#1 is just not being the default for 99% of devices. If someone gets a new computer, why would they go through the effort of installing a new os when the one it comes with works fine? Hell, I bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
Agreed. Android and chrome os are used happily by 10s of millions without any idea it’s a Linux distro
I bet if small, cheap netbooks came out running mint or fedora or something people wouldn’t even or know or care that it was Linux.
In middle school I had a USB drive with Linux Mint installed on it which I was using on school PCs. We only used those PCs for internet browsing and office. Not a single soul noticed it wasn’t Windows. Teacher only noticed 2 differences, “You have different version of Office installed here.” and also gave me a note for “Changing wallpaper” which was strictly prohibited for some reason.
which was strictly prohibited
It was probably due to some goober like me changing it to Scarlett Johansson’s bikini pics. I’m sorry.
So… the Steamdeck?
Absolutely. In fact i think everyone is hoping steam os will be the distro to make the big push onto desktop because of the gaming and another just works kind of interface
…the steamdeck isn’t a netbook.
Indeed, many Netbooks come with a firmware dual boot. Besides the crappy Windows lite edition, there’s a tiny instant-on Linux too. Most people don’t use that, but it’s there.
Indeed, many Netbooks come with a firmware dual boot. Besides the crappy Windows lite edition, there’s a tiny instant-on Linux too. Most people don’t use that, but it’s there.
Which actually means Linux is being successfully adopted by the general public in a similar way to windows as a general use system that doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge.
Fully customizable distress will never be popular with the general public. They want systems that just do the general stuff and have it work automatically.
I bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
70%*
Of course they know what an OS is. There’s only two of them: Apple and Microsoft.
my first thought actually pointed to common OS on work devices, being Windows i’d assume a majority of the time, i’d imagine a large portion of the older population were introduced to computers in a workplace setting. But your answer makes a bit more sense.
New user: I have a problem 😊
Everyone:👍
- are you on xorg or wayland?
- pulseaudio or pipewire?
- what WM/DE are you using?
- amd or nvidia?
- what distro?
- systemd?
New user: Nevermind 😮💨
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
Or they hate fridge art like systemd and are on something like PCLinuxOS or Alpine.
That’s what I mean though, why would a new user be running alpine as a desktop os?
That would be me: My hardware at the time was crap so I couldn’t use the usual mint, ubuntu, etc and I was gonna use debian but I couldn’t find the x86 download button, so after a bunch of messing about with distros like puppy and #!++, I settled on alpine for a bit. I now have decent hardware and use fedora.
Doing tech support, I encountered this attitude. People like that are nearly impossible to help. “Why can’t you just fix it!” The true answer never given is that your problem is probably something stupid you are doing, like trying to make a phone call by physically shoving the phone entirely up your asshole, and until I run through some common problems and ask some questions, I won’t be able to tell you to have your significant other get the salad tongs and pull it out of your rear and then go over “dialing.”
People mostly need to be willing to gather detailed system info with Inxi and share it.
I’ll have you know I get better reception when it’s up my ass!
No. That’s the support job to figure out the problem of the user. It is not the user’s job to figure out the support problems.
I work in support, so I know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately most computer guys are elitist assholes who can’t understand a user doesn’t have their knowledge or even the will to understand why this shitty tech is not working.
Free open source software projects you don’t pay for don’t have paid support. If you talk to a fellow user it IS your job to figure out your problem. if you don’t have the will to understand anything you ought to buy a support contract.
I don’t disagree with you, but to answer OP’s question, I think this right here is the problem. I love Linux for the same reason I love building my own PCs and working on my own car. For most people that don’t want to tinker, though, they’re looking for something that “just works” and can be fixed by someone else when it breaks.
It’s such a privileged attitude, though. One CAN get paid support, but they don’t need it if they’re just a bit patient and willing to follow instructions. If you don’t want to pay, don’t expect someone else to deal with your bullshit.
(I’m not saying this to you, but to anyone who has this attitude.)
