What is wrong with you
November 12, 2018 8:28 PM   Subscribe

 
Bryan Lunduke comes across as a bit of a douche, in my opinion. That's not fair of me to say since I've only just seen him in the Windows video but I say this nonetheless.

Anyway, I use Windows, dabbled with Linux, and used Macs. I always go back to Windows. For what I need a computer to do, it's perfect. And I can fix it when it starts to break down.
posted by ashbury at 8:56 PM on November 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


Hear, hear. When I need a computer to decide all on its own that it must spend an indeterminately long amount of time installing updates at precisely the time when I need to use it to some end (unless I spend another hundred dollars extra to pay for the privilege of curtailing this behavior), when I need a computer to remain deeply confused about UI scaling across displays of varying DPI in this year of our lord 2018, and when I need a computer to require me to look up a hexadecimal error code by hand when license authorization fails on account of my hard drive having failed: that’s when I choose Windows.
posted by invitapriore at 9:57 PM on November 12, 2018 [20 favorites]


I find the kvetching about Windows fairly disingenuous. The reason nobody kvetches about Linux isn't because everybody likes Linux.
posted by Merus at 10:23 PM on November 12, 2018 [7 favorites]


I use a mac just to annoy windows and linux users. And as a bonus, macs don't get viruses like the other two.
posted by ryanrs at 10:36 PM on November 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


The reason nobody kvetches about Linux isn't because everybody likes Linux.

Of course not everybody likes Linux. Linux is #@&%ing weird.
posted by flabdablet at 10:41 PM on November 12, 2018


Yes, I choose Windows because I prefer having my updates applied at the Most Fucking Inconvenient Time Ever such as when I need to print something, start a conference presentation, begin a class or answer that Skype job interview question. People I have to keep waiting are always patient and are entirely understanding about the fact that I didn't have any control over this happening, especially when it's not my own computer. They also know that there totally isn't another way of applying updates that doesn't get in the way of me doing my fucking job.

It's not like I could benefit from the stability or reliability of an O/S that does things right. I'm not running the International Space Station or anything.

By the way, the Windows Action Show gets me every time.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 11:10 PM on November 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


My favorite part of Linux is when you have to install software from source and then you get to nervously watch as literally hundreds of pages of compiler warnings scroll past while crossing your fingers in the desperate hope that you won't get a mysterious actual error in the middle (spoiler: there will, 100% of the time, be an unlisted dependency that you have to manually install in a chain reaction of software installation hell).
posted by Pyry at 11:44 PM on November 12, 2018 [17 favorites]


Complaining about the automatic updates on Windows feels more like a talking point than a real complaint. I haven't noticed any slowdown with my box that conincides with an update. Mostly it's because of too many tabs open of Jira in Firefox.

Automatic updates are a trade-off against an out of date operating system which I am willing to make.

If they bother you go to Settings -> Update & Security -> Windows Update -> Change Active Hours to block out time when the updates shouldn't run.
posted by DoveBrown at 11:47 PM on November 12, 2018 [8 favorites]


feels more like a talking point than a real complaint

I have a windows laptop at work I use for running certain esoteric software (setting parameters on a motor controller). On the rare occasions I need to use it, I try to fire it up the day before just to make sure it's ready to go when I need it. Otherwise Windows Update can take over the machine for hours. It's insane. What the fuck is it even doing for that long? The laptop has an SSD!

In conclusion, *shakes fist in direction of Redmond*
posted by ryanrs at 12:07 AM on November 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


I’ve been using Linux exclusively at home for the past year, and it’s awesome at making my life way more annoying than it needs to be.

“Oh, Windows installs automatic updates.” Setting aside that you can turn those off, you know what never happened to me on Windows? Suddenly being completely unable to log into my computer for reasons I can’t understand. Then when I’ve spent a day searching through forums, it turns out, oh, I guess the new kernel is no longer compatible with my video card? I still don’t actually know what the problem is. The fix was to just disable my GPU, and from what I can tell, everyone is acting like like oh, this is just a bug, yeah.

Speaking of forums — thanks for nothing. The Linux community is shitty if you don’t know what you’re doing. And like, it should be reasonable that some people won’t know what they’re doing, right? Do you ACTUALLY want more people using Linux, or do you just want to put down Windows? For every person who has been nice and helpful, there have been dozens of ignored questions (too obvious, I guess), arcane bullshit, assholes refusing to help, and useless forum pages from 10 years ago.

The second video — “oh, good thing no one here uses Ubuntu.” Oh yeah, that’s really welcoming, my dude. Ha ha yeah I’m not REALLY using Linux because Ubuntu doesn’t count ha ha ha.

And the software. Fucking Linux software. “Anything you need to do, you can do it in Linux,” say Linux-types.

Oh yeah, I can totally work just as well using janky-ass software with completely horrible UI. Who needs reliable professional tools, when you can have someone’s homemade software that recognizes the file type but fucks up important formatting or whatever? Who cares about workflow or usability? It’s free! As in beer!!

And bizarre hardware and software issues. I spent a while trying to get my USB recording interface to work, like, at all with Audacity (which loves to crash, by the way). But it was working last month? I finally jury-rigged a solution, but by then it was 2 in the morning. Nothing says “productivity!” like wasting hours to get stuff to a state of basic functionality.

Look, I’m probably sticking with Linux just because I don’t currently need to do anything important on my laptop. But I’ve met like one person who was a Linux purist who wasn’t in the tech industry or a coder or something. Everyone drones on about how much Windows sucks, but frankly, I miss having things just work without the headaches. I miss good, reliable software. Linux kind of does suck for a lot of users like me.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:20 AM on November 13, 2018 [14 favorites]


I've been using windows since forever and I never had an update force shutdown my pc, while working on something else. it is either a popup , where I can postpone the update or the machine updates, when I finally shut down the pc on my own.

Re Mac:
The complaining about final cut x was something to behold. I was listening to a lot of podcasts from film people at the time and it was a constant bitchfest. There were people using the old Final Cut way into the 64bit era, refusing to learn FCX or any other editor. It also marked the turn, where apple seemed to have abandoned the professional market a little to focus on consumer electronics.
posted by Megustalations at 12:52 AM on November 13, 2018


When people ask me about desktop OSes:
What/how do you drive?
If you like an automatic transmission, where it's D for Drive and P for Park and a flat tire means a call to AAA, get a Mac. It's not like you're a racecar driver or something, you just need to commute to work and pick up groceries.
If you prefer to drive stick - it's something you have to learn, but once you do you can really boss the thing around - and are willing to do your own oil change once in a while, go for Windows. I know, stalling on hill starts sucks, but whaddayagonnado?
If on the other hand, you're interested in desktop Linux ...be willing and able to do some of this from time to time. Or just keep your personal stuff in suitcases in the trunk, and every time you have a car problem, just scrap the whole thing and trade in for an identical one; attachment to cars is sentimentalism you don't need, right?

