before shutting down. If a critical application got stuck systemd has nothing to do with it
I know what it is. But it literally says "A stop job is running" and since english is not my first language, I had no good idea how to better express the technicalities of it in a short sentence.
As for it having nothing to do with systemd:
I am dual booting arch and artix, because I am currently in the middle of transitioning. I have the exact same packages on both installs (+ some extra openrc packages on artix).
About 30% of the shutdowns on arch do the stop job thing. It happens randomly without any changes being done by me between the sessions.
0% of the shutdowns on artix take more than 5 seconds.
I know that I can configure it. But why is 90 seconds a default? It is utterly unreasonable. You cite windows doing it, but compare it instead to mac, which has extremely fast powerups and shutdowns.
And back to the technicalities, openrc doesn't say "a stop job is running", so who runs the stop job if not systemd?
The question you should be asking is what's wrong with that job which is causing it to run for long enough that the timeout has to kill it.
Systemd isn't the problem here, all it's doing is making it easy to find out what process is slowing down your shutdown, and making sure it doesn't stall forever
I will not debug 3rd party apps. I don't even want to think about my OS nor ask any questions about it. I want to use a PC and do my job. That includes it shutting down asap when I need it to shut down asap.
systemd default - shutdown not always asap
openrc default - shutdown always asap
whatever the heck macs init system is - shutdown always asap
It may be not the "fault" of systemd, but neither does it do anything helpful to align itself with my needs.
The default is as long as it is because most people value not losing data, or avoiding corruption, or generally preserving the proper functioning of software on their machine, over 90 seconds during which they could simply walk away.
Especially when those 90 seconds only even come up when something isn't right.
If you feel that strongly that you'd rather let something malfunction, then you're entirely at liberty to change the configuration. You don't have to accept the design decisions of the package maintainers if you really want to do something differently.
Also, if you're that set against investigating why your system isn't behaving the way you expect, then what the hell are you doing running arch? Half the point of that distro is that you get the bleeding edge of everything, and you're expected to maintain your own damn system
If an app didn't manage to shut down in 90seconds, it is probably hanging and there will be "DaTa LoSs" no matter if you kill it after 2 seconds or after 90.
Been running arch for over 5 years now.
I track all my hours and for arch maintenance I've spent a grand total of ~41 hours (desktop + laptop and including sitting there and staring at the screen while an update is running). The top three longest sessions were:
btrfs data rescue after I deleted a parent snapshot of my rollback (~20h)
grub update (~2h)
jdk update which was fucky (~30min)
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It's about 8.2 hours per year (or ~10minutes per week) which is less than I had to spend on windows maintenance (~22h/y afair, about half of that time was manually updating apps by going to their website and downloading a newer version).
Ubuntu also faired worse for me with two weekends of maintenance in a year (~32h), because I need the bleeding edge and some weird ass packages for work and it resulted in a frankenstein of PPAs and self built shit, which completely broke on every release upgrade.
btrfs data rescue after I deleted a parent snapshot of my rollback
Can you expand a bit on that? I thought it didn't matter if you deleted parent snapshots because the extents required by the child would still be there.
Honestly, I have no idea why it went wrong or why it let me do that. Also my memory is a bit fuzzy since it's been a while, but as best I can remember what I did step by step:
fuck around with power management configs
using btrfs-assistant gui app, rolled back to before that
btrfs-assistant created an additional snapshot, called backup something, I didn't really pay attention
reboot, all seemed good
used btrfs-list to take a look, the subvolume that was the current root / was a child of the aformentioned backup subvolume
started btrfs-assistant and deleted the backup subvolume
system suddenly read only
reboot, still read only
btrfs check said broken refs and some other errors,
i tried to let btrfs check fix the errors, which made it worse, now I couldn't even mount the drive anymore because btrfs was completely borked
used btrfs rescue, which got all files out onto an external drive successfully
installed arch again and rsync the rescued files over the new install, everything works as before, all files are there
btrfs check said broken refs and some other errors,
Gotcha. That must have been a kernel bug (or hardware error), none of the userspace utilities could cause it unless they were trying to manipulate the block device directly, which would be really dumb. It's possible it wasn't even related to the subvolume manipulation.