It case the subject wasn’t entirely clear in my prior post I agree with you, and that is exactly what I was trying to say. You the user of a foss project, aren’t a customer unless you give someone money. It IS your job to figure out your own issues. If you ask for help from your fellow users and they graciously provide you help then this is a gift you should appreciate. Because the person isn’t an expert on that topic in the employ of the creator, they might not know everything, nor do they have the infinite patience imparted by being paid by the hour to provide you help. They have their own shit to do. Treating them with entitlement and contempt like people treat support will burn these sorts of folks out, and they are far from an infinite resource. If you want a paid support relationship instead of treating the open source community as free help whose time you are entitled to, you ought to actually pay someone to do that job.
Pay for support then. Companies like Canonical and Redhat will be happy to take your money.
At this point, my biggest dream is that these ‘new user’ distros used only Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd and Flatpaks simply to simplify things. Hopefully we’re less than 2024 away from NoVideo Wayland support.
Also as soon as XFCE releases their Wayland support, that soon it’ll become the most famous DE choice of Mint.
What I am really happy is to see how well supported Pipewire already is. Pipewire has never showed any problem in the new installs for me.
The problem with that is most major distros market themselves as “new user” distros to some extent though. Noob-friendly, out-of-the-box, easy, etc are all distro-marketing buzz-words that mean nothing.
You can’t expect them to only use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks because that dream requires every distro to use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks, which will never be reality.
Most distros will probably eventually adopt these tools, but there won’t be a sudden shift. It will be gradual.
Well, for Pipewire it’s the apps which needs to adjust at this point. Only thing missing currently is the Wayland but it’s coming. Making Linux less fragmented (read: confusing), the more new users will give a try.
So … basically Pop!_OS.
That’s what I’m using now, and it’s what I’d recommend for most desktop users. I’ve been using Linux systems on-and-off since before kernel version 1.0: Slackware, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop.
(Admittedly, my use cases are pretty simple: a terminal, a browser, Signal, VLC, and Steam.)
Pretty much. Pop is my go-to recommendation for pretty much anyone these days. It’s so well polished and just easy.
This PopOs ?
Yes, that pop os. As luck would have it, Linus installed it during a very brief period where the steam package in their repo was broken. This is not a common occurrence, and I have never heard of it happening before or since.
This whole series triggered me so hard. They went out of their way to test it under the worst possible conditions.
- last at night
- setting a goal with a deadline/time constraints for first run
- not stopping and reading or thinking, just assuming away
- copy paste from google frsit thing that looks vagualy right
- tunnel vission
- not resources like Emily, ensuring they make big mistakes
Then they follow up with hypocrisy of this shit, after going on and on about UI not being right or hard to use for the end user.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=smd8cTFchF4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
pipewire seems ready for primetime but I’m more dubious about Wayland. For instance KDE appears to still be a bit flaky and sway still works poorly under Nvidia and will never have proper mixed DPI for xwayland apps. Still seems like a tradeoff vs X which doesn’t require a compromise. XFCE is roughly 10% of Mint users. Mint users are unlikely to switch because of wayland support
Systemd
Fridge art. Fuck, they MAYBE have nfsroot working. MAYBE. After a decade of fucking around, when it was available for ages. The number of bags on the side of lennart’s piece of crap, just to reinvent the wheels we had before, is absolutely ridiculous.
and Flatpaks
… break single source of truth for as-built information and current software manifest. This kills validation, which dissolves certainty on consistency, then repeatability. And given the state of the software load exported to management tools is NOT the flatpak source of truth, you now have a false negative on the ‘installation’ of a flatpak resource when checking it via management.
Oh. That needs to be on the interview questions.
Gonna be honest with you I’m an intermediate user and understood jack shit of what you just said. A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.
If I understood the funny words magic man correctly, he is complaining that flatpaks don’t come from a single trusted source and may become a vector for malware, unlike official distro repositories. Still, that was a very technobabble way of saying it.
A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.
