TechConnectify@mas.to - Oh my gosh I just figured it out.
Okay, all you open source evangelist people: your knee-jerk reaction to come at people who are talking about a problem with whatever commercial software they use and suggest Your Favorite Alternatives™ is exactly like saying “why don’t you just buy a house?” to someone complaining about their landlord.
TechConnectify@mas.to - Actually, to borrow from @DoubleA, it’s worse than that.
It’s like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home.
You have to be at peace with the fact that some people just want to exist and not worry about so many things. And they still have a right to complain about their situation.
Link to thread: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111539959265152243
Damn, I didn’t know people couldn’t financially afford installing Linux.
“Open source is free if you don’t value your time.” (forgot who that quote is from)
Sometimes the time investment is small, but especially for complex software, the friction of switching from one imperfect (proprietary) software to another imperfect (open) software makes it not really make much sense unless the issue is severe (house is half destroyed).
This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.
It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.
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Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?
Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.
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Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.
“Help, I can’t afford rent!” -> “Buy a house, stupid.”
“Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!” -> “Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid.”
Seems like a solid metaphor to me.
Kind of off topic, but you can change how many characters your mastodon instance allows. Mine allows 1337 (for some reason) and I know many have it unlimited. I don’t know about TC’s instance.
Probably because it’s leet.
Good to know, thanks!
For the last decade my job has consisted of helping IT administrators manage open source software. Even if they’ve got all the certifications in the world they get stuck. A lot. Like, so much that I’m amazed the Internet works at all.
And then the get angry, like the computer is going to respond to their anger. They stop reading error messages. They forget to look at logs. They can’t just stop and read and think.
The computer doesn’t care that you’re angry. It’s a Turing machine, and it can do anything a Turing machine can do provided it’s told to do the correct things.
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I don’t think it is so much claiming that open source doesn’t value time, but the opposite: (switching to) open source isn’t free, because it has a time cost that needs to be discussed. Technically the arguments holds for switching between any software, open or otherwise, but when your pitching to someone who already is using proprietary software that works well enough, the cost of staying can be much lower.
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At my previous job the unwritten rule was that you could install Linux, but if for whatever reason your OS got borked and it took you more than a certain amount of hours to recover, you’d switch to Windows.
Multiple people switched to Windows. Major Ubuntu updates took an entire morning, and a kernel bug that persisted for six months caused certain machines to need terrible workarounds. Other distros had similar periodic issues. The lack of real Excel also caused issues (online Excel did not suffice in that occasion).
It made no business sense to install Ubuntu. There were just too many problems that got in the way of getting the work done compared to buying another Windows license.
For your personal machines it’ll depend on how much you value your free time, but if you do professional work on your computer, installing Linux may just not be a wise financial decision.
do you also count the time spent on arcane windows issues?
Arcane Windows issues like “why is this program slow” or “why is the start menu in Spanish” are usually easier to troubleshoot than “why does the computer not boot when I use a DisplayPort -> HDMI connector” or “why can I only mirror my screens and what is a modeset”. Plus, most professional software is developed with Windows as a primary distribution target.
It only took me…
-checks notes-
5 hours to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11.
The installer is trash. Literally requires everything but the OS disk attached to the machine.
do you do this regularly? and if so, why?
don’t get me wrong, plenty of things need troubleshooting in Windows, too. but a one time upgrade taking a bit too long isn’t exactly a persistent problem.
No, but it was still a similar experience to what others had in Linux in this post. Honestly never had an update be a problem on a Linux machine. It also wasn’t it taking long. It provides a generic error that could mean 100 different things and I had to troubleshoot to find which one it was.
Also, last time I tried installing Windows 10, I gave up trying to make the graphics drivers work properly. IDK what the hell the issue was, but Ubuntu is a lot more plug-and-play for me than that - the proper graphics drivers were included out of the box!
I’ve spent a lot of time on both windows and a bit less on Linux and I can firmly say I’ve spent far more time troubleshooting on Linux than on Windows.
Windows tends to give me bullshit like audio crackling or nvidia’s stupid fucking software. With Linux the issues tend to be far more drastic, such as UI problems with every window, or misconfigured packages fucking with the entire OS, or an entire operating system just not functioning correctly with my hardware.
A lot of this I could fix by not being such an idiot by how I use Linux, but in my defense at the time I didn’t know best practices for using Linux as a general user, and a lot of internet guides sure didn’t explain the dangers of what I was doing. Meanwhile, I’ve never fucked myself enough to need to reinstall windows by reading online guides.
I’m glad I stuck with Linux long enough that it’s what I always put on my laptops no matter what, but man I would not want to put that on others, especially people with working lives.
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I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.
I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.
And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.
Time is money after all.
You can ask a CEO to waste hours upon hours learning Linux, or they could install Windows and make bank using the hours saved.