And repeating the thing about Windows updates happening while you're in the middle some some task? It makes you sound like one of those people...'Hey, what's that chirping noise?' "Oh, it's the smoke alarm, I think it needs a new battery or something." 'How long's it been doing that?' "A couple of weeks, I dunno." 'WEEKS?!'
posted by bartleby at 1:06 AM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


Jesus, seriously? Has no one else had this happen?

After I click pop ups all damn day to put off the inevitable update, my work computer (we have a Mac at home thank God) informs me that it will be installing updates when I shut it down. Fine. So I leave it as it is doing its thing ("Installing...2 of 4,527 updates") and I do not turn it off, as my computer overlord informs me I must not. Fine.

I return the next day, usually 16 hours later, and turn on my computer, and the GODDAMN THING RESUMES UPDATING. ("Installing...50 of 2684 updates") And yes, this always seems to happen when I really, really need it to print something out, get something ready for the class I'm teaching in 15 minutes, whatever. I loathe this seemingly unstoppable "feature" of PCs. I know people have all kinds of beefs about Apple products but you can't argue that being able to put off updates--and having updates that don't take a millennium to install--isn't a dream compared to the hell that is Windows updates.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:10 AM on November 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


When my kids were first starting to use computers, I switched over to Linux desktop and it was the smartest decision I ever made. I would cringe when they would often say "Dad, why doesn't this program I just downloaded from this random questionable site run on this computer?" but I didn't have to worry, because these programs never did.

When they got older I got tired of the endless headaches Linux would cause, and their schoolwork would sometimes be easier to complete if I had Windows machines, I switched back over. I made sure the kids had their own machines. My older, more computer-experimental kid filled his machine so full of malware so fast that I was honestly considering donating it to one of the anti-virus software companies. None of these programs could make a dent in the viruses and malware. At one time the machine was so unusable I had to send the laptop back to the manufacturer. They got it working without questions. I hope it didn't spread malware to their factory. The upside is he eventually figured out what not to do and is very careful today.

But I don't regret having Linux during those critical moments of their lives. I think a Chromebook might serve the same purpose today (at least for their computers), which is why a lot of schools are going in that direction.
posted by eye of newt at 1:13 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


I drive stick and like it, thank you very much. And I change the batteries in the smoke detector as soon as those chirps start.

But Windows updates make my computer act like it's possessed. It should not need more than 16 hours to complete this process. I have turned on a computer in my classroom that started auto updating without my permission, and was still not finished when my class was over, an hour and a half later, rendering it unusable for the duration of my teaching time. I think it's reasonable to find that a little irritating.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:18 AM on November 13, 2018 [5 favorites]






Sigh. This thread is turning into another vi vs emacs debate. I should start advocating BeOS or OpenVMS with DECwindows Motif here just to piss everyone off.

OK, here's the thing -- each of you is absolutely right, within your own domain of usage and experiences.

Windows 10 updates are indeed inconvenient and opaque and I find the difficulty in opting out of telemetry off-putting. And I prefer command line to GUI for repetitive tasks.

Many Linux distros have difficulty with new or unpopular hardware, and most require more under-the-hood OS, hardware, software development and debugging self-sufficiency than most folks care to learn. And the Linux UX tends to favor exposing the internal gears of the app over showing the overall process (e. g. Spotlight for Exchange vs a litany of commands for sendmail).

I've had difficulties supporting users on Win, Lin and Mac over the years, and it's often been because I or the user was fighting the (either good or questionable) idiomatic philosophy and intent of designers and developers of the OS.

Choose an OS, take time to understand the mindset and goals of its creators, experts and community, and go with the flow. And do the East German Olympics thing; throw out the extreme pro- and anti- zealot opinions. Some folks on the web have too much personally invested in converting others. (Biggest zealot I ever encountered was a middle-aged recent Mac convert who all but said, "Landru help us, you are not of the body!" Good times...)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:17 AM on November 13, 2018 [14 favorites]


And I agree with Lunduke about Linux and its biggest commercial distros favoring corporate priorities over engineering elegance.
posted by zaixfeep at 2:28 AM on November 13, 2018


I only have older machines around the house and windows makes them more or less unusable. I decided to just switch to LXLE Linux after googling for a lightweight os for older machines. My non-techy wife honestly never even noticed and I am really not all that computer savvy myself. Then again we really don't use the computers for much more than simple web browsing and occasional word processing. Who knows, maybe we are an exception, or maybe we are more tech savvy than I think? I don't know.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:43 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


For me, there are basically two options :

1) Shell out an extra $1,000 for the privilege of using a Mac
2) Dual boot windows and Linux

I’m not going to do dev work on a windows box because LOL. And I can’t go with a Linux-only install because there’s always something Linux can’t do, and I’m not gonna spend a whole day in Dependency Hell just to get my stupid scanner to work. And yes I’ve had that lovely experience of not even being able to log into a Linux box because some updates I installed did something unspeakable to the kernel or some drivers or Gnome or whatever. Fucking fabulous. Nothing’s screams “shit out of luck” quite like navigating to some forum on my fucking phone (because I can’t log into my box) and finding out I gotta resort to some arcane jiggerypokery with some fucking libraries and files that end in .o or some bullshit like that. Bah. This the reason I use Linux to develop software on and use windows for literally everything else.

Only downside of course is I recently bought a Dell laptop which very, very badly did NOT want me to dual boot. Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 13 seems to be so ... monotheistic? “I am your God Windows, you will have no other God than me.” (funny how the Hebrew god sort of admits there are other gods, but they’re just kind of garbage I guess? But alas, I digress) All the crazy bullshit I had to go through to get dual booting to work. AHCI doesn’t work so well you say? Dell + Windows 10 likes to use RAID, you say? Oy vey. It’s enough to make me wanna shell out the extra $1,000 for a Mac, even though the more-expensive Mac wouldn’t be any better or faster hardware-wise, and I really have no need or desire to use any Mac-specific software.

