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I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

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Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#11

Post by benoau »

justinrubek wrote: post #9
benoau wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "tinkered with" is the right description for using Linux as a daily driver. It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown. Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

Do you use it on a laptop?

Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#12

Post by notnullorvoid »

benoau wrote: post #11
justinrubek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

Do you use it on a laptop? Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.

I've daily drove Linux on various laptops and haven't had much issues in the last decade. Most of these laptops have been Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#13

Post by prmoustache »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #3

To be fair, I've never once read or heard someone describe the Linux ecosystem as "it just works." The entire time I've grown up with computing, Linux was something you tinkered with as a nerd. Debian and Ubuntu were like the distros you used if you wanted a semblance of a life as a GNU/Linux user.

For a non blind user and on a machine that is well supported (rule of thumb: a thinkpad of at 3years ago or more), it does just work. At least as well as on win/mac where frustrations and issues also do exist.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#14

Post by andrewmcwatters »

justinrubek wrote: post #9
benoau wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "tinkered with" is the right description for using Linux as a daily driver. It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown. Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

It's definitely been really, really bad in the past even with major distributions. So, the comical description is not far off.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#15

Post by marssaxman »

benoau wrote: post #11
justinrubek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

Do you use it on a laptop? Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.

I haven't used anything but Linux on a laptop in over a decade, and for me it really does "just work" (unless you're including one-and-done BIOS setup issues and the like).

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#16

Post by prmoustache »

benoau wrote: post #11
justinrubek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.

Do you use it on a laptop? Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.

It really depends the kind of laptops. Gaming laptops with nvidua gpus and exotic stuff? maybe. Business laptops with intel everything from integrated graphics to lan/wifi are usually painless. That has been my experience on Fedora in the last 15 years.

Caveat being to do some research before purchase about support of third party devices like printers or scanner.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#17

Post by washadjeffmad »

In the 2000s, a video of Nelson Mandela explaining "Ubuntu" was included in every iso[1]:

"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.

Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."

Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.

Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.

Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HED4h00xPPA

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#18

Post by prmoustache »

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place.

Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability.

Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen aren't accessible enough?

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#19

Post by andrewmcwatters »

chronid wrote: post #5

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better. From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security. I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

I agree, all the modern technical additions over the years to operating systems have entirely been 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.

Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all !" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#20

Post by idw »

prmoustache wrote: post #18

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

It might help to know that blindness takes many forms. Having no sight at all is what many people assume but is not what many blind people experience. So some blind people can use accessibility tools together with the sight they do have which may for example only be in a small part of the area most people can see, or may be blurry, or otherwise impaired.
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