I was just thinking about why many things on Linux are better. Like the install process on Linux is years ahead of windows.
Then it occurred to me that windows only improves things that can make them money. If you need to install windows, then you can deal with the crappy installer.
Linux devs improve the parts they think need to be better. The decisions are not guided by money and can be made without bias.
There’s that one screen where you disable telemetry, which I’ve always consider a part of the install process, but is there anything malicious other than that? The process as a whole is quite straightforward in my experience.
Try installing debian some time, the installer makes windows’ installer feel like its for a piece of software you got of a sketchy site that wants to install 16 other things not even related to it
We must be using different installers then, because between the amount of telemetry you have to turn off, the dark patterns, and the insistence on using a Microsoft account the whole experience reminds me of installing one of those “driver updaters” when I was a kid and before I learned that was a very bad idea
I never have. Just thinking about WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on random laptops still puts me into a full flashback state. (My first experience was back in 2002, I think?)
However, getting all of that stuff working was the best learning experience I ever had. At the time, I was just learning about IT security and WiFi pcap was all the rage back then.
I never have. Just thinking about WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on random laptops still puts me into a full flashback state. (My first experience was back in 2002, I think?)
Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.
Even a decade ago it usually meant ticking a box that you also allowed nonfree drivers.
Even Debian allowed you to download the specific nonfree driver you needed and add it (without Internet) at imaging so post install you could connect with wifi and not just Ethernet.
It’s come a long way. But doesn’t anyone else remember when windows did not have drivers and you’d constantly be confronted with “have disk”?
I mean, the amount of drivers for old hardware I still have saved… Because before win10 nothing would reliability always fetch the driver you need from the net…
Ticking the non-free driver box was child’s play. As late as like 2012 I remember needing to download NDISwrapper so I could make the windows drivers work through a compatibility layer
I recall jaunty jackalope being the Ubuntu version that became my full time os. It was that version that my IBM x31 had everything taken care of on install with the third party drivers checked. I feel like the LTS version following that was where you could buy a generation previous of any hardware and it’d work without much fuss.
This reminds me of the big USB drive of drivers that we had at a PC repair shop. When Windows 7 failed to find drivers, we’d stick that in and give it a scan.
The nvidia driver has had this bug for a year now, still unfixed. Games will randomly crash with an Xid 109 error in dmesg. Some people (including myself) are unable to play games like Cyberpunk, Resident Evil 2-3-4-7-8 and Metro Exodus. And it’s not linked to proton either, it sometimes also crashes xorg itself, forcing a reboot. I’m starting to think nvidia will never bother fixing it.
This. While being annoyed by one of my grandmothers giving me bed sheets as a birthday present when I was around 10. I now totally understand and like it. Haven’t really bought much clothes since ever, cause my mother and sister are currently fullfilling my grandmother’s task for years now xD And it’s nice to use the money I would have spent on clothes to buy me more tech stuff I really want.
I get tired of it, because I don’t need socks every year. My stuff lasts. I end up with too many socks. It’s like buying me a new pair of shoes or something. Like uh no, those last me 3-5 years. Those are utilitarian purchases that are made less often
This isn’t a Linux compatibility issue. You bought a device where the manufacturer told you in advance that a driver for the built-in wifi module doesn’t exist yet. It’s a product at the development stage.
So just follow the manufacturer’s recommendation from the product page: use a wifi dongle for now and pat yourself on the back for being an early adopter.
Having the device, I already tether the wifi. But it is indeed a compatibility issue: the old kernel drivers for the chip were janky and it’s doubtful how well they even worked the time. The code is apparently such a hot mess that the people who were working on it have stopped making progress. There is now skepticism that it will ever be fully functional.
With Microsoft, any love shown could well be the Embrace part of the strategy that will lead to Extend and then Extinguish just as soon as they can figure those parts out. They might already have a plan.
The fact they've been able to turn things to their advantage so far does not mean they don't have such a plan. Or won't ever have one.
It works great until you try to use Bluetooth anything and need to connect and disconnect regularly (it can literally freeze your entire system), and don’t get me started with trying to get digital surround to work
There’s this one Bluetooth speaker with a microphone that I have, that I had hoped to use for calls, that has just refused to work. Spent hours trying to get them to work but had to admit defeat. But yes, things have improved significantly.
People love to complain about CMake, often with valid complaints as well. But it - to this day - remains the only build system where I’ll actually trust a project when they say they are cross-platform.
Being the Windows maintainer for OpenMW, it used to be absolute hell back a decade and half ago when an indirect dependency changed - and used something like SCons or Premake while claiming to be “cross-platform”, used to be that I had to write my own build solutions for Windows since it was all hardcoded against Linux paths and libraries.
CMake might not be the coolest, most hip, build system, but it delivers on actually letting you build your software regardless of platform. So it remains my go-to for whenever I need to actually build something that’s supposed to be used.
For personal things I still often hack together a couple of Makefiles though, it’s just a lot faster to do.
Not really, WSL seems like it was mainly supposed to stop people leaping ship to be able to develop Node without the horribly painful Windows JS experience. And wouldn’t you know it, Microsoft has been making their own JavaScript language in Typescript.