ALL I WANT IS A MACHINE I CAN DO DEV WORK ON THAT ALSO CAN DEAL WITH HARDWARE AND HAS A HALFWAY DECENT GUI. (also I want to waste the occasional day or three getting high and playing civ 6. what??? he who has not sinned...)

Why does this have to be so hard?
posted by panama joe at 2:56 AM on November 13, 2018 [6 favorites]


I've recently moved to Linux on my laptop at work because windows 10 was having a good hard think about opening the calculator for me, let alone a web browser. I said to our IT guy, "Fuck it, do you just want to put Linux on it" and he was all "awesome there'll be two of us", and thus far I've been remarkably unencumbered in being able to do my normal business admin stuff. If I was still a designer it would suck, but for general run of the mill stuff it's been a great big meh, except it runs way faster.
posted by deadwax at 3:19 AM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


ChromeOS bridges the Linux usability gap pretty well, stays updated compatibly and unobtrusively, and does most of the things any modern (primarily browser) user needs. It's also cheap and ubiquitous in education.

But it hasn't historically really run "software" - everything it does is basically a local or remote web application. However, with recent abilities to add Linux (and even Windows) containers, you do get some of the best of all worlds*.

This means if you want to do heavy lifting (edit video, 3D model) you're stuck inside what can effectively be run in a browser - but these days that's actually quite a lot. Further, newer Chromebooks also run Android software - it's a bit clunky but does fill the specialty software gap to some degree (eg Microsoft Office).

* Unless you're forced to use Windows or Linux software specifically for hardware control/update/configuration since containers are still pretty constrained in what they can access USB-wise.
posted by abulafa at 3:20 AM on November 13, 2018


I would be happier with my Mac if I could turn off the notifications constantly begging me to install Mohave even though our IT department has told us that we absolutely are not allowed to install it and if we do, our laptops will be shut out of the network.
posted by octothorpe at 3:24 AM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


One thing I like about Windows (as someone who also runs a couple of Linux machines) is that I don't have to follow opaque command-line recipes to get things installed. I don't have the time or energy to learn an entire system architecture as a prerequisite for using it. My typical work process for getting something running under Linux is to Google it, find a reputable-looking guide to installing that thing, and semi-blindly follow the instructions. Then Google the inevitable errors, do some more reading, and probably follow another recipe. And repeat until either (a) everything near-enough works, or (b) the system becomes so messed up that I end up wiping the OS and starting over completely.

I don't identify with any of the comments here about Windows update annoyances, at least for Windows 10. It's something you can configure easily. You get to choose the times of day when updates can happen, whether updates are automatic, and you can even defer all updates or certain categories for as long as you like. True, the defaults are set for your typical non-technical user, to keep them as safe as possible, and so can be slightly intrusive. The alternative is probably malware hell, so on balance I don't mind too much.
posted by pipeski at 3:34 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


maybe we are an exception, or maybe we are more tech savvy than I think? I don't know.

Many modern GNU/Linux distributions have made ease of OS and software package installation a high priority, and quite a lot of those have been highly successful at it.

It has pretty much always been my experience that Windows and Linux cause me roughly equal amounts of wasted time per installation, but that they do so in fundamentally different ways. When Linux wastes my time, it does so by needing me to figure out some way to make it do something I want it to do that it didn't already do straight out of the box. When Windows wastes my time, it does so by needing me to figure out how to turn off a whole bunch of irritating and useless behaviour that I never wanted in the first place. Of these, I've generally found the Linux option to be far less soul-destroying.

It's also readily apparent that Windows has been incrementally adding redundant crap at about the same pace that Linux has been getting better at Just Works, to the point where responding to the latest Redmond-induced red mist by replacing the OS that came with your computer is now a completely realistic choice for more people than ever before.

No GNU/Linux distribution will never "win" on the desktop to anything like the extent that Android has won in the mobile device space. From my point of view as a happy Debian-only desktop user that's a feature, not a bug.

I don't like working with Macs because my fingers detest their keyboards, mice and glide pads. Apart from my inability to avoid becoming enraged by the physical demands of driving them their usability is OK, I guess, though I vastly prefer the GNU command-line userland over the BSD one, have never been a fan of the global menu bar and loathe the Dock; give me panels or GTFO.

But that's all me. Those are my preferences. If you prefer something else and it makes you happy, then I'm happy for you. A bit of friendly joshing and ribbing is a fine thing; escalation into something resembling a religious war, not so much. But plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... boys have always identified with our toys to some extent. Windows vs Mac vs Linux is just Harley vs Triumph vs Jap Crap for the 21st century.
posted by flabdablet at 3:40 AM on November 13, 2018 [9 favorites]


My typical work process for getting something running under Linux is to Google it, find a reputable-looking guide to installing that thing, and semi-blindly follow the instructions. Then Google the inevitable errors, do some more reading, and probably follow another recipe. And repeat until either (a) everything near-enough works, or (b) the system becomes so messed up that I end up wiping the OS and starting over completely.

Mine looks more like ignoring the overwhelming majority of online advice and just waiting for the requisite Debian package to show up in a repository somewhere.

I used to enjoy fiddling and tweaking and researching and bending the OS to my iron will regardless of the time it took; these days, not so much, and I am in constant awe of the quality of work contributed generously to the world by Debian package maintainers.
posted by flabdablet at 3:45 AM on November 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


I work in Linux all day but inside a VM which makes it nice to be able to restore a working snapshot if I've blown up the config somehow. I have both a PC and a Mac at work and they're both fine but not very useful as a software development environment which is why I have to run Linux inside them.
posted by octothorpe at 4:05 AM on November 13, 2018


"Thousands of state-sponsored hackers are constantly trying to bypass the security of your PC. Do you mind if we run an update?"
"Waaaaaaaaa! But my PowerPoint! Windows sucks!"
posted by Brocktoon at 4:07 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


A Windows/Linux thread? [Nostalgia contact high]

Two quick points:
1) Windows 10 updates are completely painless-- on a desktop, or a laptop that stays on overnight. On a laptop that you only use occasionally and often leave shut down? It's a fucking tire fire, and that needs to be acknowledged.
2) If you want to use Linux and are have hardware support issues, get. a. laptop. that. works. well. with. Linux. Thinkpads and some Dells have worked seamlessly with Linux forever; System76 and others make laptops that ship with Linux and have actual driver support. The expectation that a free OS is going to support every weird edge case of every bit of hardware forever is sort of ridiculous.
posted by phooky at 4:11 AM on November 13, 2018 [10 favorites]


I really don't care about operating systems, but I do enjoy some of the excellent software that's come out of people trying to make Linux soyburger versions of Windows/Mac software, such as the very fine Darktable and Inkscape.

