MudMan

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

Arguably they still can’t.

But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

The thing is in my memory it wasn’t that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs…

I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn’t think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don’t use but you’ve heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.

I guess that contributes to it. I guess when someone gave me install media (I believe for Debian, if you’re gonna be pedantic about it) their approach may have been “there’s now free Unix you can just get” and that’s why it didn’t feel new.

Man, Linux is one of those things where it’s less old than I think.

I don’t see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don’t remember at the time thinking “oh, this is some new thing”, so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.

That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.

Hah.

Steam has always been an anti-piracy tool. Gabe Newell is very much on the record about convenience (and inconvenience) being the key to the problem.

People were mad at them for a while, then they proved him wrong by forgetting that had ever happened.

This is true. The thing is, all data needs a medium.

It doesn’t matter if you own a file sitting in a hard drive or a disc sitting in a box. Discs are nicer because you get a thing you can put on a shelf to act as a backup of the file you dump from it. Plus they often come with nice extras. If you don’t think things on shelves are nice your priorities may be different.

The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of “Netflix is all you need”.

As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.

I don’t know that I’d say they refuse to believe it, it’s more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.

Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that… as long as it’s within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.

Newell doesn’t have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he’s in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes “no shit, Gabe” and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.

It’s a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.

I dual boot on most of my devices and I have PCs around the house going back to Windows 95.

I am also proposing that “just this week I installed Linux for my mom” becomes the next “year of Linux desktop” and is treated with similar derision, because man.

In all seriousness, this is delusional. All Windows devices out there work out of the box and come with Windows preinstalled, so there isn’t an installation in the first place, just a first time setup. Installing Windows the way I like it takes some tinkering, but MS’s assumption is that most normies don’t have a way they like at all and will happily take the default. They are right about this.

There is certainly more clicking on a Windows install in that you have to say no to a bunch of stuff, but it’s ultimately fairly equivalent these days.

The problem with Linux isn’t installing it (sweaty Arch users aside), the problem is what happens next. You can get lucky and have everything work, particularly with Bazzite and other distros that have a narrow focus and provide specific installers targeted to specific hardware, but if something in your PC doesn’t work out of the box you’re SoL.

In the example from this video the guy found out their AMD GPU was running about 25% slower than expected, so now what? And that’s before he reaches an ungraceful boot failure and is stuck out of the OS instead of going into an automated recovery process.

You have to troubleshoot on Windows as well, as you do on any computer, but the likelihood of hitting an issue in the first place is lower due to it being the baseline platform, and the paths to a resolution are also more streamlined. That’s the definition of harder to set up and maintain.

The sooner the Linux community gets over the delusional bubble they live in after getting their systems set up and fine tuned the faster a transition to Linux for more people will be. The delusional rah-rah isn’t helping.

I should add that in my experience Linux developers and maintainers are WAY less unrealistic about the current state of Linux in these areas than vocal online advocates. This is more a community problem than a development or strategy problem, although there’s some of both in there as well.

You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.

You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That’s the bar for mainstream usage.

If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it’s cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.

Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it’s not unlocking hardware that wasn’t working because it didn’t have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.

It does make it so.

I get so tired of shouting this from the rooftops in the general direction of FOSS devs and advocates. UX is the only thing that matters. If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t exist.

No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.

This doesn’t make me mad because I want to defend Windows, this makes me mad because I really, REALLY want Linux to do well, along with other FOSS alternatives to enshittified commercial software, and this is an absolute brick wall blocker for that. I don’t know how FOSS spaces take away control from whiny engineers who think the current situation is functional, but somebody needs a UX equivalent of a Linus Torvalds shouting abuse at coworkers about how garbage their UX is (that everybody finds hilarious for some reason. Maybe the next step is getting some HR).

Yes it is.

For the end user, if one platform has driver support and the other one doesn’t, then one platform works and the other one does not.

