This is oft repeated but is short sighted, it is NOT that people do not want to think, it is that they don’t have the time and energy to constantly fight their devices to perform simple tasks.

I can’t say I blame them when it comes to going with what’s comfortable.

I used Windows and Linux while in school so it’s what I got used to. Whenever I use MacOS I feel incredibly lost

This. I get a wild hair every couple years to daily drive Linux and there’s always something small but crucial that breaks within a day or so and there’s no way for me, a relative novice, to fix it.

Example: I picked up a old ThinkPad on ebay last year. I put Ubuntu on it and after a day or two the wifi just stops working. No error messages. Nothing. I tried digging into the settings via ui with no luck. Googling didn’t help because I couldn’t tell what was helpful, unhelpful, or would have been helpful but is five years out of date.

After a few days of trying to make it work, I just threw on windows and haven’t had any issues since.

Good news! Sh.itjust.works!

Except can’t trust corporate clowns to keep shit working… Once they they obtain market share, they start doing weird things, recent example win11 where they make it less useable just because fuck plebs.

Initial setup can be hard, and then, because GNU/Linux lets you do whatever you want, It’s not hard to bork the system if you’re using commands you don’t understand. The biggest realization for me was that if I want a stable system, I can’t expect to experiment with it / customize it to the nth degree unless I have a robust rollback / recovery solution like timeshift in place. Feeling very empowered after leaving windows, I have destroyed many systems, but truly, if you set up your system and then leave it alone, these days it’s not difficult to have a good experience.

But yea, you’re totally right: the userbase can be toxic AF, and there’s no one place you can go to learn the basics you really ought to know.

Hey, the other day I set up a fresh Arch install in like an hour; it was easy as hell with Arch Installer in its current state. But that’s me - I’ve been running Linux for a while, so i might be a bit out of touch with what new folks have issues with.

That said, I think a lot of problems new users have with Linux really do come down to foolish mistakes, an unwillingness to read manuals, expecting Linux to work like Windows/Mac, or a combination of the above.
Not all problems, but many.

Here’s how to fix the time issue. Problem is by default Windows saves the time to the hardware clock in local time, but Linux saves it as UTC. You can make Windows also save it as UTC by changing a registry setting:

For 64-bit Windows, open regedit then browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Create a new DWORD entry called RealTimeIsUniversal, then set its value to 1. Reboot the system. The clock should now be in UTC time.

Switching between Windows and Ubuntu led to a weird time difference on Window’s part (it still does)

Google how to set your windows clock to UTC. You can maybe do the reverse and set linux to localtime, but I find it much cleaner that the system clock is in UTC as it’s an objective and stable standard, unlike localtime which can change with daylight savings or if your move.

There are many ways to run code at startup. cronjobs and systemd are common ways to handle this. I have also had things start automatically with my desktop environment which comes later in the boot process.

Fingerprint sensor stopped working

File an issue to libfprint, your fingerprint reader probably isn’t supported yet.

I think you are right, but I also think it’s a bit more in the relearning side than on the “Linux is hard” side.

I also spent most of my time working on Windows. When I started to work with Linux, like the OP I spent many years with in the “use it until I mess something up and then reinstall because I can’t fix it” loop. But after a few years I really got into it. I haven’t done a misconfiguration related reinstall in many years.

But if you put me in front of a Mac, I wouldn’t even know how to copy/paste text.

yup, this hits the nail on the head for me. I consider myself very tech literate; I am my family’s IT guy. I even have Mint installed in a separate drive but I seldom use it unless I have nothing else to do for an afternoon. And the reason is that the more I know about windows (be it editing the registry, troubleshooting services, learning diagnostics tools…) the less comparatively capable I feel in a linux environment. It’s like moving countries after I spent my whole life learning this city and I could’t even speak my native language anymore. Yeah I know it works out of the box and there’s wine and I can make my UX the same. But, going back to my metaphor, that feels like moving to a different country and just not leaving my house and only talking to the people I knew back home. Yeah it would be the same if I severely constrict my comfort zone. You just have to learn a bunch of new shit and leave all you know behind and that’s just one distro. Because YEAH linux isn’t an OS it’s a whole family of operating systems. The nerd yelling that it’s a kernel is right in the worst way possible. I can learn Mint but I can form an opinion on Linux because I still wouldn’t know shit about Arch or Fedora or Gentoo or what-have-you. It’s all very daunting and what I have is functional. No, not “functional enough”. This does literally everything I want in less than 4 clicks, everything is plug-and-play, everything works out of the box (and if it doesn’t you’re sure as shit it wouldn’t work out of the box on linux), my knowledge on windows is applicable on every machine I find, it’s the system everyone expects me to have (I’m fucking sure the software my uni made me install for online tests wouldn’t have a Linux installer). It’s not just that the path of least resistance points to mac/windows, Linux as a whole also has very potent repelling field. I still want to learn it but not because I see any practical value/utility in it.