I have had my share of Windows Update issues but I'd still rather use Windows as it allows me to ignore the OS for the other roughly 98% of the time.
posted by selfnoise at 4:13 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


This thread is turning into another vi vs emacs debate

Surely that is a named law
posted by thelonius at 4:14 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Re Dual booting hell -- What I do for my (IT) work for what it's worth:
* Corp laptop, boot-only Win 10 (I don't fight desktop support)
* Install PortableApps.com launcher and its versions of apps, keeping the laptop relatively clean and corp-supportable
* Install MobaXTerm Home Ed., a free portable, neatly-packaged single-binary Cygwin runtime with Bash, OpenSSH, BusyBox and X server. Plugins to add some popular Cygwin components are available.
* If I need more or faster desktop Linux than MobaXterm plus its plugins, I install VirtualBox, install a Linux guest, share my Win home dir with the guest, set up SSH port forwarding from guest:22 to host:nnnn, ssh into the guest and run Linux X apps via MobaXterm.
Note: I am not a gamer.
posted by zaixfeep at 4:22 AM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


Meh, Ubuntu LTS just works for me on my desktop and MX just works on my laptop. (The laptop was updated to Win10 before I got it, and was unusable that way.) I have one thing that I build on my own because I want the latest version, and apt-get --build-dep pulls in all the dependencies. Everything else is available as 1) distribution package 2) pre-packaged .deb 3) Snap or Flatpak in that order of preference.

Everything else though has given me at least one significant pain point.

I've had MSWin and even OSX installs blow up on me in ugly ways, including the driver hell of needing to install BLOBs off the internet without an internet connection.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:23 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Thelonious, the disturbing thing about vi vs emacs as a law is that Internet Rule 34 would also apply, probably involving netcat, unix sockets and cowsay, covered up with a figlet, wall and more.
posted by zaixfeep at 4:26 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


2) If you want to use Linux and are have hardware support issues, get. a. laptop. that. works. well. with. Linux. Thinkpads and some Dells have worked seamlessly with Linux forever; System76 and others make laptops that ship with Linux and have actual driver support.

...oh. this would explain why I've been going "wait, you're having issues like what with Linux?!" this whole time. I've been running it on a ThinkPad.

Personally, the thing that most often pisses me off about my Linux machine is my total inability to get MS Office or Box Sync to play nicely with it, opening me up to constant compatibility issues on the one side (LibreOffice being fine as long as I never collaborate with anyone ever) and the necessity of dipping into command line rclone syncing every. fucking. time I need to try to use my unlimited Box storage for things like routine updates on the other.

But I have a ThinkPad--my first Lenovo and I'm never ever going back--so I imagine that's why running Linux full time on my only machine has been otherwise mostly painless for me. I have a Windows VM I use very occasionally for things Linux can't or won't do, and mostly that's enough to get by.

Driver and hardware support issues would have made that a very, very different story.
posted by sciatrix at 4:27 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


On a laptop that you only use occasionally and often leave shut down? It's a fucking tire fire, and that needs to be acknowledged.

That has certainly been little ms. flabdablet's experience on her school-provided Lenovo Yoga. Update settings have been locked down by school IT along with everything else that might possibly call for local admin rights, so she can't turn them off; the machine insists on treating any wifi or USB Ethernet connection as unmetered, so getting network access via a tethered or hotspotted phone is unpredictably expensive; and there is something funky going on with sync to the cached-for-offline-use school server folder where they've all been told they must save all their work that makes MS Office applications grind and freeze for minutes at a time whenever the machine finds itself on a new network or on none. It's horrible to use. She hates it, frequently highly audibly.

Never heard her complain once about the Debian installation I built for her on the second-hand 2009 Acer Travelmate she had before this school thing. It Just Worked.
posted by flabdablet at 4:33 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


"Word compatibility," is an endless pile of suck, since Word can't even maintain compatibility with Word once you get deep into the reeds of styles and formatting. (And don't get me started about how the styles system of Word is completely fucked, making semantic markup on the same level as comments.)
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:35 AM on November 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


I just want to hold up my former colleague Patrick and the other handful of people who use OSX (or whatever that's called now) as just another unix system. It was always entertaining to peek into his office and see his ginormous fuck-you powerful Mac Pro (in like 2004) that he was running entirely from the command line in a couple of xterm windows.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:35 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


LibreOffice being fine as long as I never collaborate with anyone ever

It's fine as long as that's what your collaborators are using as well. LibreOffice and MS Office don't play the least bit nice though, and the prospect of persuading any corporate that they don't actually need to pay for MS Office licenses are slim to none.

It does have to be said that for a hell of a long time there, MS Office on Windows and MS Office on Mac were every bit as bad at playing nice with each other as either was with OpenOffice.
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on November 13, 2018


the other handful of people who use OSX (or whatever that's called now) as just another unix system

"Convincing a Linux guy to use FreeBSD" - Lunduke Hour - Feb 9, 2017
posted by flabdablet at 4:40 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Complaining about the automatic updates on Windows feels more like a talking point than a real complaint.
I lost a full morning’s use of my computer when, after booting into Windows 10 to play a game, I decided to reboot to get ready for work, since I work from home. Windows said it had an update to install. Okay, cool I guess, though it would have been nice to have a bit more advance warning?

FOUR AND A HALF HOURS LATER, during my lunch break, it finally finished installing whatever they called that big update (“creators’ edition”? Something like that) and I could switch back from using my iPad to using my computer.

I do not miss using Windows.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:24 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think we can just generally conclude that computers are the worst, and were a mistake.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:25 AM on November 13, 2018 [19 favorites]


If they bother you go to Settings -> Update & Security -> Windows Update -> Change Active Hours to block out time when the updates shouldn't run.

Some of us are responsible for fixing your shit regardless of whether or not the OS on our computer thinks it's time for an update or not. My Windows 7 machine strikes a good balance. It does what it can automatically and then asks me if it's ok to reboot itself. Only after a long period of nonresponse does it take matters into its own hands.

