Windows VS Linux (part 2)

If you're enabling Snap on Mint, you might as well install Ubuntu.

but once I had trouble enabling snap on Linux Mint.

Seems like a win

A simple analogy is, would you rather have keyboard with a-z and symbols you can use to build words/sentences, or would you want a wordlist you can scroll and click, while expanding words in groups, and having to find non-frequent words with a lot of difficulty to make up sentences.

Command line use is harder if you come from gui. But the main use case of command line are:

• automation: anything you can do in a command line, can be copied in a script,
• uniformity: every software now has almost the same format of use,
• flexibility: gui almost always has less options than command line, and many times options are hidden within a lot of tabs and options.
• Auto complete: whenever someone complains about terminal being hard to use and spelling mistakes I think about this. I think many people that come from GUI don't know about auto-completion on terminal. It's easy to see which options are available, easy to choose files, wildcards for multiple files, and all that
• piping: command line allows you to chain one command with another. You have a command to list all your music files, chain that with a search command to search files within them. Now if you need to search in a python code, you use the same search command, just different command to read the file. You basically have lego blocks (old ones) that can be used to make anything.

I can understand people being afraid of command line when they start, but I think many people come with biases and don't use good terminal and other tools to make things easier.

Yay -S app is hard? Or apt install app? Or flatpak?

Being used to a habit doesnt make the habit the default way. Humans adapt quickly.

Check the name of this community again.

Power users are just regular users with an ego.

GUI is like fast food, sure you can eat it and enjoy it, and you will live to see another day, but it's inferior in every way to everything else. The real problem is that people start acting like fast food is the default food and start looking at people who eat raw or cook their own food or pay for food at a restaurant as being full of themselves.

There are countless real advantages to CLI over GUI, but allowing people to use their computer effectively by fumbling around isn't one of them.

The last time I got a DLL error was back in Windows 98 ffs.

I got one on my work laptop this week. It's controlled by a shitty management software that is used by our IT, but still.

I got this when I didn't have the correct .NET installed

It is.

I like how you specified "Microsoft browser" 😏

Broken clock and all that

Eh, Windows complaints tend to get pretty hyperbolic much of the time. It’s slow and annoying but I’ve always worked with it

But the description of the Linux update process matches my experience with mint, pretty much. I even use the GUI update utility because it will put a little icon in the bottom corner of the screen. It’s quick even if I’m using a program that’s going an update, and if the kernel gets updated it’s just like “hey remember to reboot buddy!”

Besides missing dependencies or repositories for more nice software this kinda closely matches my experience though.

(Ignoring winget, becaust it is not really the mainstream way to install windows software)

What is your specific issue with this?

Literally

My desktop/laptop experience for both is as follows:

Windows update, at least since the inception of the concept has never required me to go to a browser (unless you count w98 "everything is a website" concept for the desktop or the far in between instances were a PC was offline/having issues and you need to download update packages)

It also updated windows applications (ie office) but yeah it never intended to upgrade other stuff, all other software had their own auto update check

I'll concede the restart because yeah it does all for that

But yeah Linux install is not without issues, and I'll just remind everyone of how difficult it was/is to install a component driver when it's not automatically found (wifi cards, disk controllers, and Realtek drivers anyone?)

Yeah it does update your apps, as long as you have the repos, and restart wise I distinctively remember that you do need to do restarts after updates, be it major distro or not.

Simple commands? I'll concede that, as long as we remember the average Linux user is used to a less user friendly experience. Complain ask you want but for the average user, windows update experience works

Thankfully I don't need to deal with all that stuff now

"Here have this brand new house!!"

"But you still have to smack down a few walls, disable the cameras we added, find a way to go trough your door without having your anus print registered with us, and keep us from moving your furniture to our warehouse, all for your convenience ofcourse."

As soon as I realized that Microsoft laughs at people trying to harden Windows I switched to Linux and never looked back. Microsoft doesn't care about you hardening it and they don't care about cracked versions in the slightest. You're a statistic with an advertisement in your home and you'll still be making money for them.

I'm not paying for pro

I did

I haven't had to restart to install / uninstall anything since WinME.

> doesn't use arch/nix

"why cant i find my package in the repos?"

Fuck, I hate AppImages so much. Never heard of gearlever, thanks i hope this helps a lot.

Edit: Ok Gearlever is pretty great! Now I can finally open Heroic normally. That pissed me off for so long.

Even if that’s needed, you can update apps w/o reboot usually (when sandboxed), and move opened files around (seriously wtf, Windows)…

Yes

WinGet, choco, scoop, &c, they all have strengths and weaknesses, which is why I had to write this: https://github.com/brianary/scripts/blob/main/Update-Everything.ps1

It's also why I use Linux at home.

Winget-ui is great, except Microsoft hasn't figured out to conceptually make two installs of the same product get treated the same -- absolutely pathetic that if you install VLC from their website you can never ever ever use Winget VLC without uninstalling the other.

Compiling from GitHub is cherry picking the worst case especially for "most normal people" and frankly they should be using the software store GUI in their DE to install and update software with nice easy buttons to click.

Frankly software management for a normal person generally is easier on Linux than it is on Windows for stuff made to run on Linux.

But don't worry someone will respond with nvidia's shitty proprietary drivers.

Most normal people only ever use the browser. Even image or video editing is niche for the average person

This applies to pretty much all "Linux good, Win/MacOS bad" memes. I just assume that people either aren't really serious about them and it's just tongue in cheek, or they don't have any contact with regular people.