Not just “oh this is for redhat and I’m on Ubuntu” but what I run into all the time is that you find a perfect guide but it turns out to be for the wrong version of Ubuntu. So most of it works until you get half way through and you get an error because they’ve switched from initd to systemd or something. Then you are stuck, do you try to roll back what you’ve done so far? Try to adapt the instructions to the new system? Then you end up chasing your tail down rabbit holes of what is backwards compatible, what isn’t, what can coexist and what can’t, etc etc etc.

If you have been using a particular distro and are familiar with the subsystems then the new version comes out and you just have to learn about the few changes in the release but for someone new it adds a whole second layer of complexity to have to learn the whole new OS in addition to trying to blindly figure out how the old system worked, what’s different in the new system and how you adapt instructions from the old one to the new one, or if you should just give up and try to find a different guide that will work.

This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).

Yes man is intended to be a manual so it’s understandably bad at being a cheatsheet. Check out tldr or tealdeer. They are similar but I found tealdeer to be much faster for me. Also try a shell with better completion than bash, like zsh or fish. Having better completion will sometimes sidestep the need for a cheatsheet altogether.

Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous.

You can curl the file normally, inspect, and then run it with bash. All the safety issues of running stuff you found online still apply (is the source trusted?), but you don’t get the issues that arise specifically from piping curl to bash. But most applications don’t need you to curl | bash in the first time because of package managers.

I have the opposite problem, I find windows or other OSes to be so full of stuff, (feature ritch) but lack low-level “i just wanna poke at this briefly” capability, the (possable) reason why most Raspberry Pis run Linux is because its so easy to address linking this thing to that one. Ive used linux so long that ive become used to

• its tree mounting scheme /foo/mountpointFolder on /dev/disk/by-label/C drive where symlink resolves to /dev/sdc rather than a linear one C:/ on *internal concept* rather than a

• symlinks on windows are discouraged so heavily. I looked it up and still don’t know how to make them. on Linux, its easy,

it makes a thing that acts almost just like the thing its referencing. in a GUI file manager, you can navigate into a symlink where reference is . and not get anywhere to great confusion. on windows this odd support for but insistence on not using a “basic feature” is mind boggling.

• linux with things like Fuse (Filesystem in userspace) allows literally anything and everything to be a filesystem, more non real folders to make a new user’s head spin.

all of these things are about having flexible references and easy access to computer resources, On windows I find myself wondering why I cant open this text based file real quick without needing to go online and get some software that will specifically handle it.

there are very few APIs you can touch in an ELF program (think EXE for Linux) that you cant with a Bash script and relevant programs. I get on windows and all the EXEs have have even more cryptic names than linux and no help menu or offical e-book and are at the mercy of the internee’s answer (whats lsass.exe). it all makes me go, screw it! if I want to access the Raw C drive to do a non off the shelf task, I need to make it myself which means learning their programming framework.

This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don’t really feel like windows is much better. I’ve had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I’ve had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn’t defective.

You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that’s also true on windows without 3rd party software. I’ve had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn’t support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let’s you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.

I honestly feel like Linux isn’t really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there’s a lot less help available online as well.

This exactly. Services should always be background. The OS is a service, not a goal.

Remember that Android is Linux-based

People keep saying this without understanding that Android was forked with several billion dollars in funding and aimed squarely at “normal” users, and had a decade of development since then.

Most “Linux” OSes really don’t bother with this. How many times has someone sent you into the Android terminal to fix a problem? Literally never. It doesn’t even exist without connecting a PC. Because you don’t need it.

He is clearly talking about the problems with Linux the OS, i.e. GNU/Linux, not with Linux the kernel, which is what Android is based on. So Android users don’t count as Linux OS users. Besides that, I’ve been using Debian+KDE for over a decade as a daily driver and never had any such issues, It’s hard for me to remember a single issue of importance.

Yeah, but let’s try to install graphic drivers and everything starts to break down. And without them performance is just shit.

I upgraded Ubuntu 20 LTS to Ubuntu 22 LTS in place and it broke everything including the Wifi drivers. Left with a black command line with no Internet, so I just wiped the drive

This is simply not true in my experience. Basically everyone I know has to deal with all kinds of shit when installing Linux. Broken graphics drivers, random freezes, the touchpad disabling after closing the laptop, wifi not working, etc. There’s always something. Now I don’t mind fixing that, because I enjoy Linux more despide all of these issues. Andost of my friends manage to solve it as well because they’re programmers like me. But the average person might not be able to solve it and will feel like they’re constantly interacting with a broken system.