I think the init system is the best part of systemd. It is sooo easy to use. You don't have to write the same complicated shell script for your software like everyone else. You just give systemd the path to your executable and that's basically it. It does the rest and you don't have to worry about PID files or forking the actual software. Systemd basically runs it like you did while developing it.
I think what people don't like are all the other parts of systemd that seem to be tightly coupled. I don't know if it is even possible to run just the systemd init without any other systemd package.
The last time I got angry at systemd was when resolvd did some DNS shit I did not approve of.
I may be wrong but I believe that all of the systemd programs are decoupled. You can run the systemd init system without any resolved or networkd. They just happen to be used by default on a lot of distros.
It's that it also decided to take over log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution, etc, etc.
If it were just an init system that would be perfectly portable. People were able to write software that way with sysv for years.
It's that in order to do certain low level tasks on a systemd system, you need to integrate with systemd, not just "be started by it". Now if a distro wants that piece of software, it needs to use systemd, and other pieces of software that want to be on that distro need to implement integration with systemd.
A dependency isn't infectious, but a dependency you can't easily swap out is, particularly if it's positioned near the base of a dependency tree.
Almost all of my software can run on x86 or arm without any issues beyond changing compiler targets.
It's closer to how it's tricky to port software between Mac and Linux, or Linux and BSD. Targeting one platform entails significant, potentially prohibitive, effort to support another, despite them all being ostensibly compatible unix like systems.
That’s why I personally try very hard to only rely on POSIX stuff, even when it’s massively inconvenient. The only thing I haven’t gotten around to replacing yet is GNU make.
log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution
and thin is a bod thing? tho distro can choose to not use it, but because every systemd distro uses it, it's a 1000x easier to implement it without needing to put a fuck tons of if-else's for every distro
No, not everyone thinks it's a bad thing. It is, however, infectious, which is a reason some people don't like it.
Knowing why people dislike something isn't the same as thinking it's the worst thing ever, and liking something doesn't mean you can't acknowledge it's defects.
I think it's a net benefit, but that it would be better if they had limited the scope of the project a bit, rather than trying to put everything in the unit system.
and what's the problem?, it's not like everything is in the same binary or it's a monstrosity that can't be used without using every single feature, it's a project that just has different programs under the same project name, because no one wanted todo theoe programs
Indeed, the Unix philosophy was do one thing and do it well. ls just list directory’s and files it’s not a network manager too. Systemd crams a lot of extra shit into an init.d/rc.
I still prefer the old system-v/openRC setup or BSD’s setup. It’s simple does 1 job and does it well. But I can work with systemd just fine in creating scripts these days and it does have some nice features like user startup scripts baked into it and podman integrates very nicely with it.
Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.
That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.
My understanding is that some people are die hards to the software philosophy of "do one thing really well". systemd at the very least does many different things. These people would prefer to chain a bunch of smaller programs together to replicate the same functionality of systemd since every program in the chain fits the philosophy of "does one thing really well".
Systemd breaks all three of though by being monolithic and binary. It actually makes you have to jump through more hoops to do things in certain cases. I understand it’s a mindset shift but it really starts making it feel more like Windows with how it works and the registry and event log.
I don't see how systemd has anything like the Windows registry. At least its journals are leagues ahead of Windows event logs, I hate those things and the awful viewer they have.
People don’t like it because it’s declarative. It felt cool to be able to just put bash files into certain directories to have them executed on startup. That was elegant, in the sense of “everything’s a file”.
systemd is more of an api than a framework, so it’s a different design paradigm.
I hated systemd until I printed out the docs, for some coffee, and sat in a comfy chair to read them front to back. Then I loved it.
Mostly I hated it because I didn’t know how to do things with it.
Also, “journalctl” is kind of an ugly command. But really, who gives a fuck. It’s a well-designed system.
And if a person absolutely must execute their own arbitrary code they can just declare a command to execute their script file as the startup operation on a unit.
Developer cognition is the most expensive resource on any programming project. It is entirely rational to stick to tried and true ways of doing things. A developer’s mind is generally at capacity, and putting some of that capacity into learning new tricks comes at the cost of all the other things that developer can be doing.