Maybe thats what he/she was trying to achieve.
Why don’t you magically have a magic button that magically fixes everything with no effort of my own? That’s stupid, I think I will go on social media and repeatedly tell everyone that Linux is bad actually
So you want them to provide answers by using magic? If you seek support for any software, open source or otherwise, you’ll need to tell them version, build number etc. Why do you think Linux will be any different?
Because people can already barely provide this level of information for a Windows device. Most of these words look like technobabble to non-tech-enthusiasts
Of course the words will be different. They aren’t hard words. And they can be answered very easily. In fact, most forums ask to include an output of something like
inxi -Fazywith every question, thus eliminating the need for all of these things.For more niche problems, people might ask for more specific information. But most of the time, they’ll tell you exactly what to run to get that information.
You know what’s the Windows alternative for this? Most of the time, nothing. You need to reinstall Windows. Mac is similar, except you need to have it replaced. You actually CAN repair Linux. That’s the difference.
Based on my tests on my family and friends, the main problem is tech support. Most geeks seem to assume other people want the same things than themselves (privacy, freedom, etc). Well, they don’t. They want a computer that just works.
Overall when using Linux, people actually don’t need much tech support, but they need it. My father put it really well by saying: “the best OS is the one of your neighbor.”
I apply few rules:
-
The deal with my family and friends is simple: you want tech support from me ? ok, then I’m going to pick your computer (usually old Lenovo Thinkpads bought on Ebay at ~300€) and I’m going to install Linux on it.
-
I’m not shy. I ask them if they want me to have remote access to their computer. If they accept, I install a Meshcentral agent. Thing is, on other OS, they are already spied on by Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. And most people think “they have nothing to hide”. Therefore why should they worry more about a family member or a friend than some unknown big company ? Fun fact, I’ve been really surprised by how easily people do accept that I keep a remote access on their computer: even people that are not family ! Pretty much everybody has gladly agreed up to now. (and God knows I’ve been really clear that I can access their computer whenever I want).
-
I install the system for them and I make the major updates for them. Therefore, if I have remote access to the system, I pick the distribution I’m the most at ease with (Debian). They just don’t care what actually runs on their computers.
-
When they have a problem, they call me after 8pm. With remote access, most problems are solved in a matter of minutes. Usually, they call me a few times the first days, and then I never hear from them anymore until the next major update.
So far, everybody seems really happy with this deal. And for those wondering, I can see in Meshcentral they really do use those computers :-P
When i told my dad i can install Rustdesk on his computer to do remote support (moved out), he asked me “does that mean you can look at my computer whenever you want?”. I’m really proud of him, he actually listened.
I think people sell themselves short with regards to having undue access to family members’ computers. If they’re willing to give it then you’ve clearly demonstrated that you’re trustworthy and haven’t given them reason to assume you’ll snoop or worse steal from them.
Are there any limitations to Meshcentral? I tried using Team Viewer and a few others when I was supporting family on Windows, and they all wanted to charge me after a while.
I self-host Meshcentral. I haven’t seen any limitation at all. I don’t know if there are limitations when you use meshcentral.com instead of self-hosting.
Thanks for replying :)
I’ll have a look into it, thanks. I pretty much only support my mother’s laptop outside of my house now, but I use NoMachine to sort out the home computers. As much as I like it, it can be a bit slow sometimes, and it’s always in the back of my mind that it’s going to lock me out like the others did.
Oh actually if you are worried about vendor lock-in: Meshcentral is opensource. So even if they decide to try something stupid, a fork would be likely to happen.
Wayland, unless something’s changed since the last time I tried it.
Try Anydesk, it’s very much like Teamviewer in many ways, though it’s not FOSS.
-
Preinstalled.
Like, were nerds and we fuck with our computers n stuff. But most people are lucky to know what a power cord is.
Honestly if Linux with a good DE like KDE or Cinnamon was already on their PC at boot they would figure it out. Most people just use a web browser anyways.