The Surface running Windows 10 has about a 60% availability rate when I need it. Which is why it also has a Linux partition on it and my Chromebook and phone are set up such that I can do the vast majority of my work on those devices. (Both for convenience and so nobody has to twiddle their thumbs while Windows Update is doing things on my computer)

The really frustrating thing is that Windows 10 will sometimes give me an opportunity to delay rebooting to finish updating but at other times, with no apparent pattern, will just kick off a restart with no warning whatsoever.
posted by wierdo at 5:57 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think we can just generally conclude that computers are the worst, and were a mistake.

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."
posted by zombieflanders at 5:58 AM on November 13, 2018 [7 favorites]




And repeating the thing about Windows updates happening while you're in the middle some some task? It makes you sound like one of those people...'Hey, what's that chirping noise?' "Oh, it's the smoke alarm, I think it needs a new battery or something." 'How long's it been doing that?' "A couple of weeks, I dunno." 'WEEKS?!'

No. I do not sound like one of those people, because I know why the smoke alarms beep, just as I know that updates need to happen to maintain security. I'm not complaining about having security, I'm pointing out that the method of updating is fucking stupid.

So let me propose this analogy. You go to your car in the morning, and just as you go to enter the postcode for your GPS, the system locks you out for updates. You're in a hurry? Oh, that's a shame. Or, how about let's have a system that does this when you're driving down the road? At the next junction...please wait while we install your very important updates.

When the method of updating interferes with how the tool was originally intended to be used, well, that sounds a lot like a broken tool. FWIW, the complaints I cited upthread have all happened to me (the latest of which was this morning) - all on Windows 7. Quote the "change the settings" all you like to me: if it's a shared machine and not under your control, that's not much help. The last time I used Windows 10, it took a full half hour to log in to my user account because of updates. Since I wasn't the only user on this already-updated machine, I simply don't understand why I needed some extra-special updates just for my account. I've seen colleagues write off entire mornings waiting for Windows 10 to finish its fucking update tomfoolery. Broken, I tell you. Broken.

In many ways it's a shame that the Programmers are evil link wasn't given a FPP of its own. It's worth watching for the dynamically-loading fridge analogy alone. My favourite point of that talk is that for better programming to happen, coders need to start saying no (more) when managers ask them to do bad things. I can imagine this happening perhaps more in the FOSS space, but over in proprietary world, much harder- like with the MS Office ribbon example. Were people clamouring for the ribbon? No. Did the Office team want to make something shiny shiny? Most probably.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 6:17 AM on November 13, 2018 [10 favorites]


> "boys have always identified with our toys to some extent"

As a woman and a ~professional computer user~, I am here to push back on this shitty attitude. What a bizarre thing to say!
posted by reseeded at 6:23 AM on November 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


I come home in the evening, and my desktop environment announces that it has updates. Out of that, two are security critical. I'm told exactly what's being updated (much of which I don't recognize but can look up if needed), and the size of the download. The patch process takes a few minutes (a few minutes more if it's Firefox), and a reboot.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:30 AM on November 13, 2018


"Thousands of state-sponsored hackers are constantly trying to bypass the security of your PC. Do you mind if we run an update?"
"Waaaaaaaaa! But my PowerPoint! Windows sucks!"


To be fair, people worried about security do have better options than Windows.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 6:42 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've been exclusively a Linux desktop user at home since November, 2001. I use whatever Dell Laptop with Windows Corp IT gives to me. Either way, I spend 90% of my time in either a web browser or ssh'd into something. FWIW, it's a nice feeling that my kids can't be bothered to figure out XMonad on Fedora, so they never touch my stuff, but keep to their own disposable Dell laptops with Windows on it.
posted by mikelieman at 6:55 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


What a bizarre thing to say!

It proceeds from my experience that every person I've ever encountered who has ever got all vehemently religious-war about their own choice of hardware and/or software (among whom I count my younger self) has been male. All the women I've ever worked alongside have been saner in this respect.
posted by flabdablet at 6:57 AM on November 13, 2018


I started using Macs in school, when that was what you used to do graphics. Most of my home machines are macs. I use windows mostly at work, because our software runs (mostly) happily on it. I have one windows machine at home for gaming. My forays into linux have almost always ended in reboots and reinstalls of whatever OS was originally on the machine. However, one of my friends has an old iMac of mine that he runs Mint on and is supremely happy.

I am happy that computy machines were invented, Like ice cream, everybody has a favorite flavor and no one is worng.
posted by evilDoug at 7:21 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


it's a nice feeling that my kids can't be bothered to figure out XMonad on Fedora, so they never touch my stuff

Each of us has our own user account on every Debian box in the house, along with a Visitor account for visitors, and we keep our passwords private; other people touching my stuff is not an issue.

This works so well that I am frequently astonished that most of the home computers I've ever been called in to fix are not set up this way. Just about every desktop OS released since Windows NT has had workable support for multiple user accounts built in as standard. They're not even hard.
posted by flabdablet at 7:44 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have long given up trying to convince anyone to use Linux on the desktop. However, I'd like to point out that:

a. I've been on Linux for the past 5 years at work, and to my knowledge have not had a single productivity-killing issue caused by the OS in that time. Not one.
b. Many if not most of the arguments against Linux in this thread are completely not true in 2018.
c. Outside of MS Office, gaming, and graphics production, daily computing now is largely done with a decent browser and maybe a few Electron apps (Slack, Spotify, etc.). Those are available everywhere. OS doesn't matter much any more, provided it gets out of your damn way. RAM matters.

Sucks a lot less than it used to: Linux, Windows
Sucks a bit more than it used to: Ubuntu, OS X

It doesn't surprise me that corporations generally standardize on Windows. It's a mature, severely enterprise-enabled OS, easily(ish) administered by corporate IT departments with loads of hooks to enforce whatever policy is needed. It makes sense.

What's always been surprising to me is how faithful many developers are to Macs. The OS X devotion amongst this set makes me think that the thing I thought was the main motivation for developers, curiosity and interest in hands-on understanding of how these tools work, isn't a driver for most.
posted by mcstayinskool at 7:45 AM on November 13, 2018 [4 favorites]


One thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned (unless I missed it) is the latest Windows Updates (such as the "Creator"? edition) are *huge*. And seem to do a lot more multi-part-easier-to-screw-up things.

