In an effort to relieve her PC of constantly deluge of virus and malware, I switched my Mom over to Ubuntu in the 2000’s. She lasted a month.
The experiment ended when she called me in tears because of her silent 4 week struggle with the OS.
She couldn’t get her scanner to work reliably, and none of her “print shop” software was compatible.
I know more now than I did then, and the distros have come a long way since, but I don’t have the time to retrain her and at 70 years old, I just want her to use what she’s comfortable with, even if that means I have to occasionally scrub her PC.
Wow this article perfectly captures the early 2000s experience of trying to teach parents how to use the internet. Internet access wasn’t very widespread in Australia yet, and my parents weren’t really interested in it and thought it was too difficult to use.
Things from that article that really stuck out to me:
Not being able to type searches directly into the address bar. This confused me as a child, and I was really excited when browsers started to incorporate the feature
Mentioning the use of a pager
Knowing that all the photos in the article are of real people and not AI because it’s from 2002
Yes, these are global stats, but as someone from the third world myself, I can say that most gamers around here resort to piracy, even though steam has gained a lot of popularity, so, only a fraction of us are included in the steam statistics, which would make such data not very representative.
Perhaps a better source for understanding software usage in the third world is data from statcounter. They show something around 3 to 5%, a much higher number. However, even this data can be biased, because they only count machines connected to the internet and who browse certain sites.
In that case steam doesn’t need to send the survey to all users, but only to a randomized sample, and it will statistically represent the whole of steam users.
I’m pretty sure if I dug into my backup-of a backup-of a backup-of a backup to get to my old files from the 00s I’d find this there. I might have even ironically had this picture on my Zune.
I think it was created to make fun of the RIAA’s campaign back then, I don’t think they actually did it. Kind of like the “NAPSTER BAD” Metallica flash animation.
Good to hear! My main computer is my desktop, running Mint. (I’m using it right now.) But I also have a Surface Pro 4 that I use for work. It has no problems and works fine on Windows… but I have been wondering if I can move that away from Windows as well. So its encouraging to hear that it has worked for you.
Does Mint have good support for the stylus and touch-screen on the Surface 4? (I imagine the Surface tech might be specialised to Windows a bit, so I wouldn’t be confident those would work immediately in Linux.)
My surface pro 4 still works great with windows also and even though I ran mint on the laptop I used before it I have no intention of replacing windows on the SP4 at least until support for 10 is done.
Even though I don’t use the touchscreen often, it’s not a feature I’d be willing to sacrifice either.
I don’t know about this specifically, but in my experience with Mint, it’s very plug and play with this kind of stuff. I’m always really impressed by just how little setup Mint needs.
Nope, it does not. You can install a kernel made just for surface devices and you’ll get mouse emulation via touch, but Mint doesn’t have Wayland yet and it’s my understanding that Wayland is where all the good things, like gestures, lives. So, I’m waiting for that but it honestly works fine without the touch. I’d use it if it was there, but it’s fine honestly.
That said, I’ve been using Linux/osx as my primary at work for a lot of years now so I’m super unfamiliar with even basic sysadmin stuff on Windows, so I’m happy that the surface is now on Linux. Need to move my desktop to it one day, but I honestly almost never use it.
I really like it, and I miss it on Linux. On Linux, I have to trust that each and every sh/bash script, package install script, or some stuff you download from internet are actually safe and don’t access your private stuff. On mac I get the prompt when some software needs to access a specific folder.
Ok, it’s true that you have to spend 15 mins after setting up to “install developer tools”, and remove some safety rails. However, the mac doesn’t prevent you from doing that, and doesn’t really even try to make it hard (if you’ve ever touched a terminal before). Once it’s set up, you’re good to go…
Depends on what you are doing. My company was using clang for c++ compilation and it was a drag to make all this clicks for each .so every is update. And there is no way to automate the process. And those occasional compatibility breaks didn’t help either.
what do you mean? clang is a command line tool, can’t you write some cmake and a bash script to automate the build process? That’s what I always do when I writing any C++ that needs to be compiled/updated fairly regularly.
It has nothing to do with clang being command line. It consists of many binaries, all of them untrusted. Any time new dynamic lib is loaded Mac stops the process and complains. Then you need to do manual stuff, as you can’t automatically trust a binary, for obvious reasons. This happened almost two years ago, maybe clang got apple certificates or some shit to combat the issue. But my point was that every OS update on Mac brings annoying issues for developers.
I have to admit, I’ve never touched the kind of issue where I need to load a bunch of binaries I can’t automatically trust as part of a build process, so I won’t speak on that.
On the part about OS updates being a PITA, yes: I’ll admit that I offset updating the macOS major version for as long as possible. As long as my major version is maintained/get’s security updates, and the newer versions are backwards compatible enough that I can compile stuff for them without any hassle, I’ll stay on macOS 13. Judging by historical data, that means I have about two more years before I might need to spend an hour or two fixing up stuff that bugs out with the eventual major update.
It used to be K Desktop Environment, but it’s called Plasma since KDE became the organization behind KDE Plasma. This is because they make things other than the desktop environment, like apps such as Krita or Kdenlive, which aren’t DE specific.
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