I have put my dad on Kubuntu. Don’t like anything *buntu, personally, but I have to admit it’s quite stable and with sane defaults. He hasn’t complained ever since and support calls dropped considerably. He spends most of the time in Firefox anyways, where I’ve added ublock.
The problem with Windows was, he’d occasionally browse the web with Edge by mistake (or because MS forces it down your throat), and as soon as an 80+ y.o. browses the web without ad blocking, getting a virus is just a matter of time.
All this is to say that I agree with the fact that preinstalled is key. I wish that more effort was focused on fewer distros and I feel that so much talent and energies are being lost in marginal projects.
But many people do this for passion and it’s of course their choice to decide where to contribute, or whether to spin up a brand new distro entirely, can’t judge them for that. I’m just observing that those energies could be better used to smoothen some rough edges on more popular distros to make them even more appealing to OEMs and convince them to ship those on their hardware.
This is definitely how I feel as well. None of the other shit matters unless it comes already on the machine. Even then, it absolutely has to be rock solid stable long term for it to be comparative. Of course that’s asking a lot, considering people still take their PCs into geek squad or wherever else when something goes wrong (or their printer won’t connect).
This always reminds me of the Dell XPS option of having Ubuntu installed but of course that’s far away from “Microsoft literally pays us to sell their shit”. So, until that - or some type of adoption occurs on a B&M level/online-storefront - it’s going to be pretty “voluntary” in terms of adoption. It’s just comparatively so much more work in the layman’s sense.
It’s in a weird way the same with cars. It’s been statistically proven that most people specifically won’t go out of their way to get a simple utility pickup truck. They buy the big fuck you truck because that’s what the dealerships have. It’s the same thing with kids going to college and the parents taking them to buy a laptop for class. My point is that it’s far more easier to just use what you get than try to rehash it. Maybe you don’t even know that’s a possibility so you just settle. Of course this isn’t the only issue, but imo the largest determining factor. IBM had businesses sucking from the teet since computers dropped, and we still deal with the ramifications.
I have my dad on Mint for years. Setup browser and email program and told him to click on that little shield and do updates when it’s there. You can set the shield icon to only appear in case of updates. I sometimes have to update between versions. I think he is still on 21.0 and now 21.2 is out already.
The actual answer, there is no reason to switch. The vast majority of users do not care about Linux or why they would want to. For us there are lots of benefits and things we enjoy about getting away from Windows but for them “why?”
I will object on this one. Even if the majority of user does not care about privacy they do care about ransomware , viruses, speed of the system and in my opinion Linux / BSD is secure, fast and speed remains after time not like Windows where I felt that after 6 months I had to reinstall to get a performant system. I guess it is all about convincing your family and friends about those benefits.
Two weeks ago my step mother asked me “Can you help my friend connect her PC to the wifi, it runs Windows XP” users are fucking weird.
- Isn’t pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
- Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn’t matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it’s more than just click the icon, it’s too much.
- If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I’m “gettin’ stuff done”, I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows’ input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch…
Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I’m not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop’s touch and pen interface worked right out of the box… technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.
The sole (seriously, I’ve looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any ‘functional’ keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it’s totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.
Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.
In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it’s a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it’s barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend’s extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.
GNOME has amazing touchscreen gestures, and afaik comes with it’s own virtual keyboard
I have been tempted by GNOME several times, but I disagree with some of their design choices and find them a bit frustrating. I feel that it’s fairly strongly-opinionated software. The benefits, of course, are obvious: internal consistency that leads to a higher quality experience. But, only if you buy-in to some overarching design philosophy. That’s one of the reasons I left Windows! I also have a suite of Kwin scripts that make my life a lot easier, so it’s pretty hard to leave Plasma at this point.
Still, that keyboard has tempted me a lot nonetheless…
Me too. I love the look of Adwaita, but some of their choices I can’t get past, like not having a system tray. I’m really excited for Cosmic, it looks like it will blend the styling of GNOME with much of KDE’s customization!