And it’s not just a matter of time. Generally speaking, a developer can only do so much mental processing between sleep cycles.
That’s not to say it’s always bad to learn new things. In fact one has to in order to keep the system working in a changing world.
But throwing shade at developers who hesitate to learn new things is foolish. I’d recommend every developer do shamatha and vipassana meditation so that they can more accurately monitor the state of their own mental resources. Those mental resources are the most valuable and most expensive resources on the project.
Good that you've enjoyed it. But a fundamentally wrong thing about systemd is that it is actively harming the best thing about Linux – freedom. Some programs won't work on a non-systemd distro because how tightly coupled and vendor non-agnostic anything that becomes dependent on might become at times. Of course it's not as bad as glib(loat)c, but still if something can be done without any degradation of functionality via standard POSIX facilities, WHY either incur additional maintenance overhead for non-systemd implementations or punish people for their computing choices if there's no one to maintain it?
I don't hate it now, though I did when it first came out, as it borked my system on several occasions. I'm still not a fan, but it works so eh.
One borkage was that the behavior of fstab changed, so if there was e.g. a USB drive in fstab which was not connected at startup, the system would refuse to boot without some (previously not required) flags in fstab. This is not a big deal for a personal laptop, but for my headless server, was a real pain. The systemd behavior is arguably the right one, but it broke systems in the process. Which is somewhat antithetical to, say, Linus Torvalds' approach to kernel development ("do not break user space").
It also changed the default behavior of halt --- now, it changed it to the "correct" behavior, but again...it broke/adversely affected existing usage patterns, even if it was ultimately in the right.
In addition to all of this, binary logs are very un-UNIXy, and the monolithic/do-everything model feels more like Windows than *NIX.
systemd tries to unify a Wild West situation where everyone, their crazy uncle, and their shotgun-dual-wielding Grandma has a different set of boot-time scripts. Instead of custom 200-line shell scripts now you have a standard simple syntax that takes 5 minutes to learn.
Downside is now certain complicated stuff that was 1 line need multiple files worth of workarounds to work. Additionally, any custom scripts need to be rewritten as a systemd service (assuming you don't use the compat mode).
People are angry that it's not the same as before and they need to rewrite any custom tweaks they have. It's like learning to drive manual for years, wonder why the heck there is a need for auto, then realizing nobody is producing manual cars.
There is also the argument that it's more complicated under the hood and harder to troubleshoot, particularly because of it's inherent parallelism and dependency-tree design, whereas initv was inherently serial. It was much more straightforward to pick the order in which services started and shut down on an initv system.
For example, say I write a service and I want it to always be the first service stopped during a shutdown, and I want all other services to wait for it to stop before shutting down. That was trivial to do on an initv system, it's basically impossible on systemd.
For those wondering, yes I did run into this situation. My solution was clobbering the shutdown, poweroff, and restart binaries with scripts earlier in path search that stop my service, verify that they're stopped, and then hook back to systemd to do the power event.
I had numerous situations where systemd didn't let me abort a hanging service startup during boot or stop during shutdown.
So what do I do now, systemd? Wait till infinity??
That never happened while using other init systems. Because they simply fail properly ("sorry I did my best to stop this, I needed a SIGKILL finally"). Or simply let me log in: "sorry, some services failed to start and now it's a huge mess, but at least you can log in and fix it.".
The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it's free and they don't have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I've seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.
The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It's just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.
Not all of us write code simply for monetary gain and some of us have philosophical differences on what you can and should own as far as the public commons goes. And not all of us view closed derivatives as a ontologically bad.
Software licenses don't change ownership. That requires transfer of copyright, like with contributor agreements.
Though I am aware that a small set of people seek less copyleft licenses because they think they're better. They are usually wrong in their thinking, but they do exist.
I'm not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?
I'm not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?
I'm going by the vibe of the comments of people here who are generally anti-MIT. That the very nature of allowing someone to use your code in a closed-source project without attribution is bad. Phrasing it as "hiding their copyright infringement", for example, implies that it is copyright infringement per se regardless of the license or the spirit in which it was released.
Oh no I mean that there are companies that just don't care about licensing and plod ahead hoping it's never an issue. Like having devs build a "prototype" that they know uses AGPL code and saying, "we will swap this out later" and then 6 months later the "prototype" is in production.