That combined with lower cost hardware *and* the behavior mentioned of not leaving it on overnight or just using it (turning on) occasionally is truly an Update hell. But it didn't used to have such huge (and problematic) updates though there were occasional exceptions. Is there reason to think this is more than a temporary thing with MS? Could this get better shortly?
posted by aleph at 8:21 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


My sources say no.
posted by flabdablet at 8:49 AM on November 13, 2018


The fact that operating system holy wars continue to this day is an indictment of all of them.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:00 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Quite so. Which is why we need a new one.

Oh wait.
posted by flabdablet at 9:06 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


My sources say no.

That explains why Windows 7 updates are so alarmingly slow (so slow that there is no chance that most of the reason isn't ridiculously badly-written software.) Windows 10 updates are slow for exciting new reasons:

1. They're huge! These aren't like the updates for previous versions of Windows. Some of them are more like installing the next version of Windows, like going from Win 7 to Win 8. Which nobody did, because why would they? So Microsoft now forces it on people, hidden within the "update" system.

2. They often happen when you least expect it and have better things to be doing.
posted by sfenders at 9:13 AM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Windows 10 updates are slow for exciting new reasons

...as well. None of the old reasons have gone away, to the best of my understanding.

Whenever it's not foisting an unannounced apt full-upgrade equivalent on you under the rubric of "install this update to resolve issues in Windows" it's still doing component-based servicing using the same old absurdly slow exponential tree pruning algorithm.
posted by flabdablet at 9:26 AM on November 13, 2018


I should start advocating BeOS or OpenVMS with DECwindows Motif here just to piss everyone off.

OS/2 Warp forever!
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:30 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Johnny come lately OS/2 Warp can bugger off and get its own forever slogan song.

vocal fry forever, making life better and better
posted by flabdablet at 9:33 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]




So I've only watched a quarter of first video and haven't caught up on the thread yet, but this FILLS ME WITH WORDS AND I MUST SHARE THEM.

(Also, I have stuff to do today and I want to stop obsessing over this.)

Everything positive Lunduke says about Windows (except maybe for the graphic design) is entirely a product of its ubiquity and not any intrinsic superiority of the OS. It's not awesome, just privileged.

The one thing Windows does better than any OS is provide a (mostly) painless way to run the vast library of software that has been written for Windows. And that turns out to be what most people need, which is why Bill Gates was once the richest human on Earth. Microsoft could have put any kind of garbage on top of that capability and people would buy it, because most people (justifiably) just use their computers for day-to-day things using shrinkwrapped software and they wanted that software to keep working on their new computer.

And the reason Windows has such vast software library was because everyone had it, and the reason everyone had it was that it came free with DOS and everyone had DOS. The reason everyone had DOS was because you needed it to run the vast library of DOS programs that existed because of the wide proliferation of PC clones.

And the reason for the proliferation of PC clones was that IBM quietly dropped its plans to sue the clone industry out of existence when the DOJ began its antitrust investigation of them, leaving Microsoft (and Intel) holding the only proprietary must-have component needed to run DOS programs on commodity hardware.

That's it. The true Genius of Microsoft is that when they won the Grand Jackpot in life's lottery, they invested it in mutual funds instead of squandering it. That's all. Theirs was the OS that everyone ended up standardizing on and they didn't blow it.

Which, I suppose is kind of admirable but not something I'd call awesome.
posted by suetanvil at 10:05 AM on November 13, 2018 [12 favorites]


The reason everyone had DOS was because you needed it to run the vast library of DOS programs that existed because of the wide proliferation of PC clones.

The main reason everyone had DOS is because OEM licensing terms designed to strangle competition actually managed to do exactly that before Justice got its boots on.
posted by flabdablet at 10:27 AM on November 13, 2018 [5 favorites]




I don't like working with Macs because my fingers detest their keyboards, mice and glide pads.

I guess I'm going to spend the rest of my life telling people you don't have to use the keyboards and mice that came with your Mac, you're allowed to change them.

In 21 years I have never used the stock Mac keyboard and mouse.
posted by bongo_x at 11:46 AM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Windows free with DOS? I remember paying good money for Windows 3.0 to go with that VGA card I mentioned earlier, though by that point 95% of its life was spent running ircII or a derivative on Slackware. (With an arcnet LAN! ;))
posted by wierdo at 12:19 PM on November 13, 2018


I've been using Linux on every desktop and laptop for around 15 years.

There are things that are a pain in the ass, but any use of OS X or Windows promptly sends me running screaming back.
posted by Zed at 12:35 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


you don't have to use the keyboards and mice that came with your Mac

For the decade that the Apple II remained my weapon of choice, I'd not yet become addicted to keyboards with dedicated Home, End and forward-delete keys.

I'll use a glide pad if nothing else is available, but I simply cannot seem to get the hang of Apple's button-free contraptions at all. Give me a half decent mouse with a sensible number of buttons and a wheel, or even the little red nubbin that IBM stuck between the G, H and B keys on their Thinkpads, and I'm a happy camper.

And of course it's not super difficult to find third party keyboards and mice that plug into whatever ports Apple is decorating their laptops with too few of this week, but that's never helped me much. Every Mac I've ever touched has belonged to somebody else, so changing the peripherals before attempting to do stuff with them has not really been an option.

I've never even come close to enjoying the native Mac experience enough to consider acquiring one myself, and that's after exposure to a goodly range of them starting from the very first 128K beige tombstone with the 400K floppy drive (including some system-level programming on those early machines, such as a driver for the onboard Z8530 serial controller that allowed our proprietary networked hard drive to communicate at four times AppleTalk's raw bit rate over compatible interfaces and cabling).

The main thing I had always loved about the Apple II family of machines was their expandability and the sheer amount of documentation available on their internals. Woz is my Apple hero; Jobs, not so much. When the desire to own a machine with a nicer CPU architecture than the 6502 eventually became overwhelming I bought an Amiga 1000.

The only x86 box I ever spent serious money to own was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, which I took great delight in never once booting the preinstalled Windows XP on before installing Red Hat 7. It still kinda sorta works, though the backlight behind the otherwise still-delicious 1600x1200 15" display panel is very old and feeble now.

