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My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

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Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#21

Post by shikoba »

Gareth321 wrote: post #6

Fair comments but as someone who has tried many times to adopt Linux, I can honestly state that nothing in Windows comes close to the user-hostile UX approach in Linux. For example, Radarr is an extremely popular tool for managing movies. It connects to usenet and torrent clients, as well as indexers and movie databases. It makes maintaining a home movie collection seamless. Radarr is not in major package managers, a…

> Bottom line: make it so users never ever, for any reason ever, need to use the CLI.

The more I think about, the more I'm convinced that it's an unconscious choices made by developers to keep away non power users.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#22

Post by Mikeb85 »

Jensson wrote: post #17
Mikeb85 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe CC, Microsoft Office and Visual Studios prevent an all out shift to linux for the majority How do you figure? Most people don't do any real photo editing or real asset creation. Microsoft Office isn't required for anything except Excel and that's fairly specific to a certain type of office worker. Visual Studio has many replacements, especially if you aren't using an MS stack top to bottom. Heck, when I was i…

A typical business org uses microsoft office for documents, and they employ programmers writing plugins to their microsoft office products using visual studio which also integrates into their internal .NET business services. I doubt migration would be easy, as everything ties into each other.

Yes, I know. In my last corporate gig I was given a laptop with a bunch of MS crap on it. It was far, far worse than my normal setup (Ubuntu + OSS stuff + Google Docs). MS Teams specifically would consume so much memory that eventually other programs wouldn't open without a reboot (the laptop was kinda shit too).

I know what you describe is a thing. That doesn't make it a good thing.

Edit - should add, Office 365 file synching is also absolute shit. Drove me insane.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#23

Post by Jensson »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #14

> In 2015 when Windows 10 rebooted my machine to automatically install an update, closing down an unsaved document I was in the middle of working on, Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows. I love Linux and do as much as I can for m…

Not all programs bubbles up those notifications when you are in full screen, and since default behavior is to shut down the computer after x minutes of the notification appearing it will look like the computer restarts out of nowhere.

Windows could have checked "if the user is actively using the computer do not restart", but no the computer just restarts in the middle of a gaming sessions or whatever.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#24

Post by CogitoCogito »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #14

> In 2015 when Windows 10 rebooted my machine to automatically install an update, closing down an unsaved document I was in the middle of working on, Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows. I love Linux and do as much as I can for m…

> Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows.

Many consider a 12 hour warning entirely insufficient. Many consider an auto reboot that you didn’t initiate entirely unacceptable.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#25

Post by pkulak »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #14

> In 2015 when Windows 10 rebooted my machine to automatically install an update, closing down an unsaved document I was in the middle of working on, Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows. I love Linux and do as much as I can for m…

I tend to ignore anything Windows tries to tell me because it’s usually an ad or otherwise useless.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#26

Post by CogitoCogito »

Jensson wrote: post #23
michaelcampbell wrote: post #14

> In 2015 when Windows 10 rebooted my machine to automatically install an update, closing down an unsaved document I was in the middle of working on, Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows. I love Linux and do as much as I can for m…

Not all programs bubbles up those notifications when you are in full screen, and since default behavior is to shut down the computer after x minutes of the notification appearing it will look like the computer restarts out of nowhere. Windows could have checked "if the user is actively using the computer do not restart", but no the computer just restarts in the middle of a gaming sessions or whatever.

> Windows could have checked "if the user is actively using the computer do not restart", but no the computer just restarts in the middle of a gaming sessions or whatever.

Even better would be to ask (and respect a user’s decision if they say “no”).

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#27

Post by michaelcampbell »

Jensson wrote: post #23
michaelcampbell wrote: post #14

> In 2015 when Windows 10 rebooted my machine to automatically install an update, closing down an unsaved document I was in the middle of working on, Do I have some magic aura that causes Microsoft to give me at least a 12 hour warning about updates? Because I honestly can't remember a time this sort of thing (instant update, no warning) has ever happened to me with Windows. I love Linux and do as much as I can for m…

Not all programs bubbles up those notifications when you are in full screen, and since default behavior is to shut down the computer after x minutes of the notification appearing it will look like the computer restarts out of nowhere. Windows could have checked "if the user is actively using the computer do not restart", but no the computer just restarts in the middle of a gaming sessions or whatever.

Like this? https://i.imgur.com/j3TZBEE.png

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#28

Post by yoyohello13 »

I’ve been using Linux exclusively at home for about 3 years (Fedora). I game, program and do office work. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, but I really don’t run into problems these days. I still need to live in windows for work and coming from my home environment I find it pretty painful to work in honestly.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#29

Post by smoldesu »

iknowstuff wrote: post #11
Gareth321 wrote: post #6

Fair comments but as someone who has tried many times to adopt Linux, I can honestly state that nothing in Windows comes close to the user-hostile UX approach in Linux. For example, Radarr is an extremely popular tool for managing movies. It connects to usenet and torrent clients, as well as indexers and movie databases. It makes maintaining a home movie collection seamless. Radarr is not in major package managers, a…

This is true, although the Windows model of .exe installers , which require admin permissions, isn't even the one to follow. The macOS, and especially the App Store model is far more user friendly. The non-esoteric distros and GNOME[1] recognize it and ship with a software manager akin to an app store. Those install snaps or flatpaks with one click. That's how you'd install Steam and all of its dependencies like Prot…

> The problem is that some software authors, like Radarr's, don't believe in the model.

And I don't really blame them. People love to pimp Flatpak and Snap, but nobody ever likes to talk about the issues that portals cause, the horrible rendering issues it lugs along, the lack of molecularity constantly breaking things on xorg/Wayland, the DBUS issues, the extremely esoteric configuration options, the auto-updating (!!!) and so on and so forth.

Apple makes this work because they have hundreds of billions of dollars they can divert to R&D. Linux gets the short end of the stick because it's a game of chicken-and-egg: none of the developers want to work on Flatpak because none of the packagers want to provide packages for it because Flatpak has hundreds of outstanding bugs and an entire community of people like me who remember being promised bigger and better things on Linux, only to have them fall through the ground not even halfway into development.

Simplicity is key. Flatpak, Snap, and all of it's ilk are not simple, which is why it's no surprise that their development is lethargic and adoption is, kindly put, sluggish.

Re: My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

#30

Post by jeroenhd »

foob wrote: post #18
Gareth321 wrote: post #6

Fair comments but as someone who has tried many times to adopt Linux, I can honestly state that nothing in Windows comes close to the user-hostile UX approach in Linux. For example, Radarr is an extremely popular tool for managing movies. It connects to usenet and torrent clients, as well as indexers and movie databases. It makes maintaining a home movie collection seamless. Radarr is not in major package managers, a…

If you use an Arch-based distro, it's available in the Arch User Repository (AUR) [1]. With Aura [2], installation is as simple as: aura -A radarr Yes, you need to use the CLI to run that, but it's trivial to do so and a real package management system brings many advantages over exe installers. The AUR, inspired by BSD's Ports, is one of the major advantages of Arch. It's very rare to find a package that isn't suppor…

Manjaro comes with a GUI for Pacman and after enabling AUR (and clicking the "yes I know this will probably break my machine" button) it simply shows up in the list of installable software.

That said, Radarr, being written in dotnet, should be able to package a single executable you can just click, and that process should be even easier with the upcoming dotnet release.

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