COSMIC is now on my radar, thank you. It looks very intriguing.
I echo your frustrations with Maalit. I am running Arch on my Surface Pro 7 and very frequently I have to snap in the keyboard just to get myself out of a situation where touch doesn’t work. Maalit also has this bug where it will push and resize windows as if it was visible even though it is hidden.
Regarding the Firefox issue, it helps if you enable it’s Wayland backend by passing MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to it. Maalit should properly pop whenever you tap on a text box.
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
Thank you - I was already aware of this, actually, but I choose to leave it disabled because when this is set, touchscreen drag-scrolling of webpages breaks and it selects text as though it were a mouse click-drag instead. As it turns out, I barely use Maliit anyway because of its other deficiencies, but I definitely touch-scroll my browser a lot, even in laptop mode. A generally disappointing dilemma!
I also had this problem where touch scrolling on Firefox selects text instead (on ubuntu). It does however work OOTB for me on fedora, so it’s the main distro on that machine.
I agree with the touchscreen thing-- I have one of those foldy-aroundy 2-in-1 laptops, and the only way I’ve been able to get touch to work properly (as in not like a mouse) is gnome wayland. Kde wayland’s fine too, but like you said there’s no included keyboard whereas gnome has one built-in. Also another wayland osk you could try is wvkbd (tho I’ve never used it beyond “hey what’s this”).
While this is true, if someone goes to a shop and buys a “PC”, it will have Windows 100% of the time.
You have to look to get Linux preinstalled on stuff, or pick the choice yourself. People buying PCs aren’t picking Windows, it’s just what comes with them.
- Installation process of Linux is complicated to an average Joe (Bootable USB/ISO file/Boot priority/format <- what are these scary terms?)
- Lack of availability of pre-installed Linux PCs at physical shops
- Lack of availability of industry-standard software
- Confusion for an average Joe due to excess choice of distros/application packaging format. Average people don’t want choices, they want to be guided.
- (Minor point) Most available guides for doing something heavily requires terminal usage which can be daunting to new users
Most people buy computers with the OS already installed and would get just as lost trying to install MacOS or Windows.
This is the correct answer. If Linux was pre-installed, most problems would vanish. My Linux computers are far, far more stable than windows once they run.
The pre installation also means the OEM will verify compatibility, a common complaint.
A lot of people have already talked about the onboarding/installation experience, so I’ll just chime in and say a lot of new users are unfamiliar with using a terminal for commands and instead favour a GUI experience solely for their tasks. Most modern and commercially appealing distros are moving in this direction (ie applications running the same terminal commands in the background with an easy to understand UI at the front) but I’d still say the community’s insistence on terminal over all other forms of executing a command may be a turn off for the layman trying it for the first time after Windows and MacOS.
Almost makes me think it would be more ideal to reduce the stigma associated with executing commands in the terminal and find some way to get people more comfortable with using it, both via Linux and also CMD for Windows as well.
I don’t mind using a terminal so much, but trying to follow people’s terminal instructions can be quite challenging. It seems like 90% of the time they leave out critical details because they assume you’d already know what you’re doing or you get errors because they have packages installed that you don’t. It reminds me of this gem from Malcolm in the Middle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I would agree that this is one of the biggest barriers to entry other than software compatibility.
If i was able to use ILok on linux for my music plugins and vsts, then id likely make the switch. But unfortunately ILok doesnt seem to be interested at least not since i last checked.
I agree with this more than trying to make Linux more GUI oriented overall. GUI’s are great for certain interfaces like phones and tablets for obvious reasons. GUIs are also great if you don’t exactly know what you’re looking for and need a lengthy list of available interactive elements you would have to read and parse a lengthy man page to find in the terminal.
Honestly I think that when learning computers in early age education systems, the terminal should be taught alongside GUI applications so the general public would have an understanding that there is this very powerful tool they can use to quickly execute commands. It is a pre requisite to demystifying computers regardless of which OS you use, and it makes working with your computer a lot less of a headache when you have this bare bones tool that can assist you in finding out the answer to your problem via a verbose error output rather than a cryptic message to call your sys admin or send a notice to the OS provider that likely will not solve your problem in a timely manner.