Personally, I make a lot of my personal projects' code closed because I specifically don't want it to be useable by others. Not for jerky reasons, but strategic ones. IMO common licenses don't achieve what a lot of people hope they do.
And not all of us view closed derivatives as a ontologically bad.
Please explain how allowing a third-party to limit computer users' ability to control and modify their own property is anything other than ontologically bad?
If I release something free of restrictions to the world as a gift, that is my prerogative. And a third party's actions don't affect my ability to do whatever I want with the original code, nor the users of their product's ability to do what they want with my code. And the idea of "property" here is pretty abstract. What is it you own when you purchase software? Certainly not everything. Probably not nothing. But there is a wide swath in between in which reasonable people can disagree.
If you are an intellectual property abolitionist, I doubt there is much I can say to change your mind.
Because I don't know why it is closed source. Is it a personal project? A private project? A sensitive project? I don't see a moral imperative for any of those to be free and open to all users.
Depending on how you contribute to your OSS code, commits you make on company time are considered property of the company. You could, unknowingly, be forcing your code to be closed source if your company ever decides to make a claim for it.
I prefer to keep things bifurcated. I never reuse my own library and if I do, I rewrite it whole cloth.
“Company time” doesn’t mean much to me, as a remote salaried worker with relatively flexible schedules. Not touching anything but work code from my company machine should be enough, as far as I could understand. Not a lawyer, though.
If you're the copyright holder, nothing stops you from releasing your work under more than once license. It is not necessary to use permissive licensing; you are perfectly free to release your stuff to the general public with a copyleft license while also granting your company a separate license even with proprietary terms if you want.
You're not seeing the whole picture: I'm paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.
I'm also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I'm developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I'm literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.
Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.
If the government is the US (federal), I think you are technically supposed to release your code in the public domain by default. Some people work around this but it's the default.
But anyways, the example you've given is basically that you're paid with government funds to do work to assist industry. This is fairly similar to the people that do the work for free for industry, only this time it's basically taxpayersl money subsidizing industry. I've seen this many times. There is a whole science/engineering/standards + contractor complex that is basically one big grift, though the individual people writing the code are usually just doing their best.
I'm also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I'm developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus.
Perhaps it makes the world a better place, perhaps it doesn't. This part of the industry focuses a lot on identifying a "social good" that they are improving, but the actual impact can be quite different. One person's climate project is another's strategic military site selector. One person's great new standard for transportation is another's path to monopoly power and the draining of public funds that could have gone to infrastructure. This is the typical way it works. I'm sure there can be exceptions, though.
Anyways, I would recommend taking a skeptical eye to any position that sells you on its positive social impact. That is often a red flag for some kind of NGO industrial complex gig.
Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I'm literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.
Well you're paid so of course it wouldn't be that.
Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.
Sometimes the industries will open bug reports for their free lunches, yes. A common story in community projects is that they realize they're doing a lot of support work for companies that aren't paying them. When they start to get burned out, they put out calls for funding so they can dedicate more time to the project. Sometimes this kind of works but usually the story goes the other way. They don't get enough money and continue to burn out. You are paid so it's a bit different, but it's not those companies paying you, eh?
You aren't harmed by closed source derivatives because that seems to be the point of your work. Providing government subsidy to private companies that enclose the derivative product and make money for their executives and shareholders off of it.
You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.
As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered "industry subsidies", then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).
We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don't spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.
In short: I don't work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren't interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I've noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.
You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.
This is something I'm very familiar with.
As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered "industry subsidies", then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).
This is largely the case, yes. Research universities do the basic research that industry then turns into a product and makes piles of cash from. And you are also correct that subsidizing STEM education is a subsidy for industry. It very specifically is meant to do that. It displaces industry job training and/or the companies paying to send their workers to get a degree. It also has the benefit of increasing overall supply in theur labor market, which helps drive down wages. Companies prefer having a big pool of potential workers they barely have to train.
We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don't spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.
That's good!
In short: I don't work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren't interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I've noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.
