Lettuceeatlettuce

Discord's enshitification continues.

It's important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don't think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.

But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.

Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.

Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.

People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base...which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.

I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client's Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, "We heard you're a Linux guy." At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client's Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.

Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn't offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.

At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.

As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn't "just work."

I can't begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.

Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc...

New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.

Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.

I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.

All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.

Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn't matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it's so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.

I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two... It's been 4 months and he loves it.

He says it's super fast and easy to use, he doesn't have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.

I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It's great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn't an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I'll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.

Linux absolutely isn't perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.

You got me!

No, they're hardcore because tiling WMs are hardcore. Most users don't want to use them, they don't care. And they wouldn't be significantly more likely to use them if more distros had them as a default.

Y'all complain that users still occasionally need to use the terminal for certain tasks on Linux, but you think those same users will be totally interested in spending hours writing Perl or JSON configs and memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts for every function they used to use the mouse for??

Hot take alert:

This is a stupid opinion.

First, the article reads like an AI wrote it, but assuming that's not true, the Linux space absolutely does NOT need more tiling window managers.

Quite frankly, I'm amazed there are still as many actively developed ones as there are.

The VAST majority of Linux users have little to no interest in a tiling WMs, and the basic tiling features of Plasma, Gnome, and soon Cosmic are fine for most of the users that want to try it out. The few that really want hardcore full tiling are almost always already very experienced power users who know what they want and how to get it. They aren't going to be put off by their favorite distro not having built in support for tiling WMs.

In fact, most of them are already using distros that are able to be heavily customized to their liking, like Arch, NixOS, and Gentoo.

How many users do you think want to run Linux Mint or PopOS but with some hardcore tiling WM?

Linux has a massive amount of variety in all areas, it's already hellish for new users to pick a distro from the forest of suggestions, do we really need even more tiling WMs on tip of the dozen+ ones that already exist and serve a tiny percentage of Linux users?

Capitalists: So you're telling me I can build 1000x more AI data center infrastructure now?

Fair point, I'm in the US and annoying have been seeing and hearing a bunch of American evangelicals raging about this, which is why I snapped a bit.

Fragile American evangelicals can keep seething, their tears fill me with joy lol.

I'm already more sick of hearing about AI than NFTs and Crypto. At least those largely stayed within their own separate spaces where they could be ignored.

"AI" is infecting everything. Even Duck Duck Go has it now. The web has become so enshitified. Search engines are just ad-link spam and the results are largely poisoned by AI generated sludge so even when you think you've found a useful article, you realized partway through it's LLM garbage.

What a depressing dystopia, it's not even sexy like the movies, it's just a bland, sludge-filled wasteland.

Trying to avoid it has becoming so tough. For months now, I've been painstakingly building my own content feeds from trusted sites, forums, and content sources. It's like the old internet, I've literally started buying books for tech topics because finding reliable help and documentation is getting harder every day.

I'm mean, it's literally in the name. These are not concepts that require a degree to understand, much less an hour long meeting.

Logout means ending your user session, restart means your computer turns off and then comes back on, and shutdown means it turns off and stays off.

The buttons are all in the start menu, they are clearly marked, and these concepts have existed for 30 years at least.

It's like driving a car for decades and not knowing what the difference between reverse, drive, and neutral are.

My hope is that the Microsoft store continues to be so shitty that users just reject any future attempts to do that.

That being said, if a large number of devs and users eventually adopted it, I would abandon gaming and stick with only native Linux games and vintage PC games that ran through Wine/Proton.

I refuse to use Windows for anything. And as much as I love gaming, I love my freedom, privacy, and rights as a user far more.