• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Yeah, but I think it can feel too much like a circle jerk around here sometimes. I get that people want to win over new users, but some of it goes too far I think. The fact is Linux isn’t perfect, and while no OS is, there are some critical things you can do on Windows that are still a pain in the ass on Linux. Some of that is a vendor/proprietary software problem, but a good chunk of it is just people being willing to overlook a thin layer of jank in their normal workflows.

    I think we’d all be better off to all acknowledge and clean up the jank rather than try to pretend it’s fine as is.


  • There was a time when there was an annual “Linux Sucks” presentation that I liked because it was a roundup of candid, yet constructive criticism of Linux (and then at some point the person running that went off the deep end and started yelling about woke agendas).

    I wouldn’t mind there being a whole community devoted to pointing out shit that is poorly designed or just broken when running linux, and we as a community then try to fix them or find workarounds.

    But as others have pointed out, that community isn’t a community, it’s literally just one account hanging out by themselves.


  • On top of all the other informative comments answering a plethora of questions you understandably have when entering the Linux ecosystem, I want to express: don’t feel like you need to learn all this stuff if it doesn’t interest you, or otherwise turns you off the idea of Linux.

    It’s perfectly fine to ignore all the terminology, install whatever new-user friendly version of Linux you can, and just start using it. If it’s not to your taste, or it asks too much of you, maybe try a different one. But I’m of the firm belief that immediately inundating a new user with a bunch of new vocab and unfamiliar workflows is the mark of a bad new user experience, and you shouldn’t feel required to put up with that.

    The fact is, unlike MSFT who has a bunch of terminology internal to the windows dev teams, Linux is developed in the open, so all the terminology leaks into the user world too. And you just need to get good at saying, “if this doesn’t help me use my PC better for what I need it to do, I don’t care”.


  • Honestly, it’s just a matter of knowing this list:

    • CPU
    • RAM
    • motherboard
    • GPU
    • hard drive
    • case
    • power supply

    And roughly how they should fit together.

    But every time I build a PC I have to figure out what the latest versions of these parts are, make sure they’re compatible, and when I get the parts they might have some unique form factor I have to figure out on the fly. Just going to PC Part Picker and picking out each part is 90% of the way there. After that it’s just a matter of getting them, sticking them together, crossing your fingers that it powers on, and installing an OS. If/when it doesn’t power on, THAT’S when you start learning…

    But I would say building a PC is not a fraction as difficult as say, knowing how to work on a car.





  • I feel like the end goal has always been the incentive for me. I learned to build a PC because, if I wanted to play the games I wanted, there wasn’t another option. I still do always enjoy the process of putting it all together, but I’m always ready to have it all working, booted, and put to use (if not just so I can be relieved that I don’t need to RMA anything, hah).

    If the end goal isn’t something that interests you, then maybe it’s just not worth doing it.


  • I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.





  • Agreed with using keepass. If you’re one person accessing your passwords, there’s no reason you need a service running all the time to access your password db. It’s just an encrypted file that needs to be synced across devices.

    However, if you make frequent use of secure password sharing features of lastpass/bitwarden/etc, then that’s another story. Trying to orchestrate that using separate files would be a headache. Use a service (even if self-hosted).