Wi-Fi used to be a pretty common thing to not work out of the box or to break in updates. I kept a usb Wi-Fi dongle in a bag as a backup just because of this.
It's a really simple problem to avoid, and IMO has been for years. It's been at least 10 years since I've bought something without intel wifi so maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm kind of astounded there are so many upvotes to the meme.
My rule for a very long time has been: Get something with intel wifi, or even atheros wifi, and you will almost certainly not have a problem. Get broadcom wifi and your problem will directly relate to how much effort your distro has put into trying to make broadcom not be shit. Stay the fuck way from realtek and mediatek.
That's it. I literally can't recall a time since about 2010 when I had a wifi problem with Linux on any device I owned.
I keep two of these in my bag for instant wifi on any device I might happen to be working on that doesn't have it. Most recently popped one into an old desktop I picked up for my youngest son, and have used it previously as a workaround for someone who had a laptop where the onboard wifi worked but would not come back from sleep. (That was broadcom, IIRC)
Lemmy needs polls. The last time I had problems with WIFI drivers was… 15 years ago? On a laptop bought in a supermarket that originally came with Windows Vista. Oh, and the raspberry pi - fuck raspberry pis. They can’t pick wifi module worth shit.
I mean it isn’t Linux fault, but I wanted to install balenaos on my RaspberryPi and they don’t support a WiFi chip in their kernel. Without WiFi the whole idea won’t work for me. And I don’t want to buy a new WiFi usb only because they don’t want to add the drivers.
My attempts to add it to the kernel and build it myself failed so far.
I’m not faulting linux, I’m faulting the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Linux is their main operating system and they haven’t picked a good WIFI hardware module for years. Dunno if the new raspberrypi 4 is better, but I’m not paying to find out.
All single board computers have driver problems because they require custom kernel forks that can’t or don’t get mainlined for whatever reason (usually laziness), but Raspberry PI is actually the best when it comes to that stuff.
So when you buy an SBC, you need to ask yourself: will the company continue to develop/update/patch their custom kernel fork now that they shipped? Or will they just abandon it and move on to the next product? 9 times out of 9.01, it’s the latter.
Raspberry, seriously? What problems are you seeing?
I have a raspberry pi 3 acting as a 5GHz access point for as long as it’s been on the market, I can remember one time I had to restart it because of some wonkiness. About a dozen others as clients, never had an issue there either, fast and stable enough.
All using the default os (raspbian first, raspberry os later).
After that, I gave up on WiFi on Raspberries and used LAN, but they are so underpowered… my nextcloud instance took ages to do anything, XBMC (now Kodi) was slow and couldn’t render videos > 720p (it was struggling with 720p honestly), even a simple audio proxy over bluetooth (forward bluetooth audio from phone to speaker) barely functioned as the bluetooth cut out or it was janky as hell.
It’s easier to put a old phone as a server than a raspberrypi.
There are some oddball cards out there that need the linux firmware xxx (insert manufacturer instead of xxx) binary blobs in order to work, but yes, those cards are rare nowadays and mostly older hardware uses that (as you mentioned, hardware from 10+ years ago).
Had problems about 3 years ago, got a new laptop from work and the WiFi hardware was too new and didn’t have support in the kernel yet. Took a year or something, maybe less, until it worked.
Timeshift works only with BTRFS subvolumes, thus, if you wanna have backups (snapshots), you have to have subvolumes and not install in the root of a BTRFS filesystem 😔.
If you want to you can just create a new subvolume, mount it temporarily and move all your files from root to there. Then you need to figure out how to make the new subvolume your root directory upon boot and you are done.
I know how to do that, you set the subvolume as the default one, thus, when mounting, if no options are passed, it always mounts that subvolume as root.
But, you have to disable that. Sure, I set it during install, cuz installers are stupid (if you tell it to install in /@, it will most probably moan), but disable it after first run (set the real root as the default subvol, i.e. mount point) and just add subvol mount options in fstab.
It’s just extra steps I have to do now 😒, that’s why the rant.
That’s only to backup/rollback the root though, right? If one’s looking to backup - say - their home dir, they can just recreate the home as a subvolume without reinstalling the system. Or am I mistaken?
Snapper also uses btrfs subvolumes to create snapshots, so if you did create them during your installation process, nothing to worry about.
I don’t remember if there is a way to create them after the installation, neither if it’s a tough process tho. I used to simply reinstall when I messed up with the subvolumes.
Yeah, but Timeshift uses the Ubuntu style subvolume naming, @ for root, @home for /home, so you have to create them that way, otherwise, it won’t work. It can work if you tell it to ignore home, but checks for @ as root on start up.
CMake has been around forever and is flexible enough to build really complex software. You just need to pull out enough hair when you want it to do something.
I won’t abide stanning for the billionaire class or calls to impotent civility. I very much have in my heart EXACTLY the spirit of what /r/HailCorporate was and if you doubt that, you are exactly the type of corporatist cuck that I created this community to reveal.
Now to characterize your privileged perspective:
“I have no sympathy for marginalized groups, quite literally pleading for their lives. If they wanted my sympathy, they should have done so more politely!”
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