“It’s not my bug” is a thing engineers get to say to close issues on their backlog, but it doesn’t magically fix the problem for the end user if the other side says the same thing (or doesn’t care).

If you want people to use Linux, then Linux has to work, and that includes the third party drivers.

Yeah, PS2 is standalone business still. And in its defense, PCSX2 is super user friendly as a standalone package and supports most of the shared stuff you’d want from Retroarch anyway.

I guess it kinda is. Some choices are a bit… peculiar.

I’ve just been using it for so long I have no concept of how it reads getting into it for the first time.

It can also be used as a bit of a behind-the-scenes engine in some emulation wrappers, which I guess sort of works around that issue, but hey, that’s definitely a valid concern. Retroarch makes sense if you emulate a ton of systems and want a consistent experience across the board, and it has some nice shared features across all cores, but all of that definitely comes with some complexity.

It’s one of them, and it’s fine, but it’s not what I’ve been using. I’ve been bouncing between PCSX and Beetle and they’re both just fine. I mean, at this point PSX games run on anything.

I don’t know, the PSX is old and well understood enough now that in my head it’s in the bundle of “just do Retroarch” systems along with all the 8 and 16 bit stuff.

I don’t even remember what core I usually run for it. They’re all at least serviceable to great.

It’s not the first weird rant I hear coming out of this project, which I don’t follow otherwise, so it definitely seems like it’s a thing.

I’m not sure I buy your motivations, but hey, I can oblige regardless. What, top three small things from Windows I’d like on Linux and the other way around? Windows to Linux first?

• Hibernation and states across boots. I know people hate Windows power management on laptops, but at least on my last couple of desktops it’s been surprisingly robust. I can come back overnight to the same setup I left open, even if an update ran in the middle. Same windows, tabs, open documents… It even survives booting into Linux and then coming back just fine. KDE is taking some steps in this direction, but they’re a ways away. I hope they progress quickly on it.

• Scaling and multimonitor. It’s way better than it used to be, but there are still a ton of minor annoyances on Linux. KDE in particular has some issues with icon scaling on vertical taskbars, which you’d think would be easy to fix but have been there for a while now. Other pieces of software still struggle with consistent text and headers, too, especially on multimonitor setups with different fractional scaling. Say what you will about Windows’ look and feel (and I will in a sec), the compositing is super robust and flexible.

• Mounts! Network mounts in particular and Samba mounts specifically. You just click on them, authenticate and you can mount them as either a folder or a drive right from the context menu. On Linux, Dolphin will give you access to them the same way within itself, but they won’t be mounted to the fs in a predictable way, so it’s fine for copy/pasting stuff but it’s not good if you want to use them as local folders. And Windows will remember those mounts across sessions, authentication included. On Linux you need to edit fstab manually and keep a plaintext copy of your SMB password. It’s just so smooth on Windows.

So… Linux to Windows next?

• Just the snappy window movement, man. Linux feels so much lighter than Windows for no good reason. I also really like both Gnome’s more Mac-like desktop and KDE’s default “hold shift to tile” window snapping. Windows used to be the gold standard for window management without going full tiling but I’d say I prefer KDE now.

• Vertical taskbars/no taskbars. I don’t understand why Windows decided to force the taskbar to the bottom. It’s just absurd for ultrawide screens and inconvenient for tablets and touchscreens, or for screens with burn-in issues. I’d argue KDE overcorrects. You don’t need to have a dozen different docks per desktop, but it’s definitely better than zero options. And the top bar is great for touch and more reliable than sliding from the bottom edge to pop up a hidden taskbar on Windows.

• Remote desktop everywhere. Gnome in particular has fantastic out-of-the-box support. Windows’ version of this is actually very good, too, but the server is paywalled to the Pro license, which is hard to justify. And hey, I get it, they’re trying to monetize their OS but that’s actually worse, so…

Now, that was a tangent, but if more people want to share their top 3’s I’ll read them. What the hell.