- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
Stumbled across this quick post recently and thought it was a really good tale and worth sharing.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: “If Linux is so good, why aren’t more people using it?” And it’s a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment’s consideration. Linux is even free, so what’s stopping mass adoption, if it’s actually better? My response:
- If exercising is so healthy, why don’t more people do it?
- If reading is so educational, why don’t more people do it?
- If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it?
The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.
And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
Now I totally understand why most computer users aren’t interested in an intellectual workout when all they want to do is browse the web or use an app. They’re not looking to become a black belt in computing fundamentals.
But programmers are different. Or ought to be different. They’re like firefighters. Fitness isn’t the purpose of firefighting, but a prerequisite. You’re a better firefighter when you have the stamina and strength to carry people out of a burning building on your shoulders than if you do not. So most firefighters work to be fit in order to serve that mission.
That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Besides, if you’re able to figure out how to setup a modern build pipeline for JavaScript or even correctly configure IAM for AWS, you already have all the stamina you need for the Linux journey. Think about giving it another try. Not because it is easy, but because it is worth it.
See, you have people like you all over saying “Linux just works” and then you have other users here saying “I have to spend an hour fixing my computer running one of the most user friendly distros every single time the power goes out”. I don’t know who to believe but both cannot be true simultaneously so which is it?
It’s both. Linux mostly just works, but when it breaks, it breaks in a way which is sometimes difficult for the average person to recover from.
I’ve had a couple of times in the past where something has gone horribly, outrageously wrong, and I decided to just reinstall and start again from fresh, because that was way less time investment than fixing what broke.
Nowadays I’m using Timeshift backups, and I think that’s a positive move.
Timeshift is great. I’ve recovered from an rm -rf /* with it, just to see if I could. Turns out: yes.
Different people have different experiences for lots of reasons. Like I used to have constant problems with Windows that took days to fix, and some people never had any problems. It depends on your hardware, software, settings, what you’re doing with it…with every OS.
Well, they can be simultaneously true if one person has a terrible experience because of Nvidia and another person with an all amd build who happens to have a Linux friendly touchpad (is that still a problem these days?) might have a perfect experience out of the box.
I think that’s a major weakness, that windows will be good or bad in various ways but it’s very consistent - the things that suck usually suck for everyone. With Linux everything depends, not only on hardware but with your use case, the distro you pick, the tools you use, etc.