The best one I’ve ever heard is they like the Microsoft wallpapers. Yes i told them you can use them on linux too. But they argued with me that they wouldn’t be compatible.
A friend of mine finally decided to heed my advice and try it out. He successfully installed fedora and was pleasantly surprised by the ‘clean’ design (of gnome). He then enabled his Bluetooth headphones and DMed me that they won’t connect. The BT menu wouldn’t show them.
Now, I wouldn’t call him stupid, so I committed a grave sin of troubleshooting when I decided to not offend his intelligence. We hopped on a call and started debugging. Looking at drivers, support for his hardware, logs for any errors… He didn’t have another device to connect through BT at the moment and I was out of ideas, so we called it a night and decided to try again tomorrow.
By the time we reconnected the next day, he had already reinstalled windows, but was suffering from the same issue.
And then it downed on me… “Did you pair your headphones?” I asked, afraid of the answer. He just blinked twice and the “what do you mean?” hit me so hard I couldn’t even laugh. “I’ve never had to do that before…”
Some painful explanations later, or an argument really, and his headphones were paired. But by that time he had had enough and didn’t want me to bother him about Linux again. Needless to say, pointing out it was his misunderstanding of the technology that ultimately led to this outcome didn’t really help.
This memory still injects fury in my veins as I fall asleep, right there with fumbling my words when speaking with my highschool crush…
“I’ve never had to do that before…”
Not trying to shit on the guy, but like, that’s literally the first thing you do with BT anything. 😄
I guess that really depends on the equipment though, some devices when you turn it on for the first time will automatically enter pairing mode, so all that had to be done is click it in the bluetooth menu, but it might not auto enter pairing mode when you turn it on after. So it’s unlikely the user ever knew they were pairing it, and just clicked through the prompts like many do
Yeah, no, of course. But that’s kinda my point: there was still an initial pairing. I’m not trying to be antagonistic or anything. I just find it a bit silly that one could research how to replace their entire OS with one they’re not familiar with but not realize they’re gonna have to re-pair their BT devices.
Then again, I think we’re all guilty of sometimes missing small details. I once put a PC together for a buddy and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t post only to eventually realize I was a dummy who forgot to plug in the CPU power. 😂
We all have been there. First technical build I struggled for 45 minutes trying to figure out why I was getting a zero display whatsoever only to find out that I plugged that damn HDMI cable into the wrong port, and the board had disabled everything including post and splash from using the motherboards port
He was able to install Linux and Windows but couldn’t figure out how to pair a Bluetooth device…
TBF Bluetooth sucks a lot. To this day I need to power cycle the phones Bluetooth connection and headphones connect button a few times for it to pair properly some times. Different brands and headphones, silly different issues for all. Want to use your headphones for more that a phone and laptop? Maybe on a third device like a TV or desktop? Fuck you.
People blame everything on whatever the last change was
Went to the mechanic for an oil change and now my AC doesn’t work? The mechanic must have fucked my AC while changing my oil!!! 1!1!1!1
All while claiming they did “nothing” when they f-ed up themselves.
Around '98, a tech support guy got a call that their application didn’t work anymore. He tried to troubleshoot, but the system was a mess. “Did you change anything since yesterday?” - “No, we didn’t!”.
What they did do, though, was running the Win98 update the day before. Which, at one point, after doing lots of things, complained that it could not continue for some reason, and offered to “undo” the changes…
I find a big part of trying to be the friend that transitions to Linux is taking on the role of mentor. It’s something a lot of wish we could just hand to someone and dust off our hands, but that ultimately leads to experiences like yours.
For a better chance of success, especially on first install, be on the line with them as they go through the steps, or in person is better yet.
Answer all the questions you can and help them install all their usual stuff. Most people don’t want to have to go through this change, so making it fun and social goes a long way.
Indeed that was my intention. I just never thought that he wouldn’t be familiar with something so ubiquitous in today’s world, so I didn’t even think to ask. That’s why this situation is so infuriating to me, not so much that he didn’t know, but that my assumptions prevented me to resolve it
We regularly believe that, because we know, everyone else knows, and that’s a failure I’m extremely guilty of. I gave my sister a Qnap NAS about 6 years ago and told her to just plug it in, plug in the land cable and set it up. 2 years after that she calls me asking for info on a data recovery service for her Mac. So I asked her why she needed data recovery, that’s what the NAS was for. Well, she did what I told her, but never configured backing up her files.
