• jeremyparker@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          It’s so easy for you young people. Back in my day, in order to hate Microsoft, we had to understand the virus risks of Windows, we hand to have needed to go into the registry to make some minor customization change; we had to know about Microsoft’s nefarious dealings bribing game dev companies to use Directx when they saw the threat of opengl. We had to know about Bill Gates’s dark side (which he did, really well - but we have Behind the Bastards now). We had to be mad about crap like how they locked down gui customization, killing litestep and bb4win. We had to deeply care about the deep innards of your computing experience (read: ricing) to understand why Microsoft sucked so bad.

          Today, you kids have it so easy - they’re putting ads in the operating system, their core software is all subscription, they’re talking about making the OS itself subscription based. These days they make it so obvious that we’re not their priority, making good software isn’t their priority; their priority is getting our money.

          (I feel like I made the joke already - Microsoft’s really easy to hate these days, you get it - but I’m having fun, so I’m going to keep going.)

          They used to put freecell right on your computer - I’m telling you, we had to go seriously digging to find reasons to hate M$. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire, that weird pinball game my dad liked - we had to be seriously ungrateful shits to head over to Ubuntu dot com.

          And now, with one click installers, active discord help channels, eager, excited, and friendly people all over, just happy to see the FOSS community grow - engaging in a healthy relationship with computing has never been so easy - 3 or 4 clicks! Asserting your self respect and aligning your daily experience with your ethics was never like this when I was young.

          We used to have to ask on the arch forums where 99% of the time we were told to rtfm (because we hadn’t); we had to be super careful not to let on that we were asking the arch forums about our Ubuntu issues. We had to search for random forum threads that inevitably ended with “nvm i fixed it” - if there was any follow-up at all. We had men whose back sweat trickled down through their unkempt back hair before disappearing into their plumber crack; you guys today have stunningly beautiful men and women who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be “developer advocates” - there are twitch streamers who are getting paid super well at their fancy Netflix jobs but still spend hours and hours of their day sharing their knowledge with newcomers - literally just because they enjoy helping people learn about computers.

          Kidding aside Linux is pretty ok, I hope you enjoy it.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          You can install it onto a USB key. A search for it gives a lot of results. That’s, ah, about as far as I’ve gotten into the process (oh and I’ve bought a couple of usb flash drives), but it’s looking promising. I might even make some progress and click one of those links tonight, though not sure if I’m feeling that ambitious today.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
            1·
            1 year ago

            If you’ve got a sizable USB drive, try Ventoy! Then you can put a bunch of .ISOs on it and boot from any one you want. It’s good for trying distros, or sharing Linux with others, or even putting recovery/rescue software on it. Like if you want to run memtest or alter partition data with Gparted or rescue a system that’s not booting.

            Great tool to have. You can even use the leftover space like a normal flash drive and it doesn’t mind!

            • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
              1·
              1 year ago

              Ventoy is so awesome! It’s the tool I wish it existed a decade ago. The entire process of creating botable usbs was so tedious and time consuming, and now it’s just copying the isos just like any other file. It works for almost any iso or img file, and even allows us to have windows isos as well.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      Here’s a pro tip for a newbie. Debian unstable. You’ll hate your life, but you’ll know more about how Linux really works than the rest of us.

  • dansity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have been to some shady pubs and nightclubs in my life, non of them had so much violent people as a linux bugreport thread.

      • HEISENBERG@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        But it’s on your phone, it’s powering most websites including this very lemmy instance, it’s on Steam Decks. Linux is everywhere. But if you want to narrow it down to desktop computers then sure, it doesn’t have anywhere near the marketshare windows has.

  • Urist@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Queue any discussion of Wayland/Xorg, Systemd, flatpacks, snaps, distro choice, Pipewire/Pulseaudio (last one is easy, Pipewire ftw), Vim/Emacs, GPL/MIT, immutability, etc…

      • meow@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        1 year ago

        Wayland and Xorg are responsible for display, Systemd is an init system, flatpaks and snaps are containerized, cross-distro packaging formats, you know what a distro is, Pipewire and Pulseaudio are responsible for audio, Vim and Emacs are editors, GPL and MIT are open-source code licenses, I can’t explain immutability.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          1·
          1 year ago

          Vim and emacs are editors

          Woah woah we’re talking newbies here. Nano will serve you just fine until you wanna get fancy lol. (Although sometimes it needs to be installed first)

    • steventhedev@lemmy.world
      01·
      1 year ago

      Since when is immutability controversial? Linus called out the Google patches as badly designed with massive code quality issues for good reason. Theo described OpenBSDs approach to it and it is truly a simply concept with good security ramifications.

      • mrchampion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Pacman + yay is superior. pacman for most packages, and yay to use the AUR, where you can get pretty much anything that can be downloaded online, but as a package so that you can more easily manage what shit you’ve downloaded before but no longer need.

        • jack@monero.town
          1·
          1 year ago

          Until the package adding and removing entropy lits your whole system on fire and you have to untangle dependencies, purge keyring, flush your system and reinstall

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    01·
    1 year ago

    I’m so glad I can mostly just ask my Linux questions to AI now instead of hoping I can find someone who will tell me how to do what I want instead of berating my choices and attitude.