#average linux user

[daemonhxckergrrl]

the steam deck has done wonders for the linux community, on par w/ estrogen

[soviet-siscon]

Wikipedia article for GNOME shell was briefly replaced with the mangadex page for "age gap sisters that have reached that age"

[grog-frog]

so i'm non-binary which means i like using linux on my chromebook from time to time to feel like a cool cyberpunk hacker but i'm not transgender enough to have a linux computer i hope this makes sense

[maplecinnamonbun]

xenia my beloved!!!

Doodle when I should be studying

[onyacat]

:3

[redswaberkez]

why set up a log system when your own mind can scream "SEGFAULT" at 3 am?

[ntrlily]

really my favorite thing about using Linux is that compared to like, Windows or MacOS, I just enjoy my time on the computer more with Linux. There's a lot of dumb bullshit I don't have to worry about, everything runs faster, I can make my interface look like it crawled out of 1997, and I don't have to turn the thing off to update it. It feels a bit cheesy to say that but using Windows just feels adversarial (which was the case even before I swapped to exclusively using Linux) and that's a sentiment I see from tons of people who exclusively run it.

[georgebbwbush]

linux users are so funny. like yeah flex on those stupid windows and ios users and free yourself from bloatware by running an os that just doesn't work instead

[subjectsix]

I do know most of these have a kind of workaround, and this post has been a great place for people to suggest more and find some for themselves, which rules! Most things I’ve complained about here I’ve got a workaround for already— for those suggesting Linux, I have a machine running Mint

My point is we can’t just wait for The Revolution™️, a vague concept of the future, and the workarounds aren’t solutions, just temporary fixes. My point is it needs to be talked about more (my wall of text got 20,000 notes, that’s wild to me) and we need to be active how we can in carving out our own spaces. I’m debating buying a forum soon and looking for more to join. I cancelled Spotify and I’m working on seeing if a Pi Hole to block ads is good for my household.

I’ve spent a lot of time compromising begrudgingly, so now I’m hopeful (and certain tbh) that people will be the little changes that stop this ball from rolling. Its not convenient or doable for everyone to become Linux users, or all switch to dumb phones, or all quit Facebook— but based on this post everyone’s fed up enough to be heard enough about the fact that we won’t put up with garbage and there are alternatives.

The current major internet spaces don’t foster community well. I saw people on Tiktok lamenting how Ena, an extremely popular series with a new game coming out for free and doing very well for itself, had a “dead fandom” because engagement wasn’t constant and loud. Some people don’t know how the internet was, and don’t know the alternatives suggested in this post.

I guess, really, my point is to not shut up about the fact that ownership of things and the right to repair are extremely important, and to remind people the things we miss can be done right now, and to not let the temporary fixes be the ultimate solutions.

I love love that tons of people on this post are offering to show people their fixes, and providing instructions on how to nuke Edge or Copilot off their computers. I even have a resource post in the works. That’s the online community I’ve missed! It’s still here, we just have to be more proactive about finding it :’)

Its like you say— there are work arounds! And I think everyone is ready for them (and sick of needing them). We gotta form community (small and big) about it and be willing to reject what we can of the growing bloatware and enshittification of stuff

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[xerxestexastoast]

even in Linux distros where 90% of things work out of the box, you're still gonna have to configure shit in the command line and this is why the entire Linux ecosystem will never catch on with normies

[narastories]

why am I not surprised that the command line has entered into my gif making process lmfao

[ninja-jock-bot]

[futuretrain]

I started writing all of this in the tags, but then I got so many of them it just hit me it should be a whole post, so, here: i used linux (arch-based specifically) as my daily driver OS for 2 years and i loved it and it's great but it's not the solution

in fact the leap from ''i don't know how to move files between folders'' to linux is going to be too advanced for most people and make them more likely to give up. especially if a program they use and like doesn't have a native linux package.

like in my own experience i couldn't find a music player that could rival foobar for me on features so i just kept using foobar. and that meant that one of the first things i installed on a fresh linux install was wine. and some distros deal don't give you an easy way to do that. some do not even give you easy ways to install anything at all. and nobody who is not already comfortable with doing "advanced" user things on their preferred system is going to be suddenly more confident about using the linux terminal package installation process.

sometimes features that you don't even have to worry about on windows/native OS don't get automatically carried on linux distro installations. for example, my laptop's wifi card's drivers! it's not an old or obscure laptop - it's a lenovo legion. you know, a fairly popular laptop model! i had to urgently look for my ethernet cable and spent 3 days googling in my free time to figure out what driver i needed to install for my specific card and then way too much time fighting pamac over it because there were 3 different packages that had the name of my card but only one of them worked. or the fact that i searched for 2 years and still couldn't find a way to lower my screen's refresh rate, which was stuck at the max 165hz. so, you know, don't take your laptop off charging because you can't put it in a lower battery refresh rate, and just deal with the judder on movies because that's not going away. i lived with all of those issues and the inconvenience because to me, they weren't ~that~ big of a deal and at least some of them i could bypass or fix with a little bit of time. most people are not going to be fine with the inconvenience, especially if they remember using an OS where those same issues never even came up.