3rd party software/hardware. Companies don’t develop for Linux. And Linux developers can’t reverse engineering everything.
Things break in weird ways on Linux due to dependencies. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage has yet to show if it’s enough to fix the issue.
That would depend on a case by case basis. For basic use (I thought this was the point of the post) I never had anything break, software/hardware either works or doesn’t (I always use the stable release of everything).
Linux needs developers developers developers developers developers developers developers. Notably gamedevs. And kde needs to be default. Osx is only popular in a couple countries.
Context for developers, developers, developers - https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/rRm0NDo1CiY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
We’ll ui/uz designers are also much needed.
When you have a problem the solution is fragmented between distros, configuration, opinions, and time as solutions constantly change and they all have subtly repercussions. It becomes very overwhelming to figure out a solution and pick the right one.
Make it just run and pre install it on most computers.
With “just run” I mean things like:
- Audio just working
- Bluetooth just working
- Bluetooth and audio working together
(I still can’t get this one right, after 5 evenings of trying) - WiFi supporting all the frequencies, instead of just some
- remembering monitor configurations
- Troubleshooting audio shouldn’t mean that you almost completely kill your OS with that
You know, things like that that might cost you an evening or two or three to figure and make you feel like you’re the rarest edge case alive. On Windows, these work just fine out of the box.
I know this ain’t easy to get to, but I can’t recommend people to use Linux when even a phones does perfectly fine out of the box results in at least an evening of troubleshooting.
man you must be using some fucked up distro because never had those problems in the last 4 years.
That’s kinda the problem here. I’ve heard people say how complex and difficult Android is so they have to use iOS.
People have personal experiences and beliefs that differ and there’s no way to fix them other than to dive into it and they don’t want to dive into it. Unless they are highly motivated to change they will likely just stay where they’re comfortable.
It’s like trying to logically and reasonably explain why being vegan is morally right to someone who absolutely refuses to read the labels on the stuff they buy. They’re not going to want to go into the BIOS to fix a boot order to boot to a flash drive let alone learn a new UI. Hell, most people didn’t even want to move off Windows XP, 7, now 10 till they are absolutely forced to.
It was never about what problems you have had it is about the problems they have had. Most of the time MacOS/Windows are good enough for most users.
- Ubuntu 22.04 (granted it was upgraded a few times, but origianlly a 20.10 box), even with bredr set int he conf, wouldnt work with Airpods…
- pop_os does, but since its a dual boot, i have to re-pair them if i use it in another OS, since they share the bluetooth adapater.
- Using an egpu has no hotplug. And you need something like egpu-switcher to manage the config. - https://github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher
- this also wont apply to pre-login stuff. You would need to copy that over to a different file there.
- this also wouldnt work if you had say…3 monitors and wanted to use 2 configs. In windows you can do that with super+P and swap between extend and only external etc.
-
My pop_os install wont recognize my logitech 720p USB camera thats like. Its a brand new install of 22.04.
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Teams, even in the PWA, and other apps often dont respect the system defaults for sound/mic inputs. Especially if you have a few, which all laptops do since theres always shitty onboard speakers and mics.
There are all experiences of mine from this calendar year. I can work around them mostly. But my wife or others…no way. They would just chuck the PC at me and say “fix it”. These are all also things that work OOB on windows or MacOS.
A fellow laptop user :-) For the monitor setups I use batch files with xrandr settings. I could imagine there being a way to get them to run via hotkeys…
But yes, the whole thing summs up with “I may use it for myself, but I just can’t recommend the whole package without providing tech support for it”.
Yeah I use Debian. (At least once a while when I decide to give it yet another shot…)
Edit: in case you are interested, I can give some extra details on that list, and how I fixed them or not. But all these fixes ain’t a thing I’d expect the median user to be able to figure.