All the rest of my computers have been hand-me-downs or school discards picked up for next to nothing. The laptop I'm using right this instant is an utterly craptastic Compaq Presario C700 with a single-core Celeron in it that a customer gave me to dispose of. The fan rattles and the battery only holds charge for ten minutes at a stretch, but with 2GiB of RAM and a nice Samsung SSD it runs an LXQt desktop on Debian without ever feeling even slightly laggy.
posted by flabdablet at 1:31 PM on November 13, 2018




Good Lord, how long is it going to take for this guy to get to the part where he says Hell no, he's not been too hard on Microsoft. Didn't he watch the Linux Sucks video? Microsoft has now made their own new Linux distribution that is even less free-software-like than Android.
posted by sfenders at 2:02 PM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


well, i just have you all beat to hell

on the left, a 40 buck laptop running windows 7 fairly decently after the last 40 buck laptop started being slower than hell and i got sick of it and just copied all the files

in the middle, a 10 buck laptop i got from a pawn shop as is - main problem - the keyboard wasn't working - a usb keyboard shorted it out - second problem, some idiot had installed windows 10 on it when it only had a cheap cpu and 3 gb of ram and it ran slowly - things got slower and slower and of course, updates sucked even more life out of it - swapping stuff around so i had 6 gb only helped a little - last week it was taking 15 minutes to boot after i removed a bunch of software - maybe something shouldn't have been removed?

i wiped it with ubuntu studio which runs ok so far - like a bullet compared to the old win 10 - but it takes like 5 to 30 minutes to mount the external hard drive and file transfer is slower than it is in fucking windows ...

on the left, a 10 year old imac, 4 gigs, running el capitan i bought last year for 200 bucks - the mouse freezes while web surfiing sometimes, but that's the only real annoyance - it's superior for web browning and pdf reading

i have 11 other cheap ass computers if those get boring or screw up - including a mac book that runs lion on 4 gigs that i bought at goodwill for 50 bucks

you can get old, cheap, but good stuff if you don't have to run the latest and greatest - but the operating system that runs best is osx

microsoft needs to pretend win 8 and win 10 never happened and build something like win 7 again

linux needs to grow up and provide end users with a reliable experience - it always seems like there's some kind of bug somewhere and that gets tiresome - i've been trying it and sometimes really running it for 20 years and it's still not there
posted by pyramid termite at 5:14 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


My favorite part of Linux is when you have to install software from source

When do you have to do that?
posted by kenko at 5:17 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


I understand some of the words in this thread!
posted by zardoz at 5:33 PM on November 13, 2018 [5 favorites]


Yes, you don't have to run gentoo, linux from scratch, or AUR packages unless you really want to, and gentoo and AUR both have dependency management.

Of course, I've also managed to completely bork up python on my OSX work computer using macports. If you live on the bleeding edge without packages you'll probably die there.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 5:34 PM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


respectfully sidestepping the OS wars in here and focusing on the videos -- I just finished the "Programmers are evil" video, which includes a long-ish Q&A at the end, and watched the Microsoft/Linux ones earlier today, and though I seem to be digging deep into the oeuvre man Lunduke's rhetorical style really grates on me.

it's hard to even get to what degree I agree/disagree with his ideas because he presents them as a priori truisms, i.e. a thing is dumb because it is dumb, an approach is bad because it is bad. he uses pocketless zippers and toddler drawstrings as examples of useless features, then in the Q&A repeatedly dismisses the notion that aesthetics can have value separate from utility, which makes me want to stay at a wide berth from any of his opinions re: UX/UI design just for starters
posted by Kybard at 5:43 PM on November 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


So I have a very simple rule for the team I manage: Use whatever the fuck you want, as long as it isn't getting in your way, and obstructing your ability to work. I think it's a good principle to follow in general for most things.

I'm a bit surprised to see so much OSX hate, honestly. I use it extensively for dev work and for infosec work. It's not the best option for everything, but nothing really is.

I used to be a hardcore linux desktop user, and while I still love it server side, I really dislike it as a desktop... I feel like every few years someone tells me that it's better than it used to be and my feelings about it are dated, so I try it again, and immediately have a lot of my feelings validated as I try to deal with one ridiculously obscure thing that's broken by default that you have to look up a solution for, or the occasional glitchy update that manages to bring down the entire windowing system or network stack, or I end up using the one tool out of the fifty that are available for any given task that everyone but me knows is glitchy as hell and doesn't work, but that's not mentioned anywhere at all, yet it's part of the core distribution for some reason. But I do love that you can generally compel it to work, and there's no other system you can tailor as completely to how you would like to use it, and I respect that... and if you want to do local dev of a certain variety, it can be a good option. There are also certain tools I need for my job that literally will not run anywhere but linux.

I think Win 7 was great for it's time, Win 8 was really better than many people think it was, and Win 10 is a technically very solid OS that is absolutely hostile to the user the majority of the time. The much talked about update cycle is something I've personally found maddening, but there are definitely other things I take issue with, and there doesn't seem to be a ton of consistency within the OS itself for how things are presented. But it gets the job done, it's king for commercial software, and there is literally nothing else that you can use in a corp setting that you can put so many controls behind - which is essential if you have any compliance goals whatsoever. Active Directory owns the corp world, and for good reason - there's nothing remotely comparable. I'm also convinced that at the heart of every fortune 500 company is a 20 year old excel worksheet full of complicated formulas.

Macs are expensive, and if you don't like the OSX windowing system, welp, tough. I rarely encounter issues with them, but when I do, they can be a pain to resolve. But what it comes down to for me is that I really like having a unix-ish toolset generally available since that's what most of my work is based on, but also being able to run some commercial apps that don't really have open source equivalents (seriously, I don't care how much you tell me it's coming along wonderfully, darktable is horrible). And because that's what my needs are, it's a good fit. Other peoples needs probably differ. All of the options are horrible in some way - it's the least horrible option for me within my criteria.

They all have their place - It's good to have options. And any one of them is guaranteed to piss you off in some way or another over enough time.

I will say this as my one Mac plug - I just now replaced my old 2008 macbook pro that has been in very heavy service since I bought it new. It is dented to hell, it has been dropped multiple times, it's had coffee, beer and bourbon spilled in it multiple times, it runs really hot (likely a result of one of the spills), and it has generally been through more hell than I've put any other hardware through. It went from my primary workstation to being my wifes primary workstation. She is an artist who works with a LOT of different mediums (silver casting stands out), so it lived in a perpetually dusty and caustic environment. It STILL works flawlessly, outside of running rather hot, and a rather short battery life. We only replaced it because she wanted something that would hold a charge up to more contemporary standards. Prior to that laptop, the idea of running a computer for that long - ESPECIALLY a laptop - was laughable to me. That's 10 solid years out of it.