I think your approach is better. I also prefer to write better-quality code, which for me entails thinking more carefully about its structure and interfaces and using best practices like testing and CI.
The MIT license guarantees freedom for developers proprietary software conglomerates to use FOSS code in their proprietary products. The GPL guarantees freedom for end users the entire FOSS community, both for users and developers.
When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you
blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'
If I think back of the days that I was using Linux and I saw friends and family using Windows95 that had just launched (with a massive hype, and using a Rolling Stones song to promote it) the Blue Screen of Death was fairly normal for folks. And they lived with it, and they continued to live with it because they thought that they had no choice, and they were incredibly happy to not having to use DOS anymore.
Later some of the folks I knew after having their Windows computer flocked with Windows viruses they bought a Mac, and as a matter of saying, lived happily ever after.
Not everyone can afford Macs though.And not every "normie" is ready to use Linux.
Nobody who enjoys freedom or has principles uses apple products, and nobody building a decent computer and knowing what they're talking about then installs iOs. Know what you're paying for lol, don't buy marked up fascist crap, and stop masturbating in public about it. It's disgusting to glorify them in that way, like eating a shit pie and telling everyone it's delicious.
Mac did have a better OS than Win 95 -Win98 It was smoother and crashed less.
The difference was that Windows still ran DOS programs, 5.25" floppy disks etc... They made the decision to maintain backwards compatibility.
Mac decided to drop support regularly for what they considered "outdated software and technology." For example: when USB drives came out they canceled support for 3.5" floppies in their OS. Machines that had a 3.5" drive installed could no longer use it. Put a floppy drive in and nothing happened.
Although Mac was a smoother more stable OS, windows had more functionality and greater compatability. Windows was a far superior product because of it. Even with the regular apearance of the blue screen of death.
Linux at the time also suffered from being a terminal based OS. Too much like DOS for way too long. I used it for specific tasks where it excelled at.
I just switched to Kubuntu for my ThinkPad (not my first choice but hardware incompatabilities) over the last few days, and it still very much is a terminal-based system. It took me ~4 days to set everything up, and nearly every step aside from "change things in the settings UI" was "in a terminal, type..."
I dipped my toes into Linux... 19 years ago? As someone who likes windows up until 10, and heard all of the 'it's so amazing' gospel from Linux users, two decades later I'm like: "it's still not ready"
Shit, I wanted to install Debian 12(.5) with KDE on this TP. It has a snapdragon X55, that I need working, and previous attempts at getting it working (year+ ago) failed. I read docs, did more research, I was ready. Made a live USB, install it in the live environment, restart, and... it hangs during boot. Research, 'use the option presented at the boot menu'. Okay. "no network" errors, that's fine, it's not a net installer. Done, restart. Hangs. Research. "use rufus, it solved my problem". Rinse, repeat, hang. Isn't Debian supposed to be super reliable? And Kubuntu booted fine, like what the hell?
Then cue the 4 days of setup. This machine is a very light use box, mostly to be a hotspot. Browser, email, password manager. Btrfs for snapshots (WHY IS THERE NO SNAPSHOT UI IN ANY DISTRO I TRIED?!). I'm far from a novice, been trying to switch for two decades. This will be easy.
deep breath
WHY IS GRUB NOT TAKING MY UPDATED SETTINGS (it's a known bug in Ubuntu since 20.04?!)? WHY CAN'T I GET HOWDY TO INSTALL? WHY AM I GETTING APT ERRORS ON A FRESH INSTALL? WHY IS BITWARDEN FAILING TO SYNC? WHAT IS THE NEW-NEW-NEW METHOD OF SETTING UP NEXTDNS? WHY CAN'T I RESIZE A PARTITION (/) LIVE? WHY DOESN'T MY HOTSPOT WORK WHEN I USE WPA3 (still broken, actually, and WPA2 isn't an acceptable solution imo)? WHY DON'T I GET ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THIS HAPPENS (a recurring theme)? WHY DO I HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH 3 DIFFERENT LOGS? WHY IS SEVERAL HUGELY-POPULAR PROGRAMS NOT IN THE DEFAULT REPO (omfg - Librewolf, Telegram, Element, Signal, Discord, Bitwarden...)? WHY DO THESE ALL TAKE DIFFERENT STEPS TO INSTALL ON MY SYSTEM WHAT THE FUCK WE HAVE A SYSTEM FOR THIS SCREAMS
E: WHY DOES KDE CONNECT JUST DECIDE THAT IT'S NOT GOING TO CONNECT TODAY UNTIL I TROUBLESHOOT FOR 3 HOURS, CHANGE NOTHING, THEN WORK?
