121–130 of 330 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine
This contradicts my experience. I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine. I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.
I have had my share of Linux Evenings. They built my confidence when it comes to troubleshooting system stuff, and they eroded my confidence in Linux for a while. Things are incredibly stable these days compared to even half a decade ago.
1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience . That or you're doing nothing interesting. 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs. 3. U…
1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience . That or you're doing nothing interesting. 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs. 3. U…
Which principles do you think are at play?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't write it off just yet, at least if you want to be a good programmer! While there might be some correlation, there's plenty of fantastic programmers who don't want the hassle and want to focus on a specific problem and just use Windows/macOS and an easy to setup/low configuration editor. One particularly great TA I had in college comes to mind...
Thanks, but I actually wanted to learn low level stuffs, or I thought I wanted. Anyway I'll see what happens. So far nothing really clicks for me but if that's it then that's it.
A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-specific things. For example, how you set up wifi or how you manage your firewall. Knowledge of these things gives you less long-lived and less transferable skills than knowledge of protocols like TCP/IP which is shared by everything that is plugged to the internet. It doesn't make you a better programmer, unless these daemons and tools are what you want to write software for.
Also, your options are not only Arch Linux and Windows/Mac. There are more desktop-ready distributions, too, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Linux lets you still inspect the plumbing if you install one of those.
In my experience Linux is easy. Easy to install. Easy to upgrade. Never breaks. Never gets "infected". Fast. The absence of commercial bullshit is extremely nice too. (I like Debian) (Is it just me or is there a lot of FUD in this thread?)
My propositions, which aren't in vogue on this site:
My Kubuntu system is rock solid and never crashes. Firefox is still a performant world-class browser. Brave's crypto can be disabled and the browser is world-class. And Elon Musk isn't the devil.
I had a similar experience recently. Updated my Manjaro setup, rebooted, and was greeted with text mode. X just didn't load. 1 hour of reading logfiles and pondering about why the kernel module wouldn't load, it turns out I needed to add an obscure boot parameter (I think it was something like "ibp=off") to my kernel command line to make the nvidia module load again. Easy solution if you know how to solve it, 1 hour…
I forget what I googled, but I essentially found a forum post almost immediately that explained the reason for the ibp=off, something to do with an intel security issue, caching, and the actual likelyhood of it being a security risk on a personal machine. The conclusion was basically "its enabled by default because its a good idea, but not really needed for most use-cases". Away I went disabling it, somewhat understanding why it was there.
But I've also been an arch user for years, and one thing I'm accustomed to is when the bleeding edge breaks something, other bleeding edge users are already discussing it. The overall community documentation on issues is exhaustive. If you have an obscure issue in Windows and search the error, you get windows support forums with official support asking you to click the "try to fix it pwease" button and no other solution. Half the time the only fix is a reinstall.
I ended up building a new computer because my old machine's windows install got itself in a state where it would fail to login after an update, yet constantly tried to apply that update after I'd revert it. No solutions anywhere online, no way to stop windows from trying to apply the ill-fated update. Just a broken install. I figured if I was going to spend hours re-installing and reconfiguring windows, I might as well get new hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“You get what you pay for.” has always been my reaction to Linux issues.
1 - I wonder what OS do you use. 2 - Have you actually tried Linux?
I used to hear "Linux is only free if you don't value your time." - this article seems to validate that this is still the case. Am I getting the wrong impression?
Personally, I've been riding the linux struggle bus for years in my personal time. It really hasn't been a struggle, but weird issue's I've dealt with during my "Linux evenings" has made obscure struggles at my day job far easier to debug and deal with, and overall has made me a better engineer because I know how my tools work and I can use them more effectively.
It's a whole lot more fun learning about kernel drivers, systemd, networking drivers, etc when you're personally invested in tweaking your machine just right. I much rather deal with a Linux issue for an hour than spend an hour on leetcode.