one thing i DO recommend people to do with linux is to keep a usb stick with a flashed linux distro that has a live mode, because you can use it without installing the OS. so if your main OS gets corrupted because of an update or anything else happens to it, you can just plug your linux usb into the usb port and boot into the live usb and have access to your files and go online if you want. on some distros you can even install programs on top of the base live distro, they are probably going to be gone next time you log in though. you'll need to learn how to access your bios menu, but it's significantly more user-friendly now than it was even a decade ago. if you, like me, have a fear of accidentally messing up your windows/etc OS and corrupting files in such a way that your computer just bricks itself basically, having that back-up linux live usb can do a lot for that anxiety. it definitely does mine!

bottom line don't offer people with no computer literacy linux as a user-friendly alternative. they WILL get confused by it and never want to try again in the future. offer them ways to learn their preferred system instead. in fact, chromeOS which powers chromebooks is a linux system. linux is not a catch all solution to computer literacy and never was

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

[c-rowlesdraws]

I swear to god computer people talking online about how easy computers/linux are are just that xkcd comic about experts in a field overestimating a layperson’s knowledge (“surely the average person must only know 2-3 feldspars”), over and over again. I felt this firsthand back when I was asking for advice when buying my desktop PC. When a casual computer user reads something like this, at least speaking from personal experience, it is nearly incomprehensible. It is wonderful to want to help the less technologically-fortunate, but you have to break things down more than this. You are speaking wingdings at people.

[prokopetz]

hey i was gonna make a post of my own but i realized i dont know enough about linux to like. really talk about it beyond "well a lotta places like hospitals/military places run legacy software and theyre super dependent on it and it would be a ton of work to switch over" and "well if everyone started using linux then the hackers would probably also Start Using Linux, like how nobody used to target macs when they were uncommon" so as a smart person who knows things about computers do u have a general response to the ppl pointing to the crowdstrike thing and going "see??? this is why everyone should switch to linux"

like. i also plan on switching to linux but that just feels like switching all of our eggs to a different basket u kno

I find that Linux advocates tend to inappropriately conflate "this specific problem would not have affected Linux operating systems" with "problems of this type would not affect Linux operating systems", when the former typically doesn't imply the latter.

Would the specific mechanism by which the Crowdstrike vendor accidentally bricked millions of Windows computers have affected Linux platforms? No.

Could an inadequately vetted security update have bricked a Linux platform? Absolutely.

The fact that you don't see much of the latter has less to do with Linux in itself, and more to do with the fact that, as a specialist operating system, Linux users as a group tend to have an above-average level of compliance with security best practices. The level of compliance that's reasonable to expect for a mass-market operating system changes things considerably – if everybody and their dog was running Linux, you can bet your ass there'd be millions of Linux platforms set up to just automatically accept and apply whatever updates come down the pipeline without human oversight or a validated recovery path, too.

[artisticmedley]

Re: Wine games - have a look here https://appdb.winehq.org/

Re: running a VM - it's not super recommended for games (particularly newer / heavier / harder-on-the-computer games) because it's a fair bit of extra effort for the computer, so your computer may or may not be able to run it, depending on both the game and the computer. But like, it can absolutely work. I had no problems on my 12+year old desktop computer running Debian host with Win XP virtual machine & playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (the origial 1999 version) so i don't wanna put people off too hard. But also i'm not sure that same computer (again, old) could handle a Win10 VM and like, Sims 4 or whatever.

Also in terms of distros, idk shit about Mint except that it's often recommended for new folk, but if you prefer to just work with whatever simple desktop environment you get (called GNOME), ubuntu can be fine. If you love customisation (caution: this means many settings / options) then you might prefer Kubuntu (with the K) which comes with a desktop environment called KDE Plasma.

the underlying how-it-works is the same between both ubuntu & kubuntu, just lots of stuff about what the desktop looks like in terms of layout and settings is quite different. (there are also other Desktop Environment options, like uhhh Mate and i think Cinnamon? Almost certainly others too. But idk shit about them.)

Oh I'm sorry C: you've only got 6GB free? Only six fucking gig? We used to boot the OS off fucking floppy drives but I'm so so sorry that six entire gigabytes of free space isn't enough for you you poor starving thing. You've been experiencing worse and worse memory issues for months and now you're freezing and crashing every few minutes because why, you just can't make 6 gig work? Grow the fuck up.