And then, the 5G modem. Why in the shit doesn't the fcc unlock tool just fucking detect, and unlock, automatically. Why. WHY. This is simple, the installer is already detecting hardware. It's right there. This could be easy. Instead I had to dig through pages of solutions that didn't work, until I landed on a page for my laptop (but seemingly a different architecture?) for Debian 13 (unstable) talking about needing to edit the installer with commands (omfg what) or the screen will just show nothing on boot, that you need to change wifi and bt stuff or they don't work, etc etc... But in this heap of "I should just revert", there was one line, the line I needed, to run this stupid fucking fcc unlock tool - and how to find the hardware address. Enter both, nothing (a 'success' message would be nice...). No further instructions in the doc. Luckily, I am persistent and went into the networkmanager anyway, tell it to connect to mobile broadband. Fill in my apn. Save. It works.
There's a ton of stuff I glossed over, but it should not take FOUR DAYS with the terminal essentially living on my screen, with my browser having a dozen tabs at any given time for troubleshooting, for someone who has done all this shit before (minus the modem) many times in the past. It's done, I'm setup, but there isn't a soul alive who would switch their generic Dell machine running windows, spend several hours a day for several days, just to get their base system running. And the second they see "open the terminal", which is still very much a necessity, they'll be running to the hills.
I have a friend asking me questions about Linux since I've been harping on this the last few days, and I'm like... it's not the easy path everyone says it is. I don't want to push them away, but fuck they use many of the same programs that aren't one-click installs, and I haven't even touched gaming, multiple sound cards, gpu drivers; they use their machine for gaming, and mine is on W10 for a reason. It would be a nightmare guiding them through the minefield I just emerged from. Not to mention games that aren't handled by steam/proton and don't have guides, old games like Midtown Madness/2, Midnight Club 2, Insane/2...
I always viewed the think pad line as more of a business line of products. I know it isn't owned by IBM anymore, but considering how much involvement they had with Redhat, you might have better luck trying a fedora based distro. I'm running fedora Fedora 40 beta plasma and it was basically install and start working.
At the time (a couple of years ago), I tried a Dell... Precision? laptop, but it had a different cell modem in it (I was just starting my interest in cellular computers) and my provider AT&T locked it to an utter shit plan where I could pay like $45 for 15gb of data with overage fees per month, fuuuuuck that. I was searching for one that would be bound to their 'tablet' plans, as they got unlimited data for $20 (this is a business account, not consumer). AT&T offered the TP X13 Gen 2 Intel from them, that was guaranteed tied to the unlimited plan, with 0% financing, so I jumped. It is my first TP, but an ex has an older TP and had mostly positive things to say about it. And the modem (and antenna?) gets blazing fast speeds, like 400-500Mb/s. But that's why I have the TP, it's a "business" line for my (families) business.
I tried Fedora last year but again couldn't get the X55 modem to work, which was frustrating. Information about it in the X13 is scarce since it wasn't offered with Linux officially afaik, and you either got it early and Ubu or something 'just worked' with it out of the box, or you had to compile the driver from source for some reason (I don't remember but they yanked the driver from newer releases I think). I guess at some point it was re-added but again nobody talks about this machine and it's WWAN card so I got super lucky to find that one Debian 13 info page.
While I've played with Fedora briefly when I was distros hopping to see what worked last year (and before that), and the ex had it on his TP, I don't actually know what the difference is vs Debian-based systems, since I try to stick with that as it's what I started on and know/am comfortable with. All I know is its based (?) on RHEL. Care to give me a tl;dr major differences?
Haha I just spent this weekend getting my ThinkPad set up with Arch and KDE Plasma. Two weeks ago was my final straw with W11, and I used this weekend for the plunge.
