lol. love when people are panicking about this when it means that these things are basically interchangeable anyways. Didn’t someone at Google write a memo that was like “we’re kinda fucked b/c you can re-create this stuff with enough resources” like 2 years ago?
I first got on it because Windows Vista ran like an absolute pig after a few years and I got tired of it - downloaded Ubuntu and I was off to the races with it. After that laptop I built my first PC which I’m proud to say has never so much as had a windows USB stick inserted into it.
Tbh I find it requires much less tinkering now - I ended up putting Fedora Atomic Cosmic on a Chromebook this weekend (first time w/ jailbreaking a Chromebook, and w/Fedora) and it took all of an hour to get it done - the only command-line stuff I needed to do was because Fedora Atomic is immutable so adding non-flatpak apps is a slightly more involved process. Beyond that OS setup/software installation was entirely via GUI and straightforward.
I like the idea of them because I don’t like dealing with dependencies changing and breaking stuff and I don’t really care too much about disk space in the context of non-game desktop apps, as I don’t tend to install lots of them.
That being said I absolutely hate that permissions are all over the place and flatpak doesn’t ship a GUI to manage them by default, nor do you get any indication as to what permissions a program has until you try some functionality (like filesystem or camera access) only to find out it doesn’t work out of the box.
EXPLAIN SETTING UP AUDIO SOFTWARE ON LINUX TO ME OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! DON’T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN JACK TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I’LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOU! WHAT THE FUCK IS cannot use real-time scheduling (FIFO at priority -4) ? WHAT THE FUCK ARE JACKD and QJACKCTL? DON’T DUMB IT DOWN OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU
But seriously I’ve tried getting some music-making/software synths/recording/tracking software together and every time I just bounce off of it because setting it up is just too much effort/out of my regular software wheelhouse/the documentation is like 5 decade-old forum posts with 2 replys.
I’d say so - since you’re coming in relatively cold you’re probably not so used to Windows that you’d get frustrated with how Linux works compared to it, and if you’re just using it for regular, everyday stuff like web browsing there’s practically no difference.
I’ve been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like… 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.
But well… you might be right. Non-linux sysadmins probably think it’s not possible and just hand out windows or mac.
I mean even if you were totally knowledgeable about it (Imo, as a non-IT person) it seems like it’s a hard sell in terms of effort/value unless it’s totally necessary esp if there’s an established user base for Mac/windows.
I guess it’s mostly because Mac and Windows are just easier to run for most organizations, and IME as someone who’s never worked at a software company, IT teams don’t have any interest in admin’ing Linux for a small handful of users.
I mean if it’s the choice between Fisher-Price Linux in a decently good looking package or Windows in whatever (maybe entirely useless spec) machine your employer offers, it’s probably better to get the Mac for a lot of people.
I mean it’s to the point that if you’re willing to install an operating system (a smaller sunset of computer users overall) , you can go with Linux no problem
It’s good now: https://www.protondb.com/
Go with an AMD graphics card, they work right out of the box in Linux so it’s just that much easier.
Oh yeah. From messing around with Fedora Atomic, I can definitely see something like that working for a lot of people - no messing around with system libraries, stuff installs in a click, if it’s not available as a flatpak you can find an AppImage, etc. Immutability is really convenient if you just want a system that runs and can revert back to a working state easily without fiddlefucking with the terminal/fighting Google to get the info from StackExchange threads.