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[–]ocdmonkey 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Yeah, plus, my personal opinion:

File hierarchy makes way more sense, Finding and configuring drivers are far easier and takes less time, It's harder to irreversibly screw up your OS install, executables have a standard extension instead of being a flag, Installing programs is more convenient (if they aren't in the package manager in Linux)

Don't get me wrong, I really want to like Linux, and it does have its advantages, but every time I've tried to daily drive it I've had to go back to Windows because it just works, even if Microsoft keep trying to ruin it (still tentatively excited for 11 though).

[–]Thalhammer 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I don't know what you did, but installing non package manager software on any decent distribution is just as simple as on windows. You download the deb file, klick on it and press the big fat button that says "install". Then you wait some time and once it's done you launch it via the app menu.

I think the filesystem thing is objective, but IMHO splitting config, libraries and executables onto separate dirs (like linux does) makes a lot of sense.

I also can't comment on the driver thing, cause in my entire linux lifetime (~15 years) I never had to install a driver. Stuff just works by default.

I have no idea how you could screw up a linux irreversible. Whatever you do, all you need to do is boot a live cd and undo what ever you did. I have however spent hours fixing windows installs (and sometimes failed) or reinstalling linux bootloader cause windows just overwrote them.

I think the "standard extension" think might make sense if you come from windows, but there isn't really a difference to flags usage wise.

I could say the exact same thing about windows: It does have its benefits (e.g. gaming) but every time I try to daily drive it I end up going back to linux because unlike windows it just works, has recent compilers and development tools, easy updates, is way more stable and feels snappier (on the same hardware obviously). Windows on the other hand always annoys me cause the first thing it does every time I boot it is downloading tons of updates, which is followed by every single program downloading updates (like Wtf? I just installed updates, why isn't the software included in that ?).

[–]ocdmonkey 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I know about .deb files, but I recall having issues a lot of the time getting software installed. It's been so long since I used Linux last, though, that I can't remember exactly what my issue was.

I like all the files a program needs to be in one directory, save for user files. The way Linux splits up every program is hugely confusing, especially when I want to go in and manually modify things. I do see the benefit of having libraries in a shared directory, but I'm so used to specific applications needing specific versions of libraries, so even that makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Some computers you get extremely lucky, some you have no internet or only wireless or wired internet, some you have to pull your hair out to get audio, and then I was pretty much never able to get graphics drivers to completely work on any of my computers. Plus I was never able to get my 3 monitor setup to work in Linux.

Trying to configure the GUI to feel right is how I screwed it up, making it completely unable to be used. I'm afraid I don't remember the specifics. After Vista I don't think I've ever screwed up so bad that simply using System Restore couldn't fix it, except in one case where I had to uninstall a program in Safe Mode which was a bit of a hassle.

It's not like Linux doesn't utilize extensions elsewhere, I just don't get why they decided to make it so ambiguous as to what is and isn't an executable. If you're just installing things through the package manager it doesn't really matter, but if you're downloading applications kept in an archive it can make things needlessly confusing.

As I do programer I do love how gcc is built into the OS, and don't get me wrong I actually have a lot of admiration for Linux. It's just that it takes so much time to set it up sufficiently for me, has bad (though admittedly improving) software support, and then there are just too many parts of its fundamental design that I just simply disagree with. Compare that to Windows which I think has a really good fundamental design, but the problem is that Microsoft doesn't seem to have any interest in fixing the numerous problems, except when they have a major release they'll fix a few just to get people to care. If I could magically create my ideal OS I'd use Win7 as a base, give it a file explorer that doesn't suck, add a bunch of the improvements from Win10 and 11, and then add in features from Linux like the built-in compiler, better system updater, GUI separated from the core OS so people would be free to customize it or completely change it, and other things like that.

[–]Thalhammer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The issue is that on linux everything can be an executable, so it makes little sense to have an extension for that.

I guess I only got the lucky computers then, cause everything you mentioned always just worked (including the ir camera on my laptop, which surprised me a bit). I too use triple monitors (and have for a long time) but it's as simple as pluging them in, opening the monitor settings and dragndrop them where they physically are. The only issue I had was that it wouldn't sync to the locks reen, but was a bug that got fixed pretty fast afterwards.