So, yeah, now I assume everyone is ignorant and pass for arrogant some times over explaining.
Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:
Guy: “Installing Linux is complicated though”
Me: “It wasn’t bad 10 years ago, and now it’s as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows”
Guy: “Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!”
Difficult to argue with this non-logic.
My almost 70yr old mother installed mint herself. Her tech literacy level is Word Processing with a dash of Solitaire.
“Never used Linux,” They say, typing on a chromebook or android phone, before picking up their steamdeck.
while browsing the web (hosted on linux).
Not to interject, but when people talk about using “Linux” they’re generally referring to desktop Linux (usually GNU/Linux). ChromeOS and SteamOS are Linux distros of a sort under the hood, but they’re also highly curated experiences. Android technically uses the Linux kernel but architecturally it’s so drastically different from basically any other system using it that it’s quite misleading to call it “Linux” in the colloquial sense.
If it came pre-installed on laptop majority wouldn’t mind.
That’s really the crux of it. M$ bought in back in the 80s and people are too damn lazy to change their defaults.
Why you out there telling people to install it? Those who want it will find it. This isn’t an evangelical mission.
Isn’t it?
The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.
I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it’s not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It’s not about being holier than thou, it’s about lifting each other up.
If Linux gets popular the mega corps will just follow them there and then you’ll be asking them to uninstall Dell os or at least remove the Linux recall (powered by bing) that it comes bundled with. Just look at the modern state of android.
Android is the way it is because Google is close sourcing more and more of what makes Android useful as a mobile OS. It would be infinitely harder for some megacorp to do the same thing for a desktop OS.
Yeah like, holy shit the pseudo religious bullshit here is getting annoying. I like Linux, I am supremely unlikely to ever even touch a windows system again (minus the occasional time where I might have to for work when accessing client systems) but this weird cult behavior is aggravating.
Do you have just a few minutes to chat about our lord and saviour Richard Stallman?
Can’t, whenever Stallman comes up I have to think back to the time where he while on stage, pulled something off his foot and ate it.
Eat of this toenail, for it is my flesh. Do this in remembrance of me.
Zomg, I just lol’d so loud at this.
This. I don’t mind what other use, nor I feel the need to be annoying AF telling them what they should do.
Devil’s advocate here. When people complain about phone calls, or going out in public, or being social, I think “it’s not hard.” I know for some people it is a massive hassle.
Apply that same sentiment to having to learn an OS that is irrelevant to your job or seems difficult or you’re not interested in.
”You can’t trust free software”
My grandfather’s reason for it. “It will be too different from my current system”
… the only thing he does is the web browser, and bookworm deluxe which i have confirmed does work via wine. I was recommending him install an OS called q4os, which I have on my laptop, I showed him the side by side comparison of q4os vs windows. For a point of reference this is what q4os looks like
I think he is too scared of change.
I still don’t know how Wine works and I’m a Linux advocate.
It’s pretty simple actually. Mine runs the program as it would normally and whenever the program reaches out to say “create this file” or “load this font” for example Wine will grab that call and translate it into a Linux OS command. As long as the program gets all their Windows API calls and windows specific files requests satisfied it will happily continue.
This is why ARM support is such a hassle for wine since the processor is with a different architecture so the compiled binary needs to be translated as well with all the nuances.
I have never managed to get any exe to start with wine and god i have tried. I have no idea why it never works but a menu comes up and i can choose a lot of stuff, nothing in there works so i have just given up. Putting things and run through steam is stupid but works so i just run everything through steam 😂 Wish I didn’t have to.
Being in this same boat with wine, and my ever-growing hate of Windows is what made me stay in Linux and never look back. I’ve been using everything linux-native for the last 9 years, and not once have I thought of using Windows again.
I do, however play games in Linux, ever since my wife got me a steam deck for my birthday 😁
Wine has some compatibility differences between its versions — I’ve had to downgrade it before because the newer version didn’t work with the app I wanted. So, if you’re ever in the mood to try again, you could check out an older version, and perhaps try launching a simpler app like notepad which is iirc supplied with Wine.