Similarly , the last time I went into the Apple store (which I fucking hate and makes me super uncomfortable as an "experience" but is sometimes necessary if you need something), a few weeks ago, I saw someone with one of the old plastic macbooks there and they were still supporting this person, despite it all being technically EOLed. It's easy to hate on Apple for a ton of reasons, many of them valid - but I've never seen any other company willing to even look at one of their products that old.
posted by MysticMCJ at 5:43 PM on November 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


managed to completely bork up python on my OSX

This is the normal state of affairs for Python on OSX. People say OSX is a Unix with a nice GUI, but OSX is a pretty terribly Unix-- you have your choice of Homebrew or Macports or (etc.), and each is dysfunctional in its own special way.
posted by Pyry at 6:22 PM on November 13, 2018 [4 favorites]


managed to completely bork up python on my OSX

That's exactly why I do all my dev in a Linux VM. It's just too easy to screw up your environment in OSX and pretty damn impossible to figure out how to back out of a jam.
posted by octothorpe at 6:35 PM on November 13, 2018


FWIW, I've managed to fuck up python on every single Linux distro I've used as well, so OSX is hardly alone there. Usually the fault of something trying to add a package that has a dependency that ends up upgrading core bits it should never touch. Virtualenv is your friend, much like RVM is for ruby... and on that note, I can fuck up a default ruby install pretty badly as well, and fucked up plenty of default perl installs back in the day. Those both share the lovely trait of wanting to update the entire language distro in place to meet a package dependency.
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:38 PM on November 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Eh. I've had a good relationship with Windows over the last 23 years or so, but my Asus laptop (8GB i5, only three years old) takes about 10 minutes to boot to a usable state under Windows. I dual boot; Ubuntu 18 comes up in about a minute. In many ways, my 2GB Windows tablet performs better than the Windows half of this laptop. I need Windows now and then, so I'm not about to devote this whole machine to Linux, but it sure does frustrate me.
posted by lhauser at 9:02 PM on November 13, 2018


I mean, I generally like having Linux, and I definitely like stepping back from corporate spyware and features I don’t want. It’s just a huge pain in the ass, and the only people who think it’s a reasonable Windows alternative are people who know way more about how to deal with this stuff than I do. “Oh, that’s easy, you just need to...” says the person who has spent years working with this shit.

But also, people need to stop arguing that free software is just as good. A lot of it is absolutely terrible. The argument in the other video that “any work you need to do can be done in Linux” is dead wrong
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:34 PM on November 13, 2018 [2 favorites]






You know what the hilarious thing about this discussion is to me? I actually don't hate Windows 10. The early releases, at least, were faster than 7 on the same hardware (I should tell you guys about the worst Thinkpad branded laptop ever sometime), and despite my moaning about the inscrutable updates, it boots super fast on anything with an SSD, which includes all the computing devices I currently use, and beats the hell out of trying to use anything else on a convertible. (That is the one place where the various Linux window managers is utter shite)

That said, anything you need to do that doesn't have an externally imposed dependency on, say, MS Office or SQL Server can be done on Linux. A friend of mine has been using Ubuntu exclusively for a decade now. If he needs to run a Windows game, he just uses WINE. At work, still Linux (not sure which distro, though), because his day job involves embedded programming of controllers you don't even know you'd starve without.

He just got tired of dealing with bullshit that he couldn't fix, even in principle, remembered the days of Slackware and arcnet networking fondly, and made a choice. Not everyone can do that, mind. It's a hell of a lot easier to get the base OS up and running on most hardware if you're using Linux, but there are some bits of software some people need that are either inscrutably arcane or entirely nonexistent on Linux.

At this point it's a pretty silly argument, though. Desktops and even laptops are mostly dead these days, and our fancy pocket computers pretty much all run some kind of *ix under the hood. Outside the white collar office, PCs are going away at a rapid pace regardless of the OS. My clients still have them, but they sure use them a lot less than they did a decade ago.
posted by wierdo at 8:20 AM on November 14, 2018


microsoft needs to pretend win 8 and win 10 never happened

It's ambitious, but it could work. Just look at how successful they've been getting everyone to forget that Windows 9 ever existed.
posted by sfenders at 8:37 AM on November 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm totally OS-agnostic. At work I'm on Windows 7 enterprise until I'm upgraded to 10 at the end of the year, but the only reason I've run Windows on a machine I own in the last 15 years is to get around DRM, which mostly stopped being an issue about 3-4 years ago.

Linux is great for most things I need to do, and I only boot the OSX side of the Hackintosh for Music/Video. Still don't like Finder or a lot of the default OSX "candy," so I end up half-using it like a Unix box anyway. Excel is the only actual Microsoft product I use at home, and Office seems to be fine on OSX these days.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:50 PM on November 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Finder in columns mode is the only file browser I have any patience for and it boggles me that no one has cloned that functionality. My top two annoyances whenever I try to use desktop linux are lack of column mode file browser, and the terrible state of touchpad scrolling.

(ranger exists and might do what I want if I got it configured properly, but I do find it useful to use the mouse sometimes. The way it handles column sizes is neat though.)
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:36 PM on November 14, 2018




And yes I’ve had that lovely experience of not even being able to log into a Linux box because some updates I installed did something unspeakable to the kernel or some drivers or Gnome or whatever. Fucking fabulous. Nothing’s screams “shit out of luck” quite like navigating to some forum on my fucking phone (because I can’t log into my box) and finding out I gotta resort to some arcane jiggerypokery with some fucking libraries and files that end in .o or some bullshit like that. Bah. This the reason I use Linux to develop software on and use windows for literally everything else.

You need have no fear of missing out, because Windows is catching up to Linux in that space. And as as bonus, you don't even need to install the system-breaking driver update yourself - Windows will work out a convenient time to do that for you, all on its own.
posted by flabdablet at 8:08 PM on November 27, 2018


You need have no fear of missing out, because Windows is catching up to Linux in that space. And as as bonus, you don't even need to install the system-breaking driver update yourself - Windows will work out a convenient time to do that for you, all on its own.

I had a Windows 2008 R2 server THIS YEAR, freak out on an update, and basically disable the fixed IP address and DHCP another one. Which was wonderful until people tried to do anything that DNS resolved to .32 which was now at .40... Something Something OEM (Dell) drivers inf files...
posted by mikelieman at 8:20 PM on November 27, 2018


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