Once everything is set up, linux is easy. But… that installation process can still go very wrong. eg. The last install I did was Ubuntu 22.04. The version of systemd that shipped with it had a bug that caused the system not to boot. Replacing systemd with a working version fixed that issue. Then it turns out that 5 of the graphics card driver’s dependances were held back (something recent that Ubuntu does, I forget why) so the driver didnt work. Force installing the dependancies (drop to root before KDE started) fixed that.

So yeah if you set things up for someone of course its going to be easy to use. It SHOULD be easy to use after 30 years of development. But that initial setup process is often not user friendly.

That’s a flaw with the people, not the OS.

The last part is a real issue. You can pretty much guarantee, that whenever you ask for help/talk about issues with Linux anywhere online, some helpful Linux zealot will be there to tell you what an idiot you are for having issues with Linux. Most of the time, these guys have been running Ubuntu off a Life USB stick for a week or two so far.

That last part is my experience when I tried installing a “non-supported printer” for my computer. I wanted to hook up into a computer my brother bought, and ended up in the printer model’s manufacturer’s page and having to choose between an Ubuntu driver and a Debian one. I use neither.

I eventually found my way to the AUR repository (because btw, I used Manjaro at the time—go figure what’s wrong in this scenario, lol!) and even ended up on some random repos for similar models. There were a lot of conflicting advice: like using a driver for a similar printer, or making my own package for my printer model.

I ended up deciding that I somehow have to make a package for my printer model, and having asked around for advice on how to do this, I was met with “why even brother with that printer brand?!” And I was like, “because that’s what’s available to me! And I don’t have enough money to buy a different one! I just want this to work!!”

You spend much more time trying to fix something in Linux and get it working than actually using it to do useful work.

Not really…

On Linux if it breaks, I can often dig into the source and quickly figure out what’s broken.

On Windows, I’m usually shit outta luck. Gotta trawl through tons of messy forums and bullshit SEO-optimised blogspam sites to find a solution.

That’s exactly my experience.

I’ve been doing Linux since the early days when Slackware fitted a “few” floppy disks and you had to configure the low level CRT display timings on a text file to get X-windows to work, and through my career have used Linux abundantly, at some point even designing distributed high performance software systems on top of it for Investment Banks.

Nowadays I just don’t have the patience to solve stupid problems that are only there because some moron decided that THEY are the ones that after 2 bloody decades of it working fine trully have the perfect way (the kind of dunning-krugger level software design expertise which is “oh so common” at the mid-point of one’s software development career and regularly produces amongst others “yet another programming language were all the old lessons about efficiency of the whole software development cycle and maintenability have been forgotten”) for something that’s been done well enough for years, and decided to reinvent it, so now instead of one well integrated, well documented solution there are these pieces of masturbatory-“brilliance” barelly fitting together with documentation that doesn’t even match it properly.

Just recently I got a ton of headaches merely getting language and keyboard configuration working properly in Armbian because there was zero explanation associated with the choices and their implications, thousands of combinations (99.99% of which are not used or even exists) of keyboard configurations were ordered alphabetically on almost-arbitrary names across 2 tables, with no emphasis on “commonly used” (clearly every user is supposed to be an expert on the ins and outs of keyboard layouts) and there were multiple tools, most of which didn’t work (some immediatelly due to missing directories, others failing after a couple of minutes, others only affecting X) and whatever documentation was there (online and offline) didn’t actually match.

(It’s funny how the “genious” never seems to extend to creating good documentation or even proper integration testing)

Don’t get me wrong: I see Software Architecture-level rookie mistakes all the time in the design of software systems, frameworks and libraries in the for-profit sector (“Hi Google!!!”), but they seem to actually more frequent in Open Source because the barrier for entry for reinventing the wheel (again!) is often just convincing a handful of people with an equally low level of expertise.

(anyways, rant over)

I think I am more than happy with the os. The bummer is that many of the alternative softwares do not have feature parity. The more you try to mimic the Windows workflow, the more you’ll burnout with minimal results. I’ve come to terms with it and just run a vm in gnome boxes for ms office and tableau and other stuff. However, many a times if I want something that could be done programmatically I’d definitely try a cli solution, so that cant be the same pro for everyone.

Yeah, but you can’t expect every person using a computer to be a computer expert. In fact, you should expect most of us not to be.

Because you have to know a bunch of extra letters to make basic sounds.