I used to work as a(n assistant to the) sysadmin and the things I got called over never stopped to amaze. For instance, there was a case when software was updated on the work machines and I got called because some lady couldn't use Adobe Acrobat. "It is asking me something, I don't know what". I come over and it's just a TOS Accept/Decline window.

Some people do not understand computers to an extent that they can lock up in a state of confusion when a button has been moved 100px in any direction from its usual position.

Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options, never mind putting them into a terminal window where they could seriously fuck up their machine

Maybe this is a problem that we should be addressing, rather than just making technology more of a black box, and raising generations of people who have no fucking concept of how any of it works.

Unless you have a system without a GUI, you don't need to open a terminal in order to update or install stuff. There is a GUI for that. And no, you don't need to build stuff from GitHub for normal user stuff..

been using linux for a few years both on servers and my pc and I never had to build sth myself

Let's also not conflate "ease" with historical behavior.

Taking previous experience out of the equation, it is easier to type apt upgrade and reboot to update your entire system than to click through 300 times in the system and multiple apps with reboots.

That is a fact.

Let’s not cherrypick scenarios to try and pretend Linux is easier than Windows. Most normal people are...

Let's not cherry pick users then. I don't care about your normal users. My experience is better on Linux.

Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options

Sadly no. They should be nervous if it's about making changes to their system. In reality however Windows conditioned them to just click the button labeled "Yes" or "Okay" without even reading the pop-up in the first place.

This is a requirement for Immutable Distributions, not that Mint is... But others.

Unless you're updating the kernel itself, there is little chance you actually need to reboot your machine. Just restarting whatever service or application you're using should do the trick.

Yep. Every kernel update. Granted that's less often than Windows requires a reboot.

Really? I need to restart my Windows less often, Fedora asks me every other day restart my PC to install updates

Besides a kernel update... Which one?

Honest question, as I usually just restart to be sure I haven't missed to restart a service or something, but theoretically I could restart every program and service, that got updated.

Maybe Mint is very conservative here...

Yep. I'm on EndeavourOS which is about as far as you can get from Mint without going to like Slackware, LFS, or BSD. Basically every single run of pacman prompts for a reboot. I'm sure I could restart individual services or subsystems instead, but that's not what the OS popup says.

Afaik mint just says you have to restart but don't forces you. Iirc it was there to avoud any glitches which could be caused by apps interacting with each other in different versions(say some system app got updated and desktop environment is still the old since its loaded before update then cause gui mismatch due to different versions of ui toolkit)

Genuinely the only people who use Winget or choco are Linux users who have to use Windows.

NixOS solved this. You can install both deps from two different channels.

If your distro maintainer's do a good job, that situation never happen's.

Or just use gentoo where that problem doensn't exist at all.

Most of the time you can just download a release and place the binary in path (or a symlink).

Compiling it yourself should not 'messing up' anything, it should build locally:

./configure
make -j$(nproc)

Now it's just built, nothing on your system has changed. make install will place requisite files where they need to go, but this generally configurable via prefix or equivalent. You may need to install dependencies, but that's usually a simple exercise in reading the output from the configuration step.

Compiling software is easy as fuck and is incredibly flexible.

I sometimes just give up and use Docker or a Flatpak (depending on if it's a CLI or GUI app)

Huh, pacman always seemed to automatically work out those dependency loops, or whatever you want to call them, when I was on EndeavourOS. The only time I had an issue with updating was when I went like two weeks without updating, and then ran out of harddrive space halfway through installing the 600 updates.

I've been running Bazzite for several months now, and updating is absurdly easy and unintrusive. It's basically impossible to fuckup (and if you do, it's extremely simple to rollback). I can really see immutable/atomic being the future of Linux.

Manjaro, is that you?

I've switched over a year ago and that's the thing that, looking back, sticks out to me the most as well. It's just insane that practically every application I used had its own update routine. Lesser used apps I had to update every single time before using them. Just constant interruptions everywhere.

Winget is a step in the right directions, but it still has to build upon and work around that same shaky foundation, and it shows.

I can't laugh it up as I use Ubuntu with a K.

Coincidentally my windows PC needed to update when I got back to it. It took like 15 minutes and 2 restarts. I legit pulled out my Ubuntu laptop and Sudo apt-get upgraded that bitch just to flex on Bill Gates.

Winget sucks ass. Fails half of the time, lists way too much I did not install through Winget m, even had apps broken because of bad updates through Winget.

Never had these problems with scoop or chocolatey though.

I think the last time I saw a dll issue was windows 8.

There's winget now too, which is the official Windows package manager. I've used it a couple of times now and worked as expected, not sure how it compares to chocolatey outside of simple app installs though.

I always prefered scoop with which I had fewer issues and which installs everything without needing admin rights.

Yeah at least back in the old days the ones frothing at the mouth about Linux...you had to seek them out on irc or weird forums. Now the doge memes come to me.

Windows is not getting better,
CoPilot, Recall, all more unwanted spyware..

UniGetUI is a good way to maintain software on Windows in a Linux fashion through package managers,
however that does not change that the underlying OS is pure spyware.

Nixos doesn’t need a restart

Perhaps its just gotten better, but I've been on it for a year or two now, and I haven't come across an error message that didn't bring up solutions when copy/pasted into google. Definitely varies by distro though, I was on EndeavourOS for most of that time, and being Arch, it has like infinite documentation.

Anyways Linus desktop is a mess. You are delusional if you think it's easie

Use it before saying shit that's so blatantly stupid

I appreciate Linux for how well it can handle single-purpose tasks, like if I wanted a media centre or such, but after daily driving it for 3 years on my Desktop I've had enough. Anyone who thinks it's easy has a lot of spare time they wish to invest into a thing that's supposed to just work.