Now, I know I have an unusual setup; ThinkPad X1 laptop, eGPU w/ Nvidia 4070 (BIG mistake, I bought it to play games and do 3D rendering since the onboard graphics on my laptop are non-existent, didn't do my homework and should've bought an AMD), and two external monitors. It's has been an adventure to say the least, and my wife popped in every now and again asking if I'm having fun playing with my computer (she has Mac everything and not an absolute clue lol) while pulling my hair troubleshooting shit I haven't even thought about in a long time.
It's been probably 4-5 years since I've worked with a Linux desktop, and I forgot what it takes to get a system set up from more or less scratch. Of course I could have gone with a more complete, out-of-the-box distro, but where's the fun in that? My home server runs Debian and I almost never have to touch it outside biweekly logins to make sure everything is kosher and up to date, otherwise it just chugs along and it's been going strong for probably 5-6 years at this point. But I still had fun doing it, and I also have more confidence that my current setup isn't doing nefarious shit while I'm not paying attention. My W11 install liked to wake up from sleep and I'd walk in to hear the fans on my eGPU case cranking, so I'm a bit suspect. I'm near positive I don't have an malware or viruses on my machine, but I dunno what the deal is, and I may have let my paranoia get the best of me.
But to your point, it will probably be a while before Linux is ready for the mainstream. Especially until we get a native port of the MS Office suite. Like it or not, MS Office is the gold standard in business, and while different FOSS suites are pretty good, they still lack full compatibility which won't fly in the business world. That, and you can't expect your average Joe to spend and hour or two scraping forums to fix a printer issue.
Second big paragraph: I usually have ethernet ports that just decide to wake the system up, almost all my machines in the last 15 years do this. Disabling the ability to wake from sleep (from the ethernet port) has always resolved this. Just something to look at.
Third: yeah, and it's fine to not be ready - I'd rather it not be and everyone accept that. Problem is (and what I was alluding to) is that many don't. I've got attacked here, reddit, and elsewhere because "er mah gerd I found the perfect build guide and didn't care about the distros so I followed everything to a T and you too should have no creativity or desire for exploration so that you can be as much of a sheep as I am" and it's like... I like the hardware I selected, I like the distro and want to see it improve because of [feature], etc but god damn some people if you step out of their mental line, they lose their shit. Tell them that X doesn't work because of Y and they want to rip you to shreds for breaking their perfect bubble they've built. Spend any time in a Linux-heavy gaming community and their holy penguin can do no harm.
I dunno if my venting above comes off as it, but I want this project to succeed. It's just, every time it's been a wall of issues, every time "oh it's better now" but 'better' is 'we fixed the old issues' and doesn't touch on 'and we added some new ones, too'. That's the catch. Two steps forward, one step back - but it's progress.
I have gotten flamed a few times for telling the Linux fanboys the hard truth.
If I have to hit Terminal even once with an average setup the OS is not ready for mainstream use. No exceptions. It has to work out of the box on the newest systems.
I use Linux the same way that you have: for a few applications that need a rock solid stable system. Once you get the damn thing setup, it truly is wonderful. Stable, reliable, easy to use. But getting there... Fuck that.
I think I had one clean distro install where everything worked. The PC was 7 years old when I installed it.
It was happening on wifi. I'll admit I didn't really do much troubleshooting on it outside of basic poking around. Ethernet is only available through the dock, but I didn't have it plugged in until I started my Linux install.
Dude I feel ya. I think what everyone forgets is that anyone that has any form of Linux knowledge is already somewhat tech savvy. Hell, anyone on Lemmy is usually pretty tech savvy, if not to have the basics just to wrap their heads around the concept of federation. Most people would have no clue where to start to even install a fresh copy of windows, because they see the hardware and OS as a singular monolithic unit.
I think the only way Linux would get into the mainstream is to have a dedicated hardware company built desktops and laptops that ship with a barney-basic distro preinstalled, and have a dedicated support staff. I don't think most see computers as a separation of hardware, OS, and software, but as a screenbox that runs their favorite apps.
If love to see popular adoption of Linux as well, especially since it will further accelerate improvements in its development. But I think it's a pipedream that the majority of people will jump ship. I do think that many just want to see MS's demise, but that isn't going to happen, anytime soon anyway.
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