Also, Wine launched from the command line, with the exe as the parameter, usually prints a lot of stuff some of which may say what libraries weren’t found, and
winetricksallows installing those libraries easily (if it’s still around, I haven’t done this in a while). Typically something like ‘MS C++ redistributables’ or the .NET framework is necessary.
yea but he wouldn’t need to handle that, I do all his setup, he just has to click the shortcut that opens the game just like he does currently.
It translates Windows API calls to X and POSIX API calls. Theoretically it comes with a performance hit but as benchmarks have shown that is usually not the case as both Wine and the entire system as a whole are more efficient than Windows. Wine will fail whenever an application requests an API call that is not implemented yet, sometimes copying DLLs from Windows helps, sometimes…
I’m still not great with Wine myself, but sit down for an afternoon and try out Bottles. https://www.howtogeek.com/running-windows-apps-on-linux-with-bottles/
I’m on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It’s pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it’s own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you’ll probably have an a-ha! moment.
That’s on you
my parents were open to try it, and theyre still happy they didnt have to buy a new win11 laptop
This was quite a few years ago, but a friend of mine said he’d tried Linux but had switched back because some clipboard feature he was used to using didn’t work (sorry, I forget the details). He was a programmer to, so perfectly capable of troubleshooting or finding some alternative tool. I just stared at him dumbfounded.
Sadly its really hard to change habits. But it goes both ways, every time I need to use windows I find myself grunting for every minor thing that doesn’t work as expected.
I get him though, mouse wheel click for a secondary copy buffer is one of the main things that’s extremely annoying to me when I have to use Windows, I can never retrain my brain to stop doing it and I get annoyed that it doesn’t work until I remember why.
The whatchacallit, terminal with super cryptic commands is too hard. When I go on the internet and say my system has a problem and they tell me to type sudo pacman -Syu, I need something more easier than that. You know like-- with more steps. And five modal GUIs. And buttons.
“Lack of consensus on pronunciation of name.”
And I stand by it.
Agreed. But it does make it easy to tell evil Linux users from good Linux users. I pronounced it so you can tell who is who.
I’m so glad you agree that Linux users are the evil ones.
Obvious, right? Only an evil person would say it that way.
“Linux isn’t made for professional use” - Colleague from Work who is an Apple stan. And yes he bought the Apple™ Cloth for iPhone.
What if the browser doesn’t work? It will work.
my motherboards drivers don’t come with windows, and so when i tried to install it and it forced me to connect to the internet, i just couldn’t. luckily i found a usb dongle to ethernet which worked ootb.
never had a weird mono driver issue like that on any linux distro i tried.
I did because the laptop I had bought had a brand new processor and not all the drivers were in the kernel version that was in the distro’s newest ISO. I had to plug in a keyboard, screen, and network adapter to install the right kernel.
A surprising amount of people have put up this mental wall separating “SteamOS” from Linux.
I’ve had this conversation with multiple people and it’s being brought up again because of the Steam Machine announcement.
Some (very few) legitimately didn’t know SteamOS was a Linux distro, Or they knew it was based on Linux but thought it used a whole different user ecosystem. Like how Android is technically Linux but using it is nothing like using desktop Linux. These people I’ve found are more willing to actually look into Linux after someone’s explained to them that SteamOS is just Linux. And that there’s even SteamOS-like Linux distros you can use right now!
Then you have those who are hard-line about having Official SteamOS. And most of the time they have some misguided believe along the line of, SteamOS is Linux but Valve has fixed all the “Linux issues”. And for a lot of them you’re probably not going to get far convincing them that mainline Linux isn’t just endless command lines these days.
Most silly excuse was my boss refusing to install Linux because he just had a friend give him original windows 98se licenses for the PCs we just bought for the company.
Well it gets less silly thinking that getting the eprom programmer software and orcad 4 working on Linux was probably impossible.
Then it was outright the best decision ever, because those machines never required a reinstall and worked flawless for the 5 years I was there working. Never understood the bad rep W98Se had. Never used it on my personal rigs of course.