Out of curiosity, how long ago did these problems happen? I’ve been using Mint and Xubuntu for a while now, but had to use a few different troubleshooting distros to fix a Windows boot issue, and none of these came up. As these are Debian based distros, I’d expect the same problems to filter down.
The only thing I’ve had issues with lately is setting up a USB wifi adapter on a Raspberry Pi, but I’d expect some problems with that.
Around a year ago I fixed the bigger issues, but I started with Linux around 5 years ago. The WiFi issue has been around a month ago, but didn’t do a lot of troubleshooting outside of rebooting and browsing all wicd settings because well I was offline because of it. Didn’t visit that place again and at home there’s wifi on all bands as well as ethernet almost everywhere, so the issue doesn’t hurt me that much.
Booted into it today to see if things are better, ran the update/upgrade/reboot after and:
- Bluetooth seems to be better! It now connects to my headphones even when paired before. But now I fails a2dp even after forget/re-pair.
- I had to start the system a couple of times before it actually did start, there’s been some issues finding thermal data of the cpu during startup. I’ll play around with it a bit these days, but sadly it did not magically just work.
Why would you expect issues with an external WiFi adapter for the RasPi?
I wonder if it was an edge case that the Linux driver didn’t account for, like a minor incompatibility between the two devices.
You’ve just reminded me that I had a Bluetooth problem with my laptop a few years ago. My headset would connect and work properly, but wouldn’t be recognised after the laptop had either been to sleep or shut down. I had to go through the bluetooth device folder, something like /dev/bluetooth/, find the folder that corresponded with the headset’s address, and delete the cache folder inside. It would then work until the next sleep / shut down.
I expected problems with the Pi because USB wifi has always seemed to be a bit dodgy, even on Windows, and wifi is apparently still a problem area with Linux. Add to that the Pi’s limited distro, and I thought it was bound to go wrong.
I just had the opposite problem, tried to re-image a brand new laptop with windows 10, keyboard and mouse dont work in setup. Works in the bios, works in linux, doesn’t work in windows until it can hit windows update. Honestly in recent years stuff in linux just works.
The main issue is that easy problems that should be solved baseline by the OS crop up far too often for the average user to want to have to deal with day to day. Also, whenever you go to ask on a forum, you’re usually told to just do something entirely different or use another distro. Every time I go to fix something on this machine it sends me down a rabbit hole of shit I don’t care about because it doesn’t solve my problem since it introduces a brand new one to solve. If I want to use solution X don’t tell me to go install program Y that’s your favorite program to use but is literally not what I’m trying to accomplish.
Today I installed Manjaro onto an old laptop and for the life of me I could not figure out why it wasn’t connecting to the internet. It wasn’t a network issue, it was the fact that the time was out of sync. It took me a while to realize that was the issue and not that I had fucked up my router config or something. It just couldn’t validate any cryptography because the time was off. There were like four different solutions that all attempted the same fix and eventually I was able to connect with ethernet and restart timesync, which only worked after a restart.
It breaks. And I cant imagine anyone who wants to spend time fixing it, much less how long it would take tech illiterate people. Cant explain how many times ive gotten some random error downloding a package, and even ill have a hard time finding what tf the cryptic error message means
That and permissions, though they could be lumped into the first point
Do you think just restarting with no information would be better? I could understand that cryptic error Message could scare some people, so do you think a “blue screen” and restart would be better for the average person?
If the device can self repair behind the scenes, 100% most users couldnt care less about an error message or having to reboot, as long as not too often and requiring too much input. I can see why linux is excellent for servers requiring little to no downtime though
just use strace!
I remember recently there was something where a fairly low level system dependency was having trouble installing during a system upgrade, but only until partway through the install. It caused chaos on my system that took a good week to resolve. I can’t imagine that 99% of people have the skill or patience to go through that process.
That said, that particular problem may be solved by the new generation of distros that